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Religious beliefs and behaviors have traditionally been seen as mysteries, but cognitive science is now providing potential explanations.
The explanation lies in how all human minds work, not just religious minds. Research on general cognitive processes can shed light on religion.
Contrary to the “blank slate” view, human minds are not empty vessels waiting to be filled by culture and experience. Minds have innate biases and predispositions that guide learning.
Being prepared for certain concepts, human minds are also prepared for natural variations of those concepts. This allows for the widespread acquisition and communication of religious ideas.
Religious notions are not strictly “innate” or “in our genes.” Rather, genes specify a brain architecture with certain tendencies, biases and capacities that make religious concepts psychologically natural and learnable by all humans.
The diversity of religion is not an obstacle, but rather a clue, for general explanations based on cognitive regularities across cultures. Shared biases can account for both variation and cross-cultural similarities in religious notions.

So in summary, the author argues that an evolutionary cognitive science approach, studying universal properties of human minds, can provide explanations for the origins and variability of religious ideas and behaviors.

The passage discusses some common intuitions about the origins of religion, including that religion provides explanations, comfort, social order, or that it arises from cognitive illusions. However, it argues these intuitions are inadequate and fail to fully explain the diversity of religious phenomena observed across cultures.

Anthropologists have documented extremely diverse religious beliefs, practices, concepts of supernatural agents, notions of morality, and rituals. Religions differ in whether they believe supernatural agents can die, whether spirits are powerful but unintelligent, and whether salvation is a central goal. Gods may be eternal or caught in rebirth cycles. Some cultures have multiple supreme deities with different roles. Ancestors, spirits and witches can be more important than gods in everyday life.

The diversity of religious beliefs and practices goes much deeper than just differences in naming religions. This documented diversity challenges common simplistic explanations of religion’s origins and highlights the complexity involved in fully explaining the natural origins and functions of diverse religious phenomena in human societies around the world.

Different religions offer different perspectives on the salvation or liberation of the soul and routes to salvation. However, not all religions promise that the soul will be saved or focus on moral reckoning determining the fate of the soul.
Unofficial, folk religions are more diverse than official religions acknowledge. Concepts like spirits, witches, ghosts are commonly believed even in religions that don’t officially recognize them.
You can have religion without an organized or clearly defined “religion.” Religions exist without singular concepts, terms, or doctrines.
Religion is present even without explicit faith or belief systems. Some cultures view spirits or ancestors as objects of knowledge rather than belief.
Explanations of religion should account for diversity beyond one’s own culture or region. Universal theories of religion’s origin often don’t apply across cultures.
Common proposed origins of religion, like explaining nature, the mental world, or evil/suffering, are limited. Not all cultures seek general explanations for such phenomena. Religious explanations also differ from ordinary causal explanations.

So in summary, the passage argues for a more diverse, inclusive view of religion that goes beyond singular concepts or doctrines, and questions universalorigin theories that cannot account for cross-cultural variation.

The anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard is famous for his account of religious beliefs among the Zande people of Sudan. He showed how their beliefs, like witchcraft explanations for events, made rational sense from their cultural perspective.
When a house collapsed, the Zande focused on explaining why it fell on specific people through witchcraft, not on the termites that structurally weakened it. Their beliefs provided explanations for particular cases rather than general origins.
Religious explanations often introduce more puzzling elements like unseen spirits rather than providing simple accounts. They create “relevant mysteries” rather than straightforward explanations.
However, people are able to provide ordinary explanations in other contexts, so their religious explanations serve some other purpose than simply explaining the universe.
The idea that human minds have a general urge to explain all phenomena is flawed. Instead, the mind has specialized “explanation engines” that address particular domains, like language, species behaviors, etc. Religious explanations must be understood in this more complex cognitive context rather than as a straightforward drive to understand the universe.

Here are the key points made in the text:

The need to explain mortality or ease existential anxiety are often proposed as emotional explanations for the origins of religion. However, religion does not always serve these functions well.
Religions do not always provide reassurance or comfort. Some, like certain interpretations of Christianity, can emphasize anguish, fear and gloom.
Beliefs in malevolent spirits and witches can create more fear and uncertainty about forces threatening health, fortune, and life itself. This undermines the idea that religion exists primarily to allay anxiety.
Rituals and beliefs said to protect from witchcraft may actually help create and reinforce the perceived threat of witchcraft in some societies. The rituals do not clearly reduce anxiety.
Reassuring religions are not found where life is genuinely dangerous or unpleasant. They tend to exist where existential threats are less severe.

So in summary, the text argues that emotional/psychological explanations for religion based on reducing mortality anxiety or providing comfort are not fully supported, as religions do not always or clearly serve these proposed functions. They may even contribute to creating the uncertainties and fears they are meant to address.

