Letters to the Editor
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Sorry.
Selection has worked primarily by differentially eliminating pre-reproductive individuals either by virtue of their relative vulnerability to mortality or traits in their protectors which lead to differential mortality, and through competitive mating systems. Genes are left by individuals who survive to reproductive age and win access to reproductive resources. In contrast, somatic lethality of stress (stroke, heart attacks) occurs late in the life cycle (well after winners and losers have sorted out in the mating game and offspring have survived their most vulnerable stage). Moreover, some level of hyperarousal (anxiety) in dangerous and competitive ancestral environments would actually be adaptive and work toward increasing rates of successful couplings and of survival of protected offspring to reproductive age. Leaving it up to The Lord and stress reduction would likely have diminished chances of survival to reproductive age and mate acquisition in environments in which life was competitive, brutish, nasty and short.
Religious belief likely did factor strongly into mating and reproductive systems, differential reproductive success, and survival of individuals in protective groups, but not “religious belief” as generously and defensively constructed. Look at the codes and prohibitions in systems of religion and who constructed them. They reflect males prescribing sexual conduct (mating systems), control of material resources, authority and conformity - all features which, if they can only be enforced, would favor the rule-makers differentially sending their genes through time. Incentive for the prescribed behaviors is provided by the instilled fear of earthly and eternal suffering and punishment, delivered by an ultimate authority figure.
That is, religion, somehow confused with spirituality, is an adaptation which in historical environments served to perpetuate certain traits and genes by controlling individual (especially sexual) and group behaviors through fear of powerful negative consequences. It is not a coincidence that religion so often provides a cover for sexual coercion and abuse of power differentials sexually.
Given its nature and impetus in needs for conformity and control of behavior, it is natural that religion would infantilize spirituality and the relationship of the individual to the metaphysical – God must be constructed as an all-knowing, punishing agent apart from the world rather than as diffuse, universal and in process. “Morality” regresses to behavior controlled by fear and shame.
Oddly, Wolpert and others seem to believe that in noting logical or empirical weaknesses in an infantilized construct that has been a factor in human behavior and possibly in differential selection, they are saying something about the world.