(December 16, 2014 at 12:08 am)dyresand Wrote: seems about right.... because men were relatively peaceful until religion.I don't see how anyone can claim that. Religion is another form of tribalism, which it would seem we evolved with. It's not like early humans sat around and realized that things were too quiet so they'd better start a religion and get to beating each other up. Religion may have started as a way of explaining the unknown and pretending to find a measure of control over it, and developed into a way of strengthening cultural and communal ties. I don't believe that it made us violent; it just provided one more outlet for justifying violence.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