New Age mysticism is designed to provide a comforting worldview by claiming that people have great power and potential, we are all connected to benevolent cosmic forces, good health comes from inner strength, humanity is fundamentally good, and many of us had past lives. This emerged in very secure Western societies.
Religion addresses mortality, but not all religions promise salvation. Mortality itself may not be the main motivator for religious belief.
The fear of death explanation for the origin of religion is insufficient, as the human mind does not produce delusions to cope with all threats. Plausibility is needed for beliefs to take hold.
Emotions related to mortality are complex systems designed by evolution for specific contexts like avoiding predators. Religious concepts gain salience by connecting to these emotional programs, not just a diffuse fear of death.
Social theories argue religion holds groups together, supports social order and morality. However, morality and social organization exist without the same religious concepts. The connections between religion, politics and oppression also vary widely cross-culturally.
While religion is often about social worlds, the links between specific religious concepts and social functions require deeper examination to fully understand the origins and nature of religion.

Here is a summary of the key points about functionalism as an approach to explaining religion and social institutions:

Functionalism argues that social institutions, beliefs, practices, and concepts exist and are maintained because they serve some function in allowing social relationships and groups to operate effectively.
A classic functionalist example is how divination rituals in hunter-gatherer societies help coordinate plans and resolve disputes among groups.
Functionalism sees societies as organized wholes where every part plays a useful role in keeping things functioning smoothly.
Functionalism fell out of favor because it could not adequately explain counterexamples or how individuals are motivated to participate in maintaining social functions. It relied on ad hoc stories.
A new perspective is that humans have evolved social minds and intelligence adapted for complex social interaction. This helps explain connections between religion, morality and social expectations.
Rather than keeping societies together per se, religious concepts make moral rules and social functioning more intelligible given human cognitive dispositions.
Focusing on flaws or failures in human thinking as the origin of religion is unsatisfactory - it cannot explain the specific nature and contents of religious beliefs across societies.

The key points are:

Religious claims are often viewed as irrefutable, but so are many fanciful claims that no one believes. There needs to be an explanation for why certain supernatural ideas spread widely while others do not.
Existing origin theories assume people first open their minds to belief and then passively accept religious concepts from others. But this does not explain the dominance of certain recurrent themes.
A better approach is to see religious concepts as the outcome of constant selection and reduction, not historical diversification. Many variants emerge in people’s minds, but most fade quickly. Only a few variants get communicated and transmitted in a stable form across generations.
We should seek to understand the cognitive and social psychological processes that cause only certain supernatural ideas, and not others, to gain widespread acceptance and endured transmission over time. Explaining religion requires understanding how minds select from the “very many” potential concepts down to the “many fewer” that actually take hold.

So in summary, the key point is that religious beliefs arise from selective cognitive and transmission processes acting on many ideas, rather than from isolated origin stories or people passively accepting concepts randomly.

Religions and religious concepts are not monolithic entities that people are taught in a uniform way. Rather, there are indefinitely many variants of religious ideas that exist in individual minds.
Not all religious variants are equally successful at spreading from person to person through cultural transmission and selection. The variants that do spread widely end up becoming what we consider cultural phenomena or religious traditions.
This transmission and selection happens unconsciously as people interact, trade ideas, and some ideas are more compelling than others and thus spread more. Conscious teaching plays a role but doesn’t capture the full complexity.
Cultural evolution can be modeled mathematically drawing from principles of genetic transmission/selection. Religious ideas/concepts can be thought of as “memes” that aim to propagate by influencing human behavior and transmission to others.
Thinking of culture as shared entities is misleading. Rather, cultural similarities exist between individuals due to common transmission/selection histories of ideas within populations.
Religious/cultural labels applied to large groups like nations oversimplify, as transmission networks don’t map neatly to such political boundaries.

Here are the key points about the origin and transmission of cultural concepts according to the passage:

The idea that cultural concepts are simply replicated memes passing unchanged from person to person is an oversimplification. In reality, concepts undergo significant variation and distortion during transmission.
Concepts are not passively assimilated by individuals from their environment. Individuals actively process, filter, and modify the information they receive to construct their own understandings.
Even when concepts are transmitted fairly faithfully, this is not because the individuals merely swallowed and regurgitated the raw information unchanged. Faithful transmission still requires complex mental processing by the individuals.
Cultural transmission occurs through a combination of unconscious assimilation (like learning one’s native language syntax) and active teaching/learning through social interaction and correction (like learning etiquette and politeness norms).
Individuals reconstruct concepts in transmission rather than just downloading or replicating them intact from other minds. Similarities between individuals’ understandings emerge from this reconstruction process, not direct replication.
The idea of memes or concepts directly replicating from mind to mind like a computer transmitting emails is misleading and an oversimplification of how cultural transmission actually works in human minds and societies.

