Quote by Scott Atran

““A closer look reveals that God may never have been wholly pleased with His most preferred creations in granting them the parts they have. Why did He invert the retina and give humans (but not the octopus) a blind spot? Why, in making us upright, did He render us so liable to back problems? Why did He give us just one head, heart, and liver instead of two? After all, having two lungs and kidneys is surely better than having one of each: if you have only one and it fails, you die; if you have two and only one fails, you live.””

Scott Atran

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“All religions have core beliefs that confound these innate expectations about the world, such as faith in physically powerful but essentially bodiless deities. These beliefs grab attention, activate intuition, and mobilize inference in ways that facilitate their social transmission, cultural selection, and historical persistence. New experiments suggest that such beliefs, in small doses, are optimal for memory. This greatly favors…

Scott Atran

“There are several types of comparative analysis for garnering evidence for an evolutionary adaptation: structural or behavioral resemblance in different phyletic lines owing to ecologically driven functional convergence (analogy), functional transformations from the same ancestral character (homology), functional tradeoffs between traits in the same phyletic line, intrageneric or intrafamilial species comparisons, and ontogenetic development. Analogy (homoplasy) reveals adaptation in similar…

Scott Atran

“Everybody, whether they are religious or not, implicitly knows that religion is costly, counterfactual, and even counterintuitive. The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one’s faith deep and one’s commitment sincere. For the moral philosopher and Christian votary Søren…

Scott Atran

“The individuals in a cooperative social group cannot afford to tolerate repeated defections by selfish “free riders,” such as those who hoard food or shirk responsibility for the common defense. Any group too tolerant of defectors would be subsidizing them at its own expense, which would amount eventually to collective suicide. Organisms that temporarily forsake immediate personal advantage in the…

Scott Atran

“Religious ritual invariably offers a sacrificial display of commitment to supernatural agents that is materially costly and emotionally convincing. Such ritual conveys willingness to cooperate with a community of believers by signaling an open-ended promise to help others whenever there is true need. These expensive and sincere displays underscore belief that the gods are always vigilant and will never allow…

Scott Atran

“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

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“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

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“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

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“Cultures and religions exist, and are explained, to the extent that they reliably express stucturally enduring relationships among mental states and behaviors and where…

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“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…

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“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…

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“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

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