>FYI, comments would be most welcome.


Best, Scott Atran

>      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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