DOCSLIB.ORG

About Halfway Through Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the Heroine

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
About Halfway Through Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the Heroine Pascal Boyer (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books 3 THE KIND OF MIND IT TAKES About halfway through Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the heroine Elizabeth and her relatives are given a tour of the house and grounds at Pemberley, the vast estate of her proud acquaintance and spurned suitor Mr. Darcy. The place is grand (“The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of their proprietor”) and promises pleasures thus far unfamiliar to Elizabeth (“To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”). Being no social historian, Elizabeth is more interested in the many delights of owning these commodious apartments and lush gardens than in the hard work involved in maintaining this kind of household. She lives Upstairs and does not talk much about (or even consider) what happens Downstairs. But a lot happened downstairs. The efficient running of large households like Pemberley, with stables and fields, gardens and kitchens, guest rooms and dependents’ quarters, required the execution of precisely defined tasks distributed among dozens of specialists—house steward, housekeeper, groom of the chambers, butler, valet, lady’s maid, chef, footman, underbufler, young ladies’ maid, housemaid, stillroom maid, scullery maid, kitchen maid, laundry maid, dairymaid, coachman, groom, postilion, candleman, oddman, steward’s room man and servants’ hail boy, to name but a few. These specialists all had a precisely defined position in a hierarchy (there were several castes of servants, such as the Upper Ten or the Lower Five, which dined separately) and specific duties. The chef cooked but had no control over wine. The butler decanted wine but the stiilroom maid handled the china. With this complex division of labor came a complex chain of command. The housekeeper hired and directed all the female servants but not the lady’s maids and nurses; the steward, not the butler, could give orders to the chef; the chef controlled the preparation of food but not its serving, which was the butler’s domain.’ What is truly impressive about this system is how invisible it remained to the denizens of upstairs rooms, especially to house guests. Food and drink would appear magically at the appointed time, freshly shined boots would be brought to bedrooms in the morning. Even the owners of such places had but a vague notion of the complicated hierarchy and distribution of tasks, which was the steward’s full-time occupation. As a guest, you would not even perceive any of this but only marvel at how efficiently it all seemed to work. However, another feeling (commonly evinced by visitors to such places) was that getting everything you could possibly need is not quite the same as getting what you want. For the complex hierarchy came with a certain measure of independence and rigidity. Footmen were not supposed to do a valet’s work and vice versa. Kitchen maids who cleaned floors would not make breakfast for you. Your boots would be shined, but only in the morning—the relevant people were busy at other times. So master and guest could certainly nudge this organizational juggernaut in certain directions but they could neither really direct it nor in fact clearly understand how it worked. THE GUEST’S VIEW OF THE MIND It is unfortunate, and almost inevitable, that when we talk about religion we quite literally do not know what we are talking about. We may think we know our own thoughts (“I know what I believe; I believe that ghosts can walk through walls”), but a good part of religious concepts is hidden from conscious inspection: for instance the expectation that ghosts see what is in front of them, that they remember what happened after it happened, that they believe what they remember and remember what they perceived (not the other way around) and so on. This is so 2 Boyer (2001) Religion Explained because a good part of what makes all concepts remains beyond conscious access. Another misconception is that we can explain people’s having particular thoughts if we can understand their reasons for holding them. (“They believe in ghosts because they cannot bear the grief of losing people”; “they believe in God because otherwise human existence does not make sense,” etc.) But the mind is a complex set of biological machines that produce all sorts of thoughts. For many thoughts there is no reasonable reason, as it were, except that they are the inevitable result of the way the machines work. Do we have a good reason for having a precise memory of people’s faces and forgetting their names? No, but that is the way human memory works. The same applies to religious concepts, whose persistence and effects are explained by the way various mental systems work. Now having a complex brain is like being a guest at Pemberley. We enjoy the many advantages of that efficient organization, but we have no real knowledge of what happens downstairs, of how many different systems are involved in making mental life possible. The organization of mental systems is in fact far more complex than anything you would find in the most extravagant household. At Pemberley, different servants poured wine and tea; in a more modest household, the same person would have carried out both tasks. Because our mental basement usually works very well, we tend to think that it must be simple in organization. We often have a suburban view of the mind, assuming that a few servants may be enough; but that is only an illusion, and the brain is much more like a grand estate. What makes the system work smoothly is the exquisite coordination of many specialized systems, each of which handles only a fragment of the information with which we are constantly bombarded. TO CATCH A THIEF (USING