So in summary, the passage emphasizes the active, reconstructive nature of cultural transmission between individuals and societies, rather than a passive replication model. Distortion and variation, not replication, are said to be the essence of how concepts are transmitted over time.

People acquire cultural information and ways of behaving through different modes of learning like observation, instruction, and practice. Understanding abstract concepts like mathematics requires conscious effort.
The human brain has different dispositions for learning in various domains like language, social interaction, conceptual knowledge. This allows cultural learning to occur.
Minds are not blank slates - they have ways of organizing information through templates and dispositions to make inferences beyond direct experience.
Templates like ANIMAL allow generalizations like knowing all animals of a species reproduce the same way. They provide structure for new concepts.
Concepts vary between cultures and individuals based on experience, but templates are more stable and widely shared. They enable similar inferences from different starting points.
Templates allow cultural information and representations to spread between minds without direct transmission, through convergent inferences guided by shared cognitive biases. This helps explain similarities in cultural ideas across different populations.
Religions tend to converge on certain concepts even when people receive different information, because the human mind uses inference and templates to develop concepts like animals or religion.
Cultural transmission of ideas can be modeled as “epidemics” where certain mental representations spread within a population due to inferential processes in the mind when exposed to cultural materials from others.
Religious concepts likely emerge from inferential “recipes” or templates in the human mind that take various information inputs and generate similar religious representations. This can lead religions to converge even with different starting information, like how animal concepts converge.
Religion is shaped by cultural transmission but also shows similarities across cultures due to constraints of human cognition and inferential thinking. While cultural, religion is not arbitrarily variable because minds filter cultural inputs based on internal inferential structures/templates.
Previous theories of religion’s origins were unclear or ‘mystical,’ but new cognitive science explains observable phenomena like religion’s cross-cultural features and variations based on detectable aspects of human nature like inferential thinking.

The author argues against the idea that there is a single “magic bullet” factor that explains religion. Rather, religious concepts tend to be successful because they connect and appeal to multiple human mental systems and intuitions.

An informal experiment is described where participants judge whether various supernatural notions could plausibly serve as the basis for a religion. Some notions, like items vanishing when thought of, seem unlikely. But others, like invisible spirits demanding offerings, seem more plausible despite being made up.

This suggests humans have intuitions or rules about what makes a good religious concept, even without familiarity. The goal is to understand these latent mental patterns or “recipes” that make some types of concepts, like reincarnation or divine beings, so prevalent across religions. Simply collecting examples is not enough - we need to identify the underlying psychological ingredients and processes that make certain concepts spread and motivate behavior. In doing so, we can better understand why religion takes the forms that it does cross-culturally.

Some early anthropologists tried to study world religions by cataloguing and comparing religious concepts and ideas across cultures. However, this approach did not lead to meaningful explanations of religion. Simply compiling lists of concepts does not explain them.
One proposed explanation was that religious concepts involve strange properties or entities not found in everyday experience. But this does not hold up, as mystics claim direct experiences of gods/spirits, and some cultures have experiences of possession.
Religious concepts would be infinitely variable under this “strangeness” theory, but they exhibit some commonalities. The theory is also circular, defining “ordinary experience” based on what concepts seem religious.
A better approach is to study how religious concepts are acquired and represented in the human mind, through processing new information using existing mental frameworks (“templates”). This reveals limited ways that concepts are constructed from a finite set of ingredients, analogous to how cuisine arises from a limited set of cooking techniques and materials.

So in summary, the passage criticizes the method of simply cataloging religious concepts and proposes studying how the mind naturally represents new concepts using existing mental structures as a better way to explain religious phenomena.

Here are the key points from the passage:

People form default inferences and expectations about new concepts based on similar existing ontological categories (e.g. animals). This is how we understand concepts like “zygoons” even with little information.
These default inferences serve as conjectures or expectations, not necessarily facts. Our understanding is tentative and can change with new information.
We entertain expectations constantly by speculating beyond known facts and linking ideas causally.
Ontological categories like “animal” are deep conceptual structures that guide how we understand new related concepts like imaginary creatures.
Religious concepts similarly activate ontological categories like “person” while adding counterintuitive tags that violate defaults, like describing persons without bodies.
This process of combining a category with a special, counterintuitive tag is how unfamiliar religious concepts are constructed and represented mentally in a structured way.

So in summary, the passage discusses how people form default inferences and expectations to understand new concepts, and how religious concepts are represented by combining familiar ontological categories with unusual, counterintuitive attributes.

Counterintuitive concepts in religion or folklore violate intuitive expectations about categories like biology, species membership, etc. but are still familiar concepts for practitioners.
For example, some Andean cultures view certain mountains as living beings with biological properties like feeding and bleeding, violating intuition that mountains are inert objects.
Cross-species composites in mythology like half-human heroes violate intuition that members of a species are internally similar.
The Fang concept of an “evur” internal organ violates expectations of internal similarity within a species but matches intuitions that behaviors are caused by internal differences.
Mythological transformations between persons and animals or objects preserve inferences by choosing ontologically close categories, rather than arbitrary changes. Transformations are also generally incomplete so narrative inferences can still be made.
Natural transformations like caterpillars to butterflies violate intuitions about permanent species membership and expectation of growth producing similar bodies, even if they are a single species observed at different stages.

