Journal ArticleDOI
The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion.
Don Gardner,Pascal Boyer +1 more
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This article is published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.The article was published on 1995-06-01. It has received 568 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Naturalness.read more
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Darwin's Cathedral
TL;DR: David Sloan Wilson's "Darwin's Cathedral" takes the radical step of joining the two, in the process proposing an evolutionary theory of religion that shakes both evolutionary biology and social theory at their foundations.
Journal ArticleDOI
From monkey-like action recognition to human language: an evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics.
TL;DR: It is argued that the progression from protosign and protospeech to languages with full-blown syntax and compositional semantics was a historical phenomenon in the development of Homo sapiens, involving few if any further biological changes.
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The Evolution of Cultural Evolution
Joseph Henrich,Richard McElreath +1 more
TL;DR: Understanding how and when culturally evolved adaptations arise requires understanding of both the evolution of the psychological mechanisms that underlie human social learning and the evolutionary (population) dynamics of cultural systems.
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Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion
Scott Atran,Ara Norenzayan +1 more
TL;DR: Folkpsychology and agency 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.
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The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.
Ara Norenzayan,Azim F. Shariff,Will M. Gervais,Aiyana K. Willard,Rita Anne McNamara,Edward Slingerland,Joseph Henrich +6 more
TL;DR: It is explained how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict.