Today is Good Friday, so I am going to venture into a topic previously untouched on this blog, namely religion. As far as I know every society, from the primitive to the modern-day, has belief sets which answer the questions "What am I doing here?" and "What happens to me when I die?". Why is it that these appear to be universal amongst mankind?

Now these belief sets are all different and irreconcilable. If you are a Christian then the view of life after death held by Moslems will be anathema to you. If any one of these belief sets is right, then the majority of the others must be wrong. But yet they persist. This universality and persistance suggests to me that the tendency to hold these beliefs is adaptive, which is to say that individuals with the tendency to hold these beliefs have, at some point in our evolutionary past, had an advantage over those who didn't.

How could this be? My feeling is that the heightened sense of self-awareness and the ability to project the future enjoyed by homo sapiens is a double-edged sword. At one level it gives us a great survival advantage over other species. At another level it confronts us with the knowledge that today we are alive and tomorrow we might not be.

Now the existence that we enjoyed back in the hunter-gatherer era was a precarious one. In particular the hunters who survived and prospered had to have great skills in personal risk management. Take too many risks and you end up dead and you don't get to pass on your genes. Take too few risks and you don't bring home the meat, so you do badly in the mating stakes and you don't get to pass on your genes. In these circumstances a belief that this life isn't all there is probably helps avoid the latter of these two consequences.

So, I think the tendency towards religious belief has a genetic component. I've just Googled 'religious belief genetic' and top of the search results was this article in New Scientist which supports this point of view.

Anyway, if you subscribe to a religion then I'm sure that your religion encourages you to look after your body and lead a healthy life. If you don't, then this life is all you have on offer and it makes sense to make the most of it. Either way, get lean, get healthy is my advice.