Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 - 1992) was one of the most prominent economists of the 20th century, scientifically taking a stand for liberalism and fighting nationalistic and internationalistic versions of socialism in Europe and abroad since his eminent "Road to Serfdom" (1944). Here is a nice "economy-rap", depicting the debates between him and (students of) John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946). Please note their trainers Ludwig von Mises (1881 - 1973) and Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 - 1834), as well as appearances of Ben Bernanke and Carl Levin. Enjoy the show.

F.A. von Hayek as an Evolutionist

Far less known than Hayeks image as a free-market-economist is the root of his scientific perspectives and arguments: Evolution. Coming from an Austrian family deeply embedded in natural sciences as well as philosophy (i.e. he served together with his nephew Wittgenstein in the army and read the first drafts of the tractatus) Hayek urged his fellow economists to study real humans instead of the "spectre" of homo oeconomicus.

In 1952 he published "The Sensory Order" about the evolution of human perception, preceding contemporary works on neurocognition and evolutionary psychology by decades.

F.A. von Hayek about the Evolution of Religion

In his last decade, the professing agnostic Hayek turned to the subject of religion and started to explore it from his evolutionary perspective. Personally, I would count his German lecture of 1982 about the topic at Klessheim castle and his final chapter "Religion and the Guardians of Tradition" in his final book "The Fatal Conceit" (1991) among the most important works in this field and time. For example, he rightfully observed the reproductive potential of religious groups.

Of course, you should find out for yourself! But if you were interested for a start, I discussed and tested some of his hypotheses here:

"Von Hayek and the Amish Fertility. How religious communities manage to be fruitful and multiply. A Case study", in: Frey, Ulrich (Hrsg.), "The Nature of God - Evolution and Religion", Tectum Verlag Marburg 2010 

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Today, I want to use this scilog in a new way: As a tool for presenting a question. I stumbled upon the topic while preparing a German book about Charles Darwin's works on religion & evolution. In his last year, the great Victorian became captivated by a book on the topic and wrote to its author William Graham:

Dear Sir

I hope that you will not think it intrusive on my part to thank you heartily for the pleasure which I have derived from reading your admirably written `Creed of Science,’ though I have not yet quite finished it, as now that I am old I read very slowly. It is a very long time since any other book has interested me so much. The work must have cost you several years and much hard labour with full leisure for work.

Read the full letter at the Darwin Correspondence Project (Letter 13230).

Intrigued, I started to read the book "The Creed of Science" myself, which is available in print as well as in open-access-directories.

Although a quotation from this Darwinian letter to Graham started a heated debate about the contradictions of atheistic naturalism by Alvin Platinga, I couldn't find much information about the author. He seems to be virtually unknown not only to German libraries and handbooks of philosophy, but also to the Internet including Wikipedia. According to the preface of 'The Creed of Science', William Graham has been Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy at Queen's College, Belfast.

Could you help out?

Therefore, I wanted to ask abroad if someone out there is having some bibliographic informations or scientific references to William Graham (1839 - 1911). Please don't hesitate to post a comment or contact me via my homepage.

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Maybe you have been wondering why so many people are freaking out because of another "end of the world" destined for 2012. After all, there have been numerous respective dates in the past, and it never happened.

But we are, simply put, products of evolution. And as a deeply social species, we have evolved to become addicted to experiencing and sharing captivating narratives. And what could be more fascinating than a story about the very topics of survival and reproduction: About great catastrophes wiping out nearly everyone, with the few survivors then going forth to be fruitful and multiply. It's a classic.

From Floods to the Apocalypse

Therefore, we shouldn't be too surprised to find respective narratives abundant among religious mythologies. There's plenty of popular end-of-the-world-myths available, ranging from the biblical, noachidic flood (which is only a late version of many older flood narratives) to the Norse Ragnarök and the genre-naming Christian apocalypse (greek: revelation). Ironically, the Mayan calendar is not among them - december 21st 2012 is just the non-specified end of a cyclus.

