“During the first year of life, a child acquires the concept of teleomechanical agency: the child is able to perceive an object’s physical movement as goal-directed. In the second year, the child develops comprehension of mentalistic agency: the child attributes… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“Around the start of the fourth year, the child begins to elaborate an understanding of metarepresentational agency: the child attributes intentional attitudes, such as belief and pretense, to people’s representations of the world. Only then can children examine whether their… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“All religions have core beliefs that confound these innate expectations about the world, such as faith in physically powerful but essentially bodiless deities. These… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“A closer look reveals that God may never have been wholly pleased with His most preferred creations in granting them the parts they have.… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“There are several types of comparative analysis for garnering evidence for an evolutionary adaptation: structural or behavioral resemblance in different phyletic lines owing to… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“Everybody, whether they are religious or not, implicitly knows that religion is costly, counterfactual, and even counterintuitive. The more one accepts what is materially… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“The individuals in a cooperative social group cannot afford to tolerate repeated defections by selfish “free riders,” such as those who hoard food or… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“Religious ritual invariably offers a sacrificial display of commitment to supernatural agents that is materially costly and emotionally convincing. Such ritual conveys willingness to… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“During the first year of life, a child acquires the concept of teleomechanical agency: the child is able to perceive an object’s physical movement… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“In religious thought, a person may ride a horse into the sky (Mohammed), ascend to heaven in a chariot of fire (Elijah), rise to… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“In theocratic societies, adherence to fundamentalism may enhance the fitness of fundamentalists, as opposed to nonfundamentalists, because fundamentalists are more likely to obtain productive… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“Cultures and religions exist, and are explained, to the extent that they reliably express stucturally enduring relationships among mental states and behaviors and where… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“Then there are the secondary, mostly “social” emotions, such as anxiety, grief, guilt, pride, vengeance, and love. These may be unique to humans—hence, at… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“Vengefulness signals that a breach in contract will not be tolerated at any cost, even at the price of the avenging individual’s own life… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“In sum, the great apes arguably man1 ifest at least some aspects of teleomechanical agency and mentalistic agency (Suddendorf and Whiten 2001); however, there… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“In the course of life, all such systems (i.e., the different evolutionary ridges) are somewhat functionally interdependent, as are components within each system (i.e.,… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
“All religions, I claim, involve counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural beings. Moreover, such beliefs are systematically counterintuitive in the same basic ways. As we shall… — Scott Atran Copy Share Image
