Positive Human Gene selection to believe in the supernatural?

Question

Because only 10 to 12% of the population are agnostic or atheists, do you suspect some positive selection to believe in the supernatural has taken place in pre history? What reproductive advantage would this have offered (prehistory, not after they started executing non believers.)

Answer 1

Being aware of the 'supernatural' is an advantage, genetic or otherwise, for it orders our steps toward the future of all, and keeps us from unseen evil. If you hear yourself say 'there is no afterlife', you are not among the future of life on this planet; you have chosen extinction.

Answer 2

Although Bravozulu gave a great answer, I believe that what you're asking Ed, can even be explained more simply than that!

Religious emotion is a property of the right hemisphere of the brain. Women tend to be right-brain dominant. If men, who are left-brain dominant, want to have s*x, they have to respect a woman's "thinking/approach" to life, or it's not going to happen!

So religion, as a function of the right lobe, on a larger scale, is the way women control men, in the form of a civilizing influence, unlike men, who often control women with their left-brain dominance, by building skyscrapers & super-highways!

Answer 3

All men are created equal, you are born into life. Nothing supernatural, a man and a woman get together and nine months later you're here. God gave you a mind to look at the world and make a decision, to believe in him or not. Back in history believers and non-believers were executed by believers, you believe as I do or die. Because the percentage is so small is due to man looking at the world and knowing there's more.

Answer 4

I believe that humans likely became dominant because of aggressive warfare against their neighbors.  A main cause of the increasingly complex social structures was to increase the number of young men they could send into battle.  The ones who could field the most would be the ones that inherited the territory.  Religion allowed that to extend beyond the tribal and even state level.  I am not so sure that it is not something that is learned but it does seem that it would be useful to have the tendency to strongly follow religious beliefs.  

There is some evidence that there is a biological componenet.  

One of the leading minds in neurobiology, Dr. Ramachandran director of the center for brain and cognition at UC San Diego has an opinion on it.

"Certain kinds of epilepsy have long been noted to be associated with a heightened sense of religiosity.  After having one of their brain electrical storms, patients may actually speak of having had a "religious experience," or say that they now "know why there is a cosmos."  Other symptoms of some temporal lobe epileptics can be hypergraphia (writing large, complicated tomes, often of mystical or personally religious significance) and frequent conversions  (to several different religions in sequence).  A known feature of epilepsy is what is known as "kindling," the strengthening of neurophysiological connections, often involving the limbic system.

Ramachandran now reports three patients in which he claims that a kindling of connections (to the amygdala, I believe he said)  is associated with a specific and selective heightening of response, as measured by galvanic skin response, to religious words and icons.  He believes that this can be interpreted as a change in part of the brain leading to either a heightening of religious emotion, or alternatively, perhaps to an enhancement of other emotions or perceptions which lead, incidentally, to to a heightened religious belief (everything feels weird, so the individual "wants to believe in something" to provide an explanatory context for the weirdness)"

http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/images...

Answer 5

More likely our high consciousness is searching meanings and purposes for life from practically anything and any were.