My Faith in the God Particle

I was reading recently about the continued search for the Higgs Boson, a.k.a. "The God Particle". There is quite a tremendous amount of religious fervor about the topic, and I believe that Stephen Hawking himself has a large bet where he believes it will not be found. Apparently, according to him, they (the scientists at Cern and the Large Hadron Collider) are running out of places to find the GP and it is running out of places to hide.

This got me to thinking of religious behavior in all walks of life. By "religious behavior", I don't necessarily mean behavior by religious people, but rather, behavior among people with vastly different opinions to which they are too emotionally attached, that appears to be religious in nature. We see this "religious" behavior in all walks of life, from Trade Unions to Prison Gangs, from Comic Book fans (Marvel vs DC) to Programmers (Java vs .NET). It appears to me that religious fervor is an evolutionarily successful behavior and our brains have evolved to be religious. Let's look at the benefits of religious behavior.

• Association with those who have similar opinions to you
• Isolation from those who may harm you because of differences in opinion.
• Strong pecking order in the form of hierarchy (i.e. moderators/popes/imams/comic book store owners)
• Preferences by the females for males that are higher up on the chain.
• The more people who agree with you, the more you believe you are right, despite evidence to the contrary.
  

Now let's look at the cons:

• War
• Isolation for those who cannot find others with their opinion
• Discrimination against those whose opinion is in the minority
• The mechanisms by which units establish pecking order are often unpleasant.
• The more people who disagree with you, the more likely you are to believe you are wrong despite evidence to the contrary.

Let's face it, religion exists because religious behavior is successful and contributes to the success of those who have the genetic predisposition to have similar opinions of its members. Humans are a social animal, and genes that contribute to being able to associate will survive.