But modern "secular" culture is craving for apocalyptic tales as any human culture did before. The image of a punishing God may be replaced by those of a vengeful nature. Instead of demons and angels, aliens and asteroids are descending from the sky. And those lucky or worthy few that survive are destined to sire children and to turn the eternal circle of life...

Thus, whether you are secular or religious, you may want to "enjoy" the subsequent collection of some apocalypses. I'd be glad if you would share some of the ideas and emotions you experienced while watching.

* German Version of this post with a book review "Faszination Apokalypse" by Thomas Grüter.

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On very rare occassions, scientific writing can be clear and poetic at the same time. As I prepared my lecture about Charles Darwin's evolutionary hypotheses concerning religion for the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) this year, I was amazed by the dense information and sheer beauty of the introduction Darwin gave to the religion subchapter in his "Descent of Man" (1871), page 65.

Let us take a look at those five introductory sentences framing Darwin's evolutionary perspective on "Belief in God - Religion".

"There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea.”

In his opening sentences, Darwin is refuting the idea of an "Urmonotheismus", a primordial monotheism. Instead, he asserts that some "savage" traditions have no concept of higher deities (such as mono-, poly- or henotheism), thereby bringing up his central argument: That contemporary beliefs and religions evolved from very simple beginnings, too.

“The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe; and this has been answered in the af-firmative by the highest intellects that have ever lived.”

Proving his sound education in anglican theology (the only university degree Darwin mastered throughout his life), Darwin then explains that evolutionary (that is: empirical) studies of religiosity and religions neither proves nor disproves the existence of (a) God. Instead, these questions are to be discussed in the metaphysical realms of philosophies and theologies. Darwin is adding a curteous nod to (evolutionary) theists, many of whom - i.e. Alfred Russel Wallace - accompanied and supported his scientific mission.

“If, however, we include under the term "religion" the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose.”

If theistic religions evolved from earlier forms, we would need a broad and workable definition. Darwin is offering "the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies" - in contemporary words: supernatural agents (or, even more precisely: superempirical agents). Ancestors, spirits, angels are encompassed by this definition as are sentient mountains and trees, Buddhist bodhisatvas, Jain tirthankaras, Shintoist khami or even Raelian space aliens and, of course, any poly-, heno- or monotheistic deities.

It is an interesting coincidence that, although only a small number of contemporary colleagues are aware of Darwin's own works on the matter, contemporary definitions of supernatural (superempirical) agents became the most successful and prevalent working definitions in interdisciplinary studies of religion.

For that, I am assuming a single reason: Charles Darwin had been right on this topic.

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Maybe the most exciting finding of this year has been the result of genetic studies comparing DNA from Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. To the surprise of most, some of those Homo sapiens that left Africa and spread throughout Asia, Europe and beyond have been found to have interbred with Homo neanderthalensis. As a result, non-African humans have neanderthals among their ancestors. I am looking forward to observing whether these findings might contribute to changes in our self-understanding. 

I found a YouTube-clip putting together the respective news-coverage from various TV stations. Enjoy.

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As David Sloan Wilson approached me with the plan for an online- and inter-faculty-magazine about evolutionary studies, I was ready to join it on the spot. And a starting version of ETVOL is online, while the team is working on improvements and we all are hoping to get the necessary funds... Besides contributing time as an editor, I pledged some dollars as a backer with Kickstarters. The project line has come into reach, so I ask you, dear reader, to support us, too!

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As I started to blog about my field of study some years ago (at first in German only), it started as a playful trial. But readers and commentators got surprisingly interested in the topics at hand, I was invited into the Scilogs-community and decided to open this English version, too. And I learned that it can be hard work to offer regular contributions as well as reactions to comments and discussions. As anybody would (especially anybody with a family with a wonderful wife and now three young kids, a captivating job and a lot of scientific and publishing schedules), I pondered now and then whether I should reduce my blogging activities. But today, I am a happy blogger.

