(May 16, 2014 at 7:04 pm)Chuck Wrote: So, on communal level, does ignorance or pretending to know when one can be seen to not know, increase the fitness of a society?.
Well you can say, yes, or: the way human mind functions is evolutionary adaptation. But these things should be kept separate: the adaptivity of religion, as I see it (and many evolutionary psychologists agree with me), is an adaptation on a different level. Its part of cultural evolution and group selection. Religions create group coherence, they create tribes of higher order than the small family/village/etc based units or something like that.
