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The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
Scott Atran
ISBN: 9780195178036
Format: Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Edition: New edition
Also available as an eBook
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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.
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.
| ISBN | 0195178033 | | Pages | 364 | | ISBN13 | 9780195178036
(What's this?) | | Volumes | 1 | | Publisher | Oxford University Press Inc | | Weight (grammes) | 549 | | Imprint | Oxford University Press Inc | | Published in | New York | | Format | Paperback | | Series title | Evolution and Cognition Series | | Publication date | 01 Mar 2005 | | Height (mm) | 234 | | Library of Congress | 2002074884 | | Width (mm) | 156 | | DEWEY | 210 | | Spine width (mm) | 23 | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | | Academic level | Tertiary education, Professional / Scholarly |
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| 1 | | Introduction : an evolutionary riddle | | 3 | | 2 | | The mindless agent : evolutionary adaptations and by-products | | 21 | | 3 | | God's creation : evolutionary origins of the supernatural | | 51 | | 4 | | Counterintuitive worlds : the mostly mundane nature of religious belief | | 83 | | 5 | | The sense of sacrifice : culture, communication, and commitment | | 114 | | 6 | | Ritual and revelation : the emotional mind | | 149 | | 7 | | Waves of passion : the neuropsychology of religion | | 174 | | 8 | | Culture without mind : sociobiology and group selection | | 199 | | 9 | | The trouble with memes : inference versus imitation in cultural creation | | 236 | | 10 | | Conclusion : why religion seems here to stay | | 263 |
"So how, [Atran] asks, is it that religious beliefs and practices are manifest, anywhere there are people, past or present? How could evolution have favoured wasteful investment in preposterous beliefs? ... Quite a project. He relies on a combination of the most recent human sciences. ... One of his exceptional talents is in weaving together a vast number of strands that most of us keep asunder."--Ian Hacking, London Review of Books "Atran's work is a brilliant exposition of the evolutionary by-product interpretation [of religion] as well as a mine of references for empirical research into the psychology of religion."--Pascal Boyer, Current Anthropology "Scott Atran fell in love with anthropology in 1970 when he went to work with Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and found himself surrounded by a collection of thousands of skulls. He has spent the intervening years studying human cultures all over the world, dwelling among the secretive
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