INFERENCE SYSTEMS) Systems in the mind are complicated and complicatedly connected. Some of this complexity is crucial in understanding why people have religious concepts. Fortunately, we are already familiar with the most important aspect of mind-organization that is relevant here. In the previous chapter I mentioned that all the objects we encounter are mentally sorted in different ontological categories with associated expectations. Having ontological categories is not just a matter of classifying stuff out there in large classes (e.g., most roundish, furry or feathery things “animals”; flat surfaces and sharp angles “machines”). What makes ontological categories useful is that once something looks or feels like an animal or a person or an artifact, you produce specific inferences about that thing. You pick up different cues and process information differently, depending on whether the object is an animal or a person or an artifact or a natural object like a rock. If a branch moves, it is probably because something or someone pushed it. If the leg of an animal moves, it may well be because the animal is pursuing a particular goal. This description may give the impression that sorting objects along ontological distinctions and producing category-specific inferences is a matter of explicit, deliberate thinking. Far from it. The distinctions are constantly produced by the mind. We do not have to think about them. To get a sense of how smoothly inference systems work, imagine the following scene: In a quiet and prosperous suburb, a dapper old gentleman with a hat comes out the back door of a house and walks across the lawn. He is carrying a big screwdriver and a crowbar, which he puts in his trousers’ side-pockets. He looks around a few times and then proceeds along the pavement. Not far from there, a child is playing with a huge Labrador on a leash. All of a sudden, the dog starts at the sight of a cat in the next garden and gives a sudden pull that makes the leash snap out of the child’s hand. The dog dashes after its prey, charges across the pavement Chapter Three: The Kind of Mind it Takes 3 and knocks over the old man, who trips and falls flat on his face, his hat rolling in the gutter. The man yells in pain as the screwdriver has sprung out of his pocket and badly cut his arm. The man picks himself up and limps away, massaging his bloodied hand, leaving his hat in the gutter. You were not the only witness of all this; a police officer was patrolling the neighborhood. She picks up the hat, runs after the gentleman, puts her hand on his shoulder and says “Hey, wait!” As the man turns he recoils in visible shock at the sight of the police officer, looks around as if trying to find an escape route and finally says: “All right, all right. It’s a fair cop.” From his pockets he extracts a handful of rings and necklaces and hands them over to the bemused police officer. Although perhaps not altogether riveting (we are far from Jane Austen), the scene illustrates how multiple inference systems are involved in the perception of apparently simple events. Were you a witness to all this you might be surprised by some events but you would understand all of them. This is not because there is some center in the brain that is busy understanding “what is happening to the man, the little girl, the dog and the police officer.” It is because a whole confed- eracy of different systems are involved in handling particular aspects of the scene. Consider these: • Understanding the physics of solid objects: The dog yanked the leash out of the child’s hand and knocked over a passerby.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Folk Psychology of Souls
    BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2006) 29, 453–498 Printed in the United States of America The folk psychology of souls Jesse M. Bering Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, United Kingdom. [email protected] qub.ac.uk/icc http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/Staff/ JesseMBering/ Abstract: The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others.
    [Show full text]
  • Why “Belief” Is Hard Work Implications of Tanya Luhrmann’S When God Talks Back
    2013 | HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 349–57 BOOK SYMPOSIUM Why “belief” is hard work Implications of Tanya Luhrmann’s When God talks back Pascal BOYER, Washington University in St. Louis Comment on LUHRMANN, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf. Tanya Luhrmann’s When God talks back (Luhrmann 2012), henceforth GTB, is a fitting companion volume to her first (and equally important) book Persuasions of the witch’s craft (Luhrmann 1989). The two books address a similar issue— briefly, how belief, far from being a simple matter of receiving and accepting infor- mation, requires complex cognitive processes, some of which can be illuminated by meticulous ethnographic investigation. The situations are certainly different. The London practitioners of “witchcraft” among whom Tanya Luhrmann did her first fieldwork engaged in practices widely perceived as ridiculous, indeed prepos- terous. Their stated beliefs were eclectic and generally couched in rather inchoate metaphors. By contrast, American evangelicals practice a respected version of mainstream Christianity. What makes them special is a clearly articulated belief that God can, precisely, talk back. But the rub is, he does not. Or, to be more specific, the definite intuition that an agent is around, that this agent really is the god, that the god is talking, requires a lot of work, and is rather rare and frustratingly elusive. Even among the most acc- omplished of believers, a few islands of intuition are surrounded by oceans of doubt and disbelief (GTB: 133). This is splendidly illustrated in Lurhmann’s eth- nography, and raises important questions to do with both our understanding of “beliefs” in anthropology and our cognitive models of belief states.
    [Show full text]
  • Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations
    Cognitive Science 25 (2001) 535–564 http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cogsci Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations Pascal Boyera,*, Charles Rambleb aWashington University One, Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA bWolfson College, Oxford University, Linton Rd, Oxford OX2 6UD, UK Abstract Presents results of free-recall experiments conducted in France, Gabon and Nepal, to test predic- tions of a cognitive model of religious concepts. The world over, these concepts include violations of conceptual expectations at the level of domain knowledge (e.g., about ‘animal’ or ‘artifact’ or ‘person’) rather than at the basic level. In five studies we used narratives to test the hypothesis that domain-level violations are recalled better than other conceptual associations. These studies used material constructed in the same way as religious concepts, but not used in religions familiar to the subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed a distinctiveness effect for such material. Experiment 3 shows that recall also depends on the possibility to generate inferences from violations of domain expectations. Replications in Gabon (Exp. 4) and Nepal (Exp. 5) showed that recall for domain-level violations is better than for violations of basic-level expectations. Overall sensitivity to violations is similar in different cultures and produces similar recall effects, despite differences in commitment to religious belief, in the range of local religious concepts or in their mode of transmission. However, differences between Gabon and Nepal results suggest that familiarity with some types of domain-level violations may paradoxically make other types more salient. These results suggest that recall effects may account for the recurrent features found in religious concepts from different cultures.
    [Show full text]
  • Ten Problems in Search of a Research Programme: Towards Integrated Naturalistic Explanations of Human Culture
    Ten Problems In Search Of A Research Programme: Towards Integrated Naturalistic Explanations of Human Culture Pascal Boyer DRAFT VERSION Abstract. This is a concise statement of ten different problems for which a be- havioural science should (and may soon be able to) provide coherent, empirically grounded explanations. These problems were chosen for their social importance as well as their theoretical interest, as demonstrations of the need to integrate psycho- logical, economic and evolutionary factors in explanatory models. For each ques- tion, I mention pointers to incipient or possible research programmes. The ques- tions are the following: What are the natural limits to family arrangements? Do we have an intuitive understanding of large societies? Why are despised social catego- ries essentialised? Why gender differences in politics? What logic drives ethnic vio- lence? How are moral concepts acquired? What drives people’s economic intui- tions? Are there cultural differences in low-level cognition? What explains individ- ual religious attitudes? Why religious fundamentalism and extremism? The general aim is to propose a new approach to issues of human culture, not through an ab- stract discussion of paradigms and traditions, but through specific examples of possible empirical research. v3 [ 0 ] In Search Of A Programme Ten Problems In Search Of A Research Programme: Towards Integrated Naturalistic Explanations of Human Culture 1. Introduction 1.1. The aim This is a concise statement of ten difficult problems in the explanation of hu- man behaviour, particularly of human culture. The point of listing these questions is not to offer solutions but to outline and advocate a new way of doing social sci- ence and explaining culture, which for want of a better term I call an integrated behavioural science.
    [Show full text]
  • Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology
    P HUMAN CULTURES THROUGH ASCAL HUMAN CULTURES THE SCIENTIFIC LENS B THROUGH THE Essays in Evolutionary OYER SCIENTIFIC LENS Cognitive Anthropology PASCAL BOYER This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present the Scientific Lens through Human Cultures questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’. Human Cultures through the Scientific Lensspans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences. This is the author-approved
    [Show full text]
  • Cognitive Aspects of Religious Ontologies: How Brain Processes
    PASCAL BOYER Cognitive Aspects of Religious Ontologies: How Brain Processes Constrain Religious Concepts A cognitive study of religion shares some of its concerns with tradi- tional approaches in cultural anthropology or the history of religion: It aims to explain why and how humans in most cultural groups de- velop religious ideas and practices, and why these have recurrent and enduring features: By contrast with other approaches, however, a cognitive approach centres on one particular set of factors that influence the emergence and development of religion: The human mind is a complex set of functional capacities that were shaped by natural selection and evolved, not necessarily to build a coherent or true picture of the world and certainly not to answer metaphysical questions, but to solve a series of specific problems to do with sur- vival and reproduction. A crucial aspect of this natural mental make-up is that humans, more than any other species, can acquire vast amounts of information through communication with other members of the species: A cognitive study takes religion as a set of cultural representations, which are acquired by individual minds, stored and communicated to others: It is quite natural to wonder to what extent what humans acquire and transmit is influenced by evolved properties of the mind: Obviously, many other factors influ- ence the spread of cultural representations: economics, ecology, po- litical forces and so on: The point of a cognitive approach is not to deny that there are such factors, but simply to show
    [Show full text]
  • Mind, Culture & Biology
    Sociology/STS 367 Fall 2006 Mind, Culture & Biology McAulay Biological perspectives on social behavior have been a source of public controversy since at least the “Sociobiology Debate” of the mid 1970s. Nowadays “Darwinizing Culture” has become prominent and it is this latter phenomenon that this course specifically seeks to address. However, it is no longer a straightforward issue of dismissing evolutionary approaches as sociologically and politically incorrect given that Darwinian perspectives today are themselves often sociological in character and may even be intertwined with liberal/left political views. Not infrequently obscured in the exchanges between opposing viewpoints are ways in which biological and sociological approaches may complement, supplement or even converge with one another. In this context, our concerns in this class are: 1) to examine a series of intriguing ideas spawned by evolutionary thinking; 2) to focus on several domains of human culture: morality and religion, gender norms and standards of beauty as well as literature or film from a Darwinian vantage point. Darwinians seldom speak with one voice about human culture and social behavior. In some sense, the real “Darwin Wars” are waged among those committed to an evolutionary perspective but who nonetheless disagree about how far this logic should be extended to account for human society and culture. Some arguments are compelling, others controversial or provocative. Despite claims to scientific status, conclusions grounded in evolutionary theory often represent an interplay of theory and interpretation, of logic and intuitive insight, of empirical evidence as well as social commitments. It is the intersection of these dimensions that forms the space which we will explore and attempt to navigate over the course of the semester.
    [Show full text]
  • Evolution of Wisdom: Major and Minor Keys
    EVOLUTION OF WISDOM: MAJOR AND MINOR KEYS AGUSTÍN FUENTES AND CELIA DEANE-DRUMMOND Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing University of Notre Dame Evolution of Wisdom: Major and Minor Keys by Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. Copyright © 2018 Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing, University of Notre Dame CONTENTS Contents v Acknowledgements vii List of Contributors viii Introduction: Transdisciplinarity, Evolution, and Engaging Wisdom 1 Agustín Fuentes and Celia Deane-Drummond PART I. INTERDISCIPLINARY WISDOM 1. Independent Reason, Faith, and a Distinctively Human Wisdom 7 Angela Carpenter 2. Re-Engaging Theology and Evolutionary Biology: The Nature of True Wisdom 15 Nicola Hoggard Creegan 3. Human Origins and the Emergence of a Distinctively Human Imagination 25 J. Wentzel van Huyssteen PART II. EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVES 4. Technological Intelligence or Social Wisdom? Promiscuous Sociality, Things, 41 and Networks in Human Evolution Fiona Coward 5. The Palaeolithic Archaeological Record and the Materiality of Imagination: A 57 Response to J. Wentzel van Huyssteen Jennifer French 6. How did Hominins become Human? 64 Marc Kissel PART III. WISDOM AND THE MIND 7. De-Centering Humans within Cognitive Systems 83 Marcus Baynes-Rock 8. Practical Wisdom: Good Reasoning or Good Action? 89 Craig IfGand 9. Concepts of Reason and Wisdom 96 Maureen Junker-Kenny 10. Wisdom and Freedom as Reason - Sensitive Action Control 104 Aku Visala PART IV. WISDOM IN THE MINOR KEY 11. Evolution in the Minor Key 115 Tim Ingold 12. A Response to Tim Ingold: Evolution in the Minor Key 124 Karen Kilby 13.
    [Show full text]
  • University of Copenhagen [email protected]
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Copenhagen University Research Information System Anthropomorphism in god concepts The role of narrative Westh, Peter Published in: Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture Publication date: 2011 Document version Early version, also known as pre-print Citation for published version (APA): Westh, P. (2011). Anthropomorphism in god concepts: The role of narrative. In A. Geertz (Ed.), Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture Equinox Publishing. Religion, Cognition and Culture, No. 2 Download date: 07. apr.. 2020 Anthropomorphism in God concepts: The role of narrative Peter Westh, Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen [email protected] Manuscript to be published in the fortcoming volume "Origins of Religion, Cognition and Culture" ed. by Armin W. Geertz © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009 There is an emerging consensus among current cognitive theories of religion that the detection and representation of intentional agents and their actions are fundamental to religion. By no means a monolithic theory, this is an argument with several separate lines of reasoning, and several different kinds of empirical evidence to support it. This essay focuses specifically on the notion that people tend to spontaneously make inferences about gods1 based on intuitive, ontological assumptions, and on one of the main pieces of evidence that is cited to support it: the narrative comprehension experiments conducted by psychologists Justin L. Barrett and Frank C. Keil (Barrett and Keil 1996; Barrett 1998).2 Religion as anthropomorphism That anthropomorphism is indeed a universal trait of religions the world over has been acknowledged by generations of scholars of religion, but it was the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie who first made this fact the backbone of a cognitive theory of religion (Guthrie 1980; 1993; 1996).
    [Show full text]
  • Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology
    P HUMAN CULTURES THROUGH ASCAL HUMAN CULTURES THE SCIENTIFIC LENS B THROUGH THE Essays in Evolutionary OYER SCIENTIFIC LENS Cognitive Anthropology PASCAL BOYER This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present the Scientific Lens through Human Cultures questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’. Human Cultures through the Scientific Lensspans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences. This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences. This is the author-approved
    [Show full text]
  • Theory of Mind in Chimpanzees: a Rationalist Approach
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Nebraska Anthropologist Anthropology, Department of 2005 Theory of Mind in Chimpanzees: A Rationalist Approach Benjamin Grant Purzycki Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nebanthro Part of the Anthropology Commons Purzycki, Benjamin Grant, "Theory of Mind in Chimpanzees: A Rationalist Approach" (2005). Nebraska Anthropologist. 7. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nebanthro/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Anthropology, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Nebraska Anthropologist by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Theory of Mind in Chimpanzees: A Rationalist Approach Benjamin Grant Purzycki Abstract: The question of whether or not chimpanzees possess the ability to mentally represent others' mental states has been a popular question since Premack and Woodruff (1978) originally asked the question. It is well established that humans have a theory of mind (ToM), but extending this psychological faculty to our evolutionary cousins has created a massive amount of literature and research attempting to resolve this issue. Such a resolution is arguably not possible given the nature of the debate. An Either/Or approach to chimpanzee theory of mind both ignores the essential components of ToM as well as foreclosing on the possibility that there is variability of the iriformational encapsulation at the modular level between closely related species. The Modular Mind and Naturalism In order to discuss ToM, it is imperative to summarize the body of scientific advancements, particularly in the realm of cognitive science, to understand the theoretical backdrop behind the current debate.
    [Show full text]
  • Darwin, Pascal Boyer and the Evolutionary Theory of Religion
    ************* Darwin, Pascal Boyer and the Evolutionary Theory of Religion. Note: Along with the essay on anti-science in the last book and the essay on Chomsky’s linguistics, this essay deals mostly with science. It dissents from the theories of Boyer and Dennett, among others, and claims that religion is not an evolutionary development but merely one of cultural development, power and social control, and even then it is hardly necessary and can be done without quite easily and well. Is religion and adaptation and due to natural selection, or not?. I think not, and I will explain why. Much of religion derives from symbols imposed on nature or evoked by nature. This process of imposing artificial or cultural beliefs on the world goes way back, certainly, and appears to be motivated mostly by social needs. E.O Wilson thought religion was adaptationist because it involves “bonding”. But this tells us very little as bonding happens without religion, as anyone who has children knows. Religion is not necessary to bonding. Oxytocin is a hormone that helps a woman bond with their babies and does far more than religion could ever do. Indeed, the Virgin Mary images exploits just this kind of closeness that mothers can feel for their babies. Is an exploitation an adaptation? I think not. A few years ago I did a painting of a mother and child and women in general loved it. They responded just as I have seen women respond to portraits of the Virgin Mary and there was nothing at all religious in my work.
    [Show full text]