Would be likely for Extra terrestrial to have a religion?

[Angrboda]

I would argue similarly to Chuck, but ending up at diametrically opposite conclusions. I would argue that there are good reasons to expect convergent evolution to yield similar results regardless of the evolutionary pathway to that result.


These are rather gross generalizations, so forgive their crudity and omission of caveats. In general, though, the more complex the behaviors of an organism, the larger and more complex the organism, especially with regard to the biological systems that give rise to those behaviors. And while the reasons behind the dominance of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction in organisms on earth is unclear, the widespread dominance suggest that it is a generalized solution to a general evolutionary problem. The two combined tend to result in species that are more likely to lean towards a K reproductive strategy rather than an r reproductive strategy (fewer offspring, more invested in each). This in itself contributes to selection pressures towards organisms with more complex behavioral repertoires. My conjecture is that consciousness and social behaviors are a likely consequence, and with the complexity and variability of such behavioral apparatus comes greater possibility for the capacities of the behavioral control machinery to combine to produce instrumentally useful behaviors that are not instrumentally useful as a consequence of their representative accuracy about some feature of the world (religion being a prime example). The only wild card is what role language plays, and whether the development of language and symbolic thought is a convergent evolutionary solution. I personally suspect that consciousness itself originated early in the evolution of animals as a control feedback loop for navigating and exploiting the internal and external environment of the organism, but others may disagree; as a result, I see the type of cognitive capacities and behaviors that exist in higher land and marine animals as converging on similar cognitive tool sets which has the potential to give rise to religious mental behaviors.