Early-developed expectations about the ontological category ANIMAL include the intuition that animals have minds, perceive the world through senses, form memories and beliefs based on perceptions, have desires and intentions that drive behavior, learn and adapt based on experience, exist in the physical world at a specific location, die and decay after death, etc.

However, many aspects of the real natural world challenge these intuitive expectations. Some animals lack characteristics we assume they should have based on their appearance, like consciousness or complex cognition. Other living things like plants display unexpected forms of response, communication and adaptability.

Similarly, religious concepts often involve counterintuitive ideas that violate our basic biological expectations about ontological categories like what it means to be an object, plant or animal. Religions posit entities like spirits, gods or sacred objects as having mental states and abilities that transcend their physical form or natural capacities, like perceiving hidden facts, communicating across distances, existing in multiple places at once, and so on.

While challenging intuitions, successful religious concepts tend to incorporate just enough structure and constraints on the counterintuitive properties that allow inferences and interactions based on an intuitive psychology of agency. Unstructured or incoherent violations are less culturally successful or transmissible.

The passage discusses how supernatural concepts are built by combining an ontological category (like PERSON) with a limited violation or counterintuitive element.
This allows most of the default inferences from the original category to still apply to the supernatural concept. So things like ghosts are assumed to have minds that work like human minds, even though this is never explicitly stated.
This process of combining a category with a small change is known as default reasoning, which humans are good at but computers find difficult.
It explains how supernatural concepts can be transmitted culturally even when only sparse information is provided, as people intuitively fill in the gaps using their existing conceptual templates.
The passage then discusses some intuitive paranormal beliefs that exist cross-culturally, like extended perception or the idea that thoughts can cause real effects.
It notes the particular interest Western societies have developed in empirically validating paranormal claims, due to the cultural impact of science, even though experiments consistently fail to demonstrate supernatural effects.
Supernatural concepts are not just interesting because they involve the mind affecting physical events, as mundane things like smiling also do this. What makes psychokinesis seem supernatural is that it allows intentions to precisely control objects from a distance, violating intuitive expectations.
This combination of an ontological violation (thoughts controlling objects outside the body) and preserved inferential expectations (the intended precise effect occurs) is what defines supernatural concepts and makes them culturally successful.
There are a limited number of ontological categories (animal, person, tool, etc.) and ways to violate the categories while preserving inferences. This produces a “short catalog” of supernatural concept templates that systematizes most myths and tales.
Experiments show concepts corresponding to these templates (violations of expectations) are better recalled than concepts without violations. Odd or surprising details alone are not enough - it is the violation of ontological categories through preserved inferences that makes supernatural concepts memorable and transmittable.

In summary, the key idea is that supernatural concepts gain cultural traction because they combine an intuitive violation with preserved intuitive inferences, and psychological experiments support this theory by showing concepts with such features are better recalled.

The passage discusses how religious and supernatural concepts are represented in the human mind. It argues that while these concepts may seem strange at first, they are better understood as violating ontological categories rather than just being odd combinations.

Some key points:

Religious concepts often involve violations of our expectations about categories like humans, animals, etc. For example, a woman conceiving without sex.
Mere oddities that don’t violate categories, like a woman having 37 kids, seem less convincing as religious concepts.
Memory experiments show people recall ontological violations better than mere oddities. This explains why violations are core to supernatural concepts.
Surface details of concepts can vary culturally, like different spirits drinking different things. But the ontological violations remain core.
Cross-cultural experiments in Gabon and with Tibetan monks found similar memory effects, suggesting these concepts are processed similarly across cultures despite different exposure and beliefs.

So in summary, the passage argues religious concepts involve violations of conceptual categories more so than just strange combinations, and this explains their persuasive power and representation in human cognition cross-culturally.

The study tested whether cultural differences in religious concepts and traditions impact memory and recall of supernatural concepts.
Participants from different cultures (French, American, Fang, Tibetan monks) were asked to recall violations, oddities, and standard religious concepts.
Across cultures, violations were best recalled followed by oddities then standard concepts, suggesting a universal sensitivity to violations of ontological expectations.
Cultural factors like religious diversity, seriousness, oral vs. literate traditions did not seem to affect recall performance.
While combinations of violations may be more attention-grabbing, they are not as culturally successful or widespread as single violations focused on one category.
People’s intuitive ontological expectations appear robust against familiar counterintuitive religious representations in their culture.
When reasoning about concepts involving ontological violations, people tend to preserve default inferences and backgrounds to allow rich inferences, rather than imagining anything is possible.

So in summary, the study found cognitive effects of reasoning about supernatural concepts are robust to cultural differences in religious traditions and concepts.

This passage summarizes an experiment conducted by Barrett exploring people’s concepts of God. The key points are:

Barrett asked people to describe God’s characteristics. Many said God can attend to all things at once, unlike humans who focus on one thing at a time.
He had people read stories where God simultaneously helped multiple people, like saving a life and finding a lost purse.
When recalling the stories, many subjects described God helping one person then turning to the other, focusing on them sequentially rather than simultaneously.
Barrett found this contradiction between people’s explicit descriptions of God and implicit mental representations occurred with both believers and non-believers.
He coined the term “theological correctness” to describe having an officially reported concept that doesn’t match one’s implicit concept.
Implicit concepts are accessed faster and may be stored as instructions for intuitive psychology rather than explicit propositions like theologically correct descriptions.
This shows implicit and explicit concepts are stored differently and theological concepts haven’t fully displaced spontaneous concepts. People have both.

So in summary, the experiment revealed people implicitly think of God as acting sequentially rather than simultaneously as their theological concepts state, showing a contradiction between explicit and implicit supernatural concepts.

The passage describes a scene witnessed by the author where a dog breaks free from a child’s leash and knocks over an old man on the sidewalk.
Multiple inference systems in the mind work together to understand what is happening. Systems for intuitive physics model objects colliding. Causal reasoning interprets one event causing another. Goal understanding sees the dog pursuing the cat. Character tracking maintains identities. Functional reasoning links tools’ structures to functions.
These systems operate automatically and smoothly to parse events, not through deliberate, explicit thinking. The mind effortlessly recognizes causal chains, motions, goals and more through specialized unconscious mechanisms.
Together these inference systems allow observers to comprehend complex real-world interactions, even surprising ones, without having to deliberately analyze each element. The mind implicitly parses scenarios through many parallel operating systems.
To understand a story, we need a sophisticated model of mental representation - keeping track of what each character thinks and knows. Thoughts cannot be directly observed.
Everyday life is full of inferences we make without realizing it. Our brain contains specialized inference systems that combine observations with principles to make predictions and understand the world.
Intuitive physics, for example, allows us to predict how objects will move and interact based on properties like mass and velocity. We also naturally infer causal relationships even when just watching dots on a screen.
Perceiving something activates certain inference systems. Activating systems for physics, goals, and psychology leads us to categorize it as a person. Activating other systems leads to other categories like animals or tools.
Advances in experimental psychology, cognitive development, brain imaging, and neuropsychology have provided insights into these specialized inference systems and how they are organized in the brain. Our knowledge comes from these systems, not explicit theories or definitions stored in the mind.
The passage discusses how the human mind analyzes and categorizes objects through different functional inference systems, rather than through a general mental encyclopedia.
It provides the example of a fish that was first viewed as an “animal” when observing its movements, then as an “artifact” when wondering who made it, and finally as a “tool” when considering its structure and function for striking or gripping.
The mind has specialized inference systems that are activated differently depending on the object, rather than distinct divisions for different categories of things.
Domains like man-made objects and animacy involve even more specific neural systems than a general distinction between natural and artificial. The brain focuses on figuring out how to handle tool-like objects rather than having a broad “artifacts” category.
Recognizing mental states in others involves multiple specialized subsystems rather than a single theory of mind mechanism. Autism affects just the subsystem for representing other people’s representations.
Other examples given of specialized systems include distinguishing animate from inanimate motion, computing how others perceive things differently, and simulating others’ actions and experiences of pain.
Our understanding of other people’s mental states comes not from a single unified theory but from many specialized perception and inference systems that analyze different aspects of experience.
Similarly, distinguishing which objects are goal-driven/animate vs passive comes from multiple neural systems, not a single process. Young infants seem able to detect basic differences in motion that suggest goal-driven behavior.
Young children appear to have innate expectations and inferences about various domains like biology that allow them to learn efficiently from limited exposure. Examples given are about expecting similarity inside members of a species and representing animals in “essentialist” terms with inherent properties defining their category.
Children recognize that living kinds form a hierarchy or taxonomy and that their categories are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, even without having full concepts defined. This contrasts with non-living kind concepts.
Even pre-verbal infants seem sensitive to cues suggesting self-propelled motion vs physical interactions, and older children clearly distinguish self-propelled living things from inanimate ones based on these cues rather than explicit explanations.
Infants have certain intuitive principles and preferences from a very early age, even if they cannot verbally explain them. These are produced by specialized neural systems that are separate from conscious thought.
Infants pay special attention to human faces from birth and quickly build “files” to recognize and keep track of different people based on faces and interactions. This shows the brain is predisposed to see differences between faces as particularly important.
Infants can imitate facial expressions, showing their brains have the neural connections needed for visual-motor matching from a very early stage, before mirror recognition. Imitation helps infants learn and recognize people.
Experiments show infants expect small numbers of objects to remain consistent even when hidden, indicating their brains track quantity. They are surprised when the amount changes unexpectedly.
A young mind has many specialized capacities and expectations that adults possess, like treating moving things as having goals or seeing faces as crucial for social interaction.
Strictly speaking, the concepts infants possess are not the same as adult concepts, but early precursors that generate the later concepts through development and experience. There is a gradual progression of increasingly sophisticated concepts rather than innate full-fledged concepts.
Innate factors likely determine brain connections and initialization of inference systems, but the environment is also crucial for calibrating and developing adult conceptual abilities from these early foundations.
An organism’s development depends on both its genetic architecture and the environment it encounters. Normal human development, like tooth growth and language acquisition, requires a typical human environment.
However, atypical environments like zero gravity or intravenous feeding could disrupt normal development, even with the right genes. The genes are adapted to ancestral environments.
Different species have evolved different cognitive architectures attuned to solve distinct adaptive problems in their evolutionary histories. For example, humans have specialized systems for face recognition, tool use, and social interaction that reflect our evolutionary past.
The brain likely evolved numerous specialized subsystems rather than just a general intelligence in order to efficiently solve diverse adaptive problems like detecting agents versus events, remembering social interactions, choosing mates, assessing food quality, etc. This increased specialization and complexity led to higher cognitive capacities in species like humans.
Evolutionary psychologists began combining psychological findings with evolutionary theory to better understand how the human mind is organized. This involves examining what specialized cognitive systems in the brain evolved to solve particular problems in ancestral environments.
One of the stringent requirements of evolutionary psychology is demonstrating that a hypothesized cognitive system meets certain criteria - it had to solve a recurrent problem in ancestral conditions, it has identifiable computational principles and neural underpinnings, and it would have conferred an evolutionary advantage.
The passage gives some examples of cognitive systems that seem adapted for avoiding hazards like toxic foods or contamination, such as food aversions in pregnancy and strong reactions to concepts of disgust.
It argues that humans have two core needs that have deeply shaped cognitive evolution - the need for information about the environment, and the need for social cooperation. Finding and sharing information was crucial for survival tasks like foraging and hunting.
Due to these needs for information and cooperation, humans have become highly dependent on information provided by other humans throughout their evolutionary history. This has impacts on cognitive evolution.

