From: Bruce Edmonds (b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 24 Sep 2003 - 16:14:09 GMT
-- Regards. -------------------------------------------------- Bruce Edmonds, Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Bldg., Aytoun St., Manchester, M1 3GH. UK. Tel: +44 161 247 6479 Fax: +44 161 247 6802 Email: bruce@cfpm.org Web: bruce.edmonds.name
attached mail follows:
Dear Dr. Edmonds,
Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article
Religion's Evolutionary Landscape:
Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion
by
Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan
http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Atran-12172002/Referees/
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Religion's Evolutionary Landscape:
Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion
Scott Atran
University of Michigan
Ara Norenzayan
University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring
cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets
cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human
interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to
passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by
supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively
given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics,
folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate
ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable
problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural
worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here
the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural
agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate
Releasing Mechanism," or "agency detector," whose proper
(naturally-selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid
survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually
extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds.
Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes
deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same
metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended
solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that
cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious
beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs
only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion.
Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.
KEYWORDS: Agency, Death anxiety, Evolution, Folkpsychology, Maya, Memory,
Metarepresentation, Morality, Religion, Supernatural
http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Atran-12172002/Referees/
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