Human Nature Review 2003 Volume 3: 102-103 ( 28 January )
URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/satran.html
Book Review
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
by Scott Atran
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Reviewed by David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., Director, New England Institute for
Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, University of New England,
Westbrook College Campus, 716 Stevens Avenue, Portland, Maine 04103, USA.
Scott Atran, a cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, presents in this
volume a rich, nuanced cognitive-evolutionary account of religion. Eschewing
attempts to translate genes directly into behavioral propensities, group
selectionism and memetics, Atran situates his project firmly in the emerging
synthesis of cognitive science and evolutionary biology.
From this vantage, religion is not doctrine, or institutions, or even faith.
Religion ensues from the ordinary workings of the human mind as it deals with
emotionally compelling problems of human existence, such as birth, aging,
death, unforeseen calamities, and love.
Religion is costly and its doctrines typically starkly counterintuitive. If one
assumes that religion is an item that has been directly selected for, this
entails a Quixotic quest to identify specific fitness enhancing features of
religion offsetting its considerable costs, but if religiosity is an
essentially non-adaptive consequence of adaptive features of human cognition,
then we are free to look for the payoffs elsewhere: 'Religions are not
adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such.' Atran regards
religiosity as a phenomenon fed by several evolutionary sources. Religion, like
other cultural phenomena, 'results from a confluence of cognitive, behavioral,
bodily and ecological constraints that neither reside wholly within minds nor
are recognizable in a world without minds' - the evolutionary landscape of the
book's title - each defining ridge of which is constituted by a set of
psychological faculties. One such influence consists of primary and secondary
affective programs. Another involves the social intelligence module, which was
probably rooted in ancestral experiences of avoiding predators and hunting
prey, and received tremendous impetus by the selection pressures exerted by
group living. A third lies in the operation of functionally independent evolved
cognitive modules such as those devoted to folkmechanics, folkbiology, and
folkpsychology.
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In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and
Cognition Series)
by Scott Atran
Hardcover: 400 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.09 x 9.02 x 7.02
Publisher: Oxford University Press; ; (October 2002) ISBN: 0195149300
AMAZON - US
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195149300/darwinanddarwini
AMAZON - UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195149300/humannaturecom
Book Description
This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion
using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist
and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human
evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and
historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and
moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
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