The passage discusses several ways in which humans rely on social intelligence and acquiring information from others. It argues that humans have evolved unique cognitive abilities and social behaviors due to living in a “cognitive niche” dominated by acquiring and processing social information from other humans.

Some key points made include:

Humans have an exceptionally developed “social intelligence” for tracking mental states, beliefs, and relationships between multiple individuals.
Gossip is an important human activity for spreading information about social statuses, which helps with survival and reproduction. However, gossip is also universally despised.
Humans have specialized inference systems for reasoning about social exchanges and reciprocity.
People are good at evaluating signals from others to determine their trustworthiness for cooperation.
Coalitional dynamics, like forming groups, illustrate humans’ tendency towards “groupishness” for mutual benefits through social interactions and trust within groups.

Overall, the passage argues humans have evolved unique cognitive skills and behaviors due to our reliance on intricate social intelligence and information acquired from other members of our social networks.

Coalitions require more than just a common goal - there must be voluntary joining, the possibility of defection, benefits from cooperation, and costs to being a cooperator when others defect. Few other species form coalitions like humans.
Several conditions must be met for a group to be considered a coalition, including enhancing benefits to other members, expecting similar behavior in return, balancing costs/benefits across the whole group rather than with individuals, representing other groups as unified agents, concern over others’ loyalty to the group, etc.
Building coalitions requires complex cognitive computations that humans can intuitively perform from a young age.
Human cognition is remarkable in its ability to decouple from the immediate environment through fiction, future/past thinking, planning, and pretending. This decoupling ability is crucial for tasks like evaluating information from others, complex cooperation, and episodic memory.
Young children show decoupling abilities through pretend play, where they can distinguish reality from an imagined scenario and make inferences accordingly. Decoupling also enables creating external representations like art, toys, etc.
External representations like drawings convey information but are not the same as what they represent in reality. Our minds must maintain some inferences (e.g. a path on a map turns left, so the real path does too) while blocking others (a 1-inch-wide path on a map is not actually 1 inch wide).
Young children consider what objects external representations depict to depend more on the creator’s intentions than just the appearance. Two identical drawings may depict different objects if intended that way.
Hypothetical scenarios work because our minds run the same inference systems as if the situation were real, allowing for coherent and useful thinking about imagined premises.
Many universal human activities like art, music, and supernatural concepts arise not as direct adaptations but as byproducts of our evolved cognitive capacities. Things like music stimulate the auditory cortex in an outsized way. Visual art stimulates areas pertaining to color, symmetry, and object recognition.
This helps explain the attraction to artifacts that strongly activate these areas, like symmetrical patterns or pure tones in music. It also explains attractions to things like jokes and paradoxes that activate reasoning abilities.
Some magical beliefs could similarly arise from activations of systems dealing with contamination, rather than failures of causal reasoning per se. Beliefs about purity and pollution may make more sense in this light.

