Morality

[Angrboda]

          The need for a sky daddy argument

Well, first of all, the TED talk presenter is talking out of his ass regarding his primary argument. It takes nothing more than a simple google search to reveal that he is wrong about the capabilities of monkeys compared to humans. Perhaps they are different in degree, but not necessarily kind. It doesn't inspire me with much confidence in his opinions and hypotheses when they start out based on a rather easily recognized falsehood. But even if one accepts his hypothesis for the sake of argument, he only suggests that one of the possible stories which formed the basis of social cohesion originally was religion. It's plausible that it was, but it's also plausible that it was not. He mentions a possibly more compelling story, that of the group, when he talks about the fictional entities referred to as nations. But it's not necessary that this story began on so grand a scale. By nature, we form social groups known as families. It doesn't take a lot of invention to move from that story, to the story of a group of loosely related individuals as belonging to the same 'group'. And from there, on to larger and larger groups, such as the tribe, or specialized social groups organized around characteristics such as skin color or language. This to me seems like a more plausible story for spurring the foundation of societies than that of religion, if for no other reason than the story of religion is a rather advanced and abstract story in comparison to the story of the social group, and so it's much more likely that the religion story is built on top of the other story. It's also possible that once the story of unified social groups began to develop, the settlement of large groups of individuals in a shared location spurred on by agriculture and the domestication of animals accelerated the story of the group by giving it an additional trait to base the group identity around, namely location.

So the suggestion of the story of religion as the prime mechanism of social cohesion is certainly entertaining, it's just a hypothesis, and doesn't seem to have any evidence that would compel belief that religion was the foundational story over other possible foundational stories. It's little more than a guess.

One of the most interesting aspects of human language is the ability to deceive. Some primates are capable of displacement, or the use of language to refer to things that are not present. Monkeys use both spatial displacement, referring to objects that are not present in that space, and temporal displacement, referring to objects that are not present at that time. The white-faced capuchin in Clever Monkeys that uses displacement to deceive his troop had to think abstractly about invisible objects. And he had to predict how others would respond. It takes impressive intelligence to tell a monkey lie.

(PBS Nature)