also, at the other end of the spectrum is the way in which the Essene's have been shown to have died. Small, radical group of Jews who practiced a rather extreme version of Mosaic law, and ended up dying from poisoning themselves with their own faeces, which had ended up leaching into their water supply.

It's interesting, but not particularly relevant.  As Matt has pointed out, millions of dead Native Americans can attest to the biological destruction brought by Christian missionaries.

In The Rise of Christianity, Stark argues that in the Roman Empire during the rise of Christianity, slightly different attitudes towards caring for the sick may have led to "miraculous" levels of plague survival among the Christians, while the Romans suffered abnormally high death rates because of their practice of abandoning the sick without treatment.

If true, it's an incredible example of common sense... treating the sick helps them get better.  It doesn't address the truth value of the religion.

     I still can't figure out the computer without a 9 year to tell me how

    My comments are mixed in with the original post,  but it looks like it is part of the original post from topher. 

I can't find a 9  year old can some one here help to seperate my comments from the original post???????

Agreed. This is sketchy. And for the record I study Biological Anthropology. Statistical correlations alone are not scientific.

Both Corey and Randy are apparently biologists who are committed to bringing the subject in an interesting way to as many people as possible, and for that they receive kudos from me, in any case. Thornhill, according to his CV, has published in places ordinary biologists fear to tread, and from the excerpts from his other material I saw has no agenda other than making biology interesting and demonstrating where possible how human behaviour quite often has an explanation in biological terms.

But on the evidence of this snippet above they are no sociologists and fairly amateur anthropologists, and I am beginning to wonder if we are reading a Daily Mail bias here and not really one expressed by the two professors. Even in the snippet they point out that it is the prevalence of small, semi-isolated communities that accounts for the non-transmission of disease, that this leads to cultural diversity, and that religion operates as a cultural marker in that respect - all of which sounds reasonable to me and which runs counter to what follows.

The jump from that to the claim that religion was therefore devised (however unconsciously) specifically in order to prevent disease transmission sounds out of kilter with the rest of what Thornhill, at least, has published in the past. That religious identification helps reinforce the social isolation which leads to certain diseases being inhibited epidemically makes sense (just as the same isolation makes communities even more vulnerable disease-wise when infiltrated by others), but then only in geographical areas with a long history of human habitation where such tight-knit communities in close proximity have been prevalent. Such areas are by no means a global norm. Migration and other forms of nomadic lifestyles could, with equal emphasis, be claimed to represent a traditional norm.

But as I said, I suspect it's the news agency that needs to learn this - not the accredited authors of the claim.

Here's one of the author's previous articles:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-489653/Human-race-split-different-species.html

Yeah, just like H.G. Well's Time Machine which he references in the article.  I'm thinking the guy is just reporting on nutty scientific ideas from fringe scientists.

As someone mentioned earlier missionaries were the spreader of disease.  In Canada a sure way to die was to be a missionary since the natives associated missionaries with demons who would come into towns and leave dead people behind.  Add this to the Christian belief that disease was a punishment from god and godless science that cured disease usurped god's authority.  Today we have the Catholic church and stupid African superstition doing more to spread AIDS than any stupid religious abstinence program is doing to stop it.

Another article by Firth:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1037205/Are-Roman-tonight-Statue-Elvis-chiselled-1800-years-birth-goes-hammer.html

I don't think he takes his subjects seriously and his articles tend to mock whatever he's writing about.  So I certainly doubt he actually believes the religion/disease nonsense but certainly

Thus the quotes. Obviously the guys have credentials, and like Nordmann, I'm willing to afford them credit for publishing a thought-provoking piece, but the news article is really stretching it with the marketing. Honestly, am I the only one who thinks newspapers keep getting more and more condescending to their readers? They could have written "Science Guys Say Religion Good For No Sickness" and it wouldn't have changed the register of the writing appreciably.

What's worse is I'm assuming that someone who would write about these topics would be a "science correspondent". I hate to think what the qualifications for that job have been reduced to.

"Have you heard of science?"

"Um, does this get me job?"

"You'd be a science correspondent, so yes."

"K, I heard of signs."

"Science."

"Yeah. Thog know all about signs."

A mate of mine's first job as a newly qualified journalist was with a provincial paper in Ireland. On his first day he had a meeting with the editor (who had missed interviewing him as he was "out testing new glasses" at the time - code for researching the effects of beer on the body of a middle-aged provincial newspaper hack). My mate was asked had he any hobbies or interests.

"I've played a bit of football."

"We already have a sports correspondent, but you can help Liam out if he's after been out testing new glasses. Anything else?"

"I read a lot."

"Book reviews. Great. That's something we've missed. Anything else?"

"Astronomy"

"At last! Great! That means Paddy who makes the tea needn't do the horoscope any more. He'll be chuffed!"

 It just occurred to me that you could turn that headline around:

"Religion helps spread disease by encouraging large social groups"

I'm sure I'll get that warm and fuzzy feeling any minute now. Any minute now...