Here are the key points about why gods and spirits are such an important part of religion:

Religious concepts are invoked and reasoned about in practical contexts to explain or deal with salient events, not just as abstract theological beliefs. People interact concretely with supernatural agents, not just ponder their existence.
Gods/spirits are represented as active agents that people have ongoing interactions with - making offerings, communicating through prayer/dreams, perceiving the agents’ effects through fortune/misfortune.
They are seen as responsible for many everyday things - good harvests, illness, death. Salient bad events especially require supernatural explanation.
People reason about placating angry gods/spirits or determining which one caused a problem so it can be addressed. Divination helps with this.
Failure to properly interact with or pay respects to gods/spirits through things like sacrifices could bring further harm. Religious rules are taken seriously.
Gods/spirits are intensely localized - people often have close relationships with particular ancestral spirits. Supernatural agents are ever-present in daily life and situations.

So in short, gods and spirits are highly practical concepts that people reason about and interact with constantly to manage relationships, explain events, and avoid angering powerful supernatural presences in their lives and environment. This makes them centrally important to religious thought and practice.

The Kwaio ancestors (adalo) are important supernatural agents in Kwaio culture. However, their exact nature and afterlife are not clearly defined by Kwaio beliefs. Answers around these topics are inconsistent or non-existent.
What matters more is the precise way these ancestors can influence daily life, and the guidelines provided on proper ways to interact with them (e.g. rituals). Religions tend to focus more on practical interaction than theological consistency.
The powers attributed to gods/spirits alone do not explain their importance. More powerful gods can be less important if their powers are irrelevant to human concerns.
Supernatural concepts are intuitively represented as person-like agents one can interact with, rather than impersonal forces. This shapes how their powers are conceptualized and what types of interventions seem natural when interacting with them.
Across religions, gods and spirits are overwhelmingly represented as persons rather than other ontological categories like plants or rocks. This is notably the case even when the visual depictions include non-human features.
Guthrie argues humans tend to anthropomorphize and imagine supernatural agents as human-like because our cognitive systems are designed to extract maximum information from environments, leading us to intuitively apply our most complex understanding (of other humans) when perceiving ambiguous cues.
Barrett provides a more nuanced view, noting we detect generic agency rather than specifically human features. Our intuitive psychology applies to intentional agents in general, not just humans.
Barrett also argues our psychology is biased toward “overdetecting” agency due to evolution - it was safer to assume agency (predator/prey) even without full evidence, to avoid potential costs of underdetection.
This “hyperactive agency detection” may explain why religious concepts intuitively depict ambiguous, counterintuitively human-like agents rather than clearly defining their nature. It also helps make sense of frightening/dangerous traits often associated with such agents.
Hunting/predation metaphors are common in religion, reflecting how agency detection originally evolved in evolutionary contexts of predation/prey detection, activating similar intuitive psychology systems.
People naturally have a tendency to detect the presence of agents (like other humans or animals) when perceiving noises or movements. However, many of these detections turn out to be false positives.
Thoughts about gods and spirits differ in that they form stable, long-term concepts that people assume are permanent fixtures in their environment. Even with little evidence, beliefs are maintained rather than quickly abandoned.
Barrett’s theory is that agency detection initially gives salience to supernatural concepts. However, these concepts become stable and important due to their interaction with multiple mental inference systems.
Stories and warnings from others in a culture inform concepts of spirits and gods more than direct experiences. The prior concept then shapes how experiences are interpreted.
Imaginary friends in children show that the social inference systems can operate in a detached mode with made-up agents. This likely provides practice with social skills. However, beliefs in gods/spirits involve claims that they are real and interaction is shared socially.
Supernatural agents are especially important because the social inference systems produce similarities to people while one key difference (being counterintuitive) makes them particularly salient. They are a source of “strategic information” that shapes important inferences.
Social interactions involve the exchange of various cues and signals between individuals. Our minds have evolved specialized systems to process these “strategic” social cues and make inferences about reliability, trustworthiness, intentions, etc.
Strategic information refers specifically to the cues or facts that activate these social inference systems. Whether a particular piece of information is strategic depends on how it is represented and interpreted by an individual in a given context.
For humans, it is difficult to predict in advance what information will be strategic, as it depends so much on subjective representations. In most other animals, strategic cues tend to be more clear-cut and unambiguous.
A key aspect of human social cognition is that we recognize imperfect access to information. We don’t assume that just because we have a strategic fact, others involved automatically have access to it as well. Recognizing these limitations of information is crucial for navigating complex social interactions.