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Some time ago, I presented the awesome Khan Academy at my German blog "Natur des Glaubens". Founded by former hedgefund-manager Salman Khan, the online-academy is offering thousands of teaching videos via YouTube, thereby reaching out to people and especially learning teenagers around the world looking for better education. Personally, I think it is one of the very best online-ideas. You might want to take a look at the Khan Academy page or Salman Khan's talk at TED 2011.

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Applying evolutionary studies to human politics? Socialised as a German scientist, I winced on the spot. But then, I began to read "The Neighborhood Project" - and became more than convinced. For years, the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has embarked on adventurous quests to broaden evolutionary studies into classic humanities - working together with scholars of literature, education and religion. In the captivating, autobiographic parts of "The Neighborhood Project", he is explaining why - his father has been the great novelist Sloan Wilson, who remained deeply curious about human emotions and behaviors throughout his life. After decades of doing scientific studies on plants and animals, his son finally came home.

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For the last years, the demographic potentials of religiosity have been my primary focus of research. Repeatedly, people asked me whether proselytizing or high fertility would be more important for the success of a religious tradition.

Now, Christopher P. Scheitle, Jennifer B. Kane and Jennifer van Hook jointly addressed this topic in a compelling study, freshly published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

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Some readers of this blog may have met the post about Ara Norenzayan and his outstanding work on evolutionary studies of religion. Now, Ara has joined with another (evoluttionary) social psychologist - Will M. Gervais - for a fascinating article:

Ara Norenzayan & Will M. Gervais (University of British Columbia): The Cultural Evolution of Religion (2011)

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One of the interesting experiences in doing a German as well as this English scilog about evolutionary studies of religion is to meet the dominant prejudices: While in the German blogosphere antitheist radicals tend to fight any studies exploring the field because of their fear of findings supporting adaptive scenarios, this English speaking blog is currently flooded by American-Catholic fundamentalists trying to fight evolutionary studies of humanity in general. But then, neither secular nor religious extremists managed to stop evolutionary sciences during the last century - and I happily assume they will not be able to do it in our time. ;-)

One of the reasons for my evolutionary optimism resides in the encouraging activities of David Sloan Wilson, rightfully one of the most popular evolutionary biologists around and author of famous books such as "Darwins Cathedral", "Evolution for Everyone" and now (and to be reviewed here) "The Neighborhood Project - Using Evolution to Improve my City".

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Today, the 13th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) convenes at Tübingen University. A special I am looking forward to is the Outreach Symposium "Evolution - More than Biology" with Joseph Carroll (Literary Studies, University of Missouri, St. Louis), Esben Andersen (Economics, Aalborg University), Frank Ryan (Medicine, University of Sheffield) - and with me, from the field of scientific study of religion. Our shared aim is to introduce the colleagues from biology into thos interdisciplinary fields that have opened up to an evolutionary perspectives these last years. I am glad and grateful for the honor to introduce evolutionary studies of religiosity and religions.

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While I am toiling with the reproductive potentials of religiosity and religions in the long-term scales of evolutionary history, Eric Kaufmann is (rightfully) reaping the harvest of contemporary political studies. If you are interested (as you should be ;-) ), see Eric's new talk and presentation of his well-done book with fresh data and a lively discussion at the New America Foundation.

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On July 5th to 6th, the dedicated anthropologists of the Universities of Barcelona and Lleida brought together scientists from various scientific faculties and nations to discuss the changing roles of Religion(s) & Science(s) in contemporary culture(s). After the "Explaining Religion"-conference in Bristol (UK), it proved to be another hotspot concerning cognitive and evolutionary studies of religion in Europe within a year. Although it is, of course, impossible to condense content-rich lectures into a few sentences, I will try my best to give a brief overview of some main arguments. The event took place at the Faculty of Geography and History at Barcelona University.

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