They're not going to say that, John, because assuming sociobiologists even exist, they're in the business of being reasonably plausible, and not, you know, making shit up. Especially making up genes that can't possibly exist.
Totalitarian religious governments are at least as dangerous as totalitarian atheist ones. The unifying element is totalitarianism, which in fact has a psychological element that utilizes many of the same mental processes as religion. So if the biology of brain formation has any impact on that kind of thing, the structures that enable religion
Interesting that he's acknowledging religion as a behavior whose social impact has survival value in a primitive tribal setting. It's almost like he has a clue.
@Passerby: There was a lot of bad history in there. In the transition from the High Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period the church became a force for stultification and oppression, and in the Middle Ages, which came after the Dark Ages inasmuch as they existed, the Inquisitions did exist.
However, during the Dark Ages the church was the only reason Western Europe retained literacy or any of Latin culture, and they happened because the Roman Empire fell. (Which wasn't, by the way, because it converted to Christianity. That was an attempted stopgap by Constantine that didn't save the West, but may actually have been a saving factor in the East.) And the Inquisitions were formed for a number of reasons, but none of them specifically to target philosophers.
Most of them were formed to target fundamentalists and other cultists, 'heretics,' although the Church of the time believed that the classical heresies were an everliving scourge that twisted and bred under cover always, bursting out in the attempt to corrupt good Christians to Manicheaism or Arianism or what have you. Philosophy was a dead letter in Western Europe for most of the period you're talking about anyway, and when it revived it was on Greek roots and merely required not to be strikingly incompatible with Christian thought. Oppressive by today's American standards, but positively unmoderated compared to plenty of other places. The Spanish Inquisition was a special case, formed by the Spanish monarchy without papal writ to enforce the conversions of the Jews and Muslims who'd declined to leave in 1492 when they united Castile and Aragon, conquered Granada, and announced n expulsion.
(Mostly the Jews, because the Muslims who'd stuck around unconverted for that long were mostly peasants, and who really cared how sincere peasants were about converting?)
Apart from the Albigensian Crusade, which was a war of church on church to the benefit and with the power of the French monarchy, the Crusades had zilch to do with heresy, either, except insomuch as some Christians were aware that Islam was actually a close relative of their religion and called it the 'Mahometan heresy.'
And machines were not actively stamped out and called witchcraft. That didn't happen. That is a chimera. Modern science evolved fairly unmolested, despite the brouhahas that arose whenever it came around to challenging the accepted cosmology.
Stop being ignorant and making the rest of us look bad; you're slinging the same kind of lowest-common-denominator guilt-by-association trash they do. The past was not evil because of religion. The present is not evil because of science. The world turns and is as it is, and stop being childish about it.
Seriously, people. We're supposed to be better than this. Could everyone stop believing that inaccurate, teleological fairy tale about the Church causing the Dark Ages now?
