Apophenia and the human brain

Somewhat in line with the the theme of my earlier post, here is an excellent article -
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert05/gilbert05_index.html.

God fearing societies worse-off?

Yes, according to this article. The article does not have a link to the original paper(come on, how long will that take ? atleast the title would have sufficed) and I could not find the author, Gregory Paul's homepage either. I think Indians are more religious than people in the US. I could be wrong about that but I wish they had included India in the study.

Smart Pill

Scientific American Mind: Smarter on Drugs

We seem to be making astounding breakthroughs in our understanding of the our brains. We are very far from knowing everything but we know enough to start manipulating the brain. If there was a smart drug available, will I take it ? YES. If there was a pill that made people happy, should we take it ? Sure, why not ? There may, no there will, be trade-offs to make. It might make other parts of our body less useful. We might be able to guide evolution towards a particular path(how exciting and terrifying at the same time!). There was another study which , if I remember correctly, laid forward the hypothesis that evolution has been/and_is optimizing the brain. I am not sure I believe this though.

So in addition to becoming smarter,inventive and intelligent, somehow our brains(well, most of our brains) have evolved to hope, have faith and most of all believe in a supernatural force(God) that guides us?Hmm...something to think about...