Darwin's Cathedral
"From Calvinism in sixteenth-century Geneva to Balinese water temples, from hunter-gatherer societies to urban America, Wilson demonstrates how religions have enabled people to achieve by collective action what they never could do alone. He also includes a chapter considering forgiveness from an evolutionary perspective and concludes by discussing how all social organizations, including science, could benefit by incorporating elements of religion. Religious believers often compare their communities to single organisms and even to insect colonies. Astoundingly, Wilson shows that they might be literally correct. Intended for any reader, Darwin's Cathedral will change forever the way we view the relations among evolution, religion, and human society."--BOOK JACKET.
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What Hacker News says
- Is any reasoning right for the wrong reasons? Older models were more visibly strange. Maybe the newer ones have started talking better but the inner thoughts are perhaps strange. Maybe they just moved the strangeness inward into the layer weights instead of revealing in reasoning tokens.
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What’s going on here, for example? But what if this is the path of human reasoning too. You know, have you guys read Peter Thiel’s Antichrist essay? It’s very weird, man. Guy sounds off his rocker entirely.
But he’s super successful, right? Maybe world modeling doesn’t text represent well. By the antichrist maybe he means some notion of the collective voting for distribution of resources without contributing productive capacity and that that ends societies? Or maybe internal world models are just not text serializable effectively.
A thing I’ve recently been enamored of are effective world and coordination models that are not “true”. E.g. a tribe that believes the forest gets angry if they do not hunt united. Lots more like that in Darwin’s Cathedral.
It might seem a bit free association-y but the topic itself is that.
The reasoning tokens behind this comment: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-10-12/Word_Magic
- What are these tools? I often write about stuff on my blog and I know a lot of what I’m writing or thinking about are ideas someone else has come up with (and that I’ve read but not remembered or not read and come up with a poor version of) but bog standard LLM DeepResearch never picks up the things I want.
I imagine any tool that’s good at plagiarism detection would also kill it at this kind of literature research.
An example of something where it worked like this is that I had some ideas around how tribes evolve and so on and wrote them as I could think of them and ChatGPT was able to find that Darwin’s Cathedral had a far better synthesis of various much more rigorous takes on the subject.
- Huh, I went looking into this after reading this story and gorilla culture is interesting. Apparently, gorillas don't have a teaching culture (in comparison to us, I suppose) so during their long growth into adults they have to pick up a lot of cues by observation. This group, in particular, is a famous group called Pablo's group because when it was initially followed the leader was a Pablo, who was soon deposed by a chap named Cantsbee with Pablo remaining on in a non-dominant position. This kind of multi-male system allowed the troop to grow large, and it progressed for two more generations when this chap decided to neither take the Leave And Start Anew nor the Stay And Gently Takeover approach.
Apparently, female gorillas have an effectively large amount of freedom in this scenario and they'll switch tribes if they don't feel they're being effectively led. Lots of interesting stuff in here.
I have this personal theory that Cooperation Ability is the superpower of all living beings and that's how we get bigger things done. You know mitochondria and other cells cooperated and formed modern cells. As things aggregated more we got bigger and bigger beings till the point where we have nation-sized beings. And I notice that many successful societies have strong cultures of internal cooperation, though they might schism, e.g. Abrahamic religions. Anyway, I'm some way through Darwin's Cathedral (recommended to me by an LLM when I asked about this idea) and that book plus the story of this tribe have served to shove me firmly into the land of absolute belief in this idea haha!
- It's even more interesting when you think about Christianity not as a clear category, but as a cloud of practices, beliefs and institutions in a broader family of religious patterns.
Mircea Eliade asks how Christianity reinterpreted sacred history, myth, salvation. What does Christianity do with motifs older than itself, such as paradise, rebirth, sacrifice? In A History of Religious Ideas [0], he treats the emergence and development of Christianity, including Judaism, early Christianity, Gnosticism, late antiquity, medieval religious forms and also how it interacted with other traditions. I think it complements quite nicely the geographical spread of Christianity by also clarifying what kind of transformations of religious symbols make it recognisable as Christianity across such different contexts.
There's also "Darwin's Cathedral" [1] that analyses religion as group-organizing system, with a focus on Calvinism. Didn't go through it, but seems relevant. It was recommended by Robert Sapolsky in his Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology lecture series [2].
[0] A History of Religious Ideas - Mircea Eliade
[1] Darwin's Cathedral - David Sloan Wilson
- Is this a goal to which we should aspire? I’m a former evangelical, now atheist and I thought that it was but now I’m not so sure. Darwin’s Cathedral made me rethink this position and I encourage you to read it.
- I asked many of these same questions when I lost my faith. I found compelling answers as to why I had a god shaped hole in D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. It’s taken 15 years, but I also finally have plans about what the fuck we should be doing about it.