So in summary, it outlines how humans have evolved mental systems for processing strategic social cues, but determining what exactly counts as strategic depends heavily on individual perceptions and representations within a given context.

The passage discusses how people interact with and think about supernatural agents like gods and spirits in similar ways to how they interact with and think about other human agents.
A key difference is that with human agents, people assume their access to strategic information is imperfect or limited. But with supernatural agents, people presume they have full access to strategic information.
“Strategic information” refers to information that is relevant or important for social interaction, things like who someone met with, if they are lying, if they misbehaved, etc.
Even though gods or spirits are said to “know more” in general, what people have in mind specifically is that supernatural agents have access to all strategic information about a given situation, unlike humans whose access may be imperfect.
This assumption that gods/spirits have perfect access to strategic information is what makes interaction and reasoning about them seem natural and intuitive for people.
People typically perceive gods and spirits as having access to “strategic information” - information relevant to social interaction and coordination.
This perception is not explicitly taught, but rather inferred intuitively based on narratives involving gods/spirits. Interpreting these narratives requires assuming the gods can access strategic details.
Important aspects of supernatural concepts are reconstructed intuitively by each individual, not explicitly transmitted.
Several lines of evidence suggest humans are naturally attentive to strategic cues in social situations and treat them differently than other information.
Intuitive systems automatically focus on strategic aspects without conscious rules. Similarly, gods/spirits are assumed to have access to whatever is strategic without needing to be told.
Concepts of gods/spirits develop because certain mental systems pay attention to and make inferences about particular cues in the environment due to their relevance, not because of special desires to explain the world. Relevance drives which cues systems process.

So in summary, the passage argues humans intuitively perceive gods/spirits as having access to strategic social information because mental systems attune to relevant cues, not due to explicit transmission or special propensities.

Relevance theory suggests that cultural concepts and beliefs spread based on how well they activate people’s innate inference systems and generate rich inferences with little cognitive effort.
Concepts of supernatural agents (gods and spirits) that are described as having “full access” to all strategic information tend to spread more than other concepts, because they:

Require less effort to represent given how humans assume other minds work.
Generate richer inferences as people can assume the agents know everything relevant rather than having to estimate what they know.

Beliefs in aliens from other worlds often describe them similarly to gods/spirits but typically do not assume the aliens have strategic knowledge of human affairs. So these beliefs do not usually trigger the same inferences or behavioral changes as religious beliefs do.
For aliens to function similarly to religious beliefs, a cult leader must convince followers the aliens know what individuals do and want guidance, tapping into innate inference patterns around strategic knowledge.

The passage discusses the consequences of believing in religious agents that have full access to human thoughts, behaviors, choices, etc. It argues that if people assume gods or spirits are all-knowing in this way, it will affect how they behave and what choices they make. Their moral intuitions and inferences about proper conduct will be shaped by how these supernatural agents view various behaviors and choices.

People will care about how gods/spirits perceive things because they expect the agents to have complete information about social interactions, beliefs, intentions, etc. Representing such agents makes inferring these views much easier compared to alternative explanations. So what matters most to people - how to act, what choices align with moral rules - becomes influenced by what the all-seeing religious agents endorse or prohibit based on their perspective.

In many religious/cultural traditions, supernatural agents like gods or ancestors are viewed not just as lawgivers or moral exemplars, but also as “interested parties” in people’s moral choices and behavior.
The idea is that these supernatural agents pay attention to what people do and can reward good behavior or punish bad behavior. This provides motivation for following moral codes.
The “interested parties” model is often dominant in how people actually reason about morality in particular situations, even if other models like the legislator or paragon are also present conceptually.
Moral reasoning and feelings are more complex than simply following rules. People have intuitions and make judgments based on both principled reasoning and emotions.
Explicit moral principles may be a cultural construct, while principled moral intuitions and feelings are more universal. Not all cultures emphasize abstract moral reasoning in the same way.
The “interested parties” model is a natural fit for how many perceive the link between supernatural agents and morality because it accounts for both reasoning and emotionally-driven moral intuitions.
Young children are not entirely morally incompetent, as evidenced by psychological studies showing they can distinguish between moral and conventional rules from a young age.
Two main theories seek to explain the development of morality in children - principle-based reasoning, where children acquire more abstract moral principles over time, and feelings-based theory, where children develop moral sentiments like guilt through empathy.
Studies by Turiel found that even preschool-aged children distinguish between moral transgressions like harming others and conventional rules about things like classroom behavior. They also differentiate based on severity and understand some acts are always wrong.
Young children have basic moral intuitions and concepts, even if they can’t fully articulate them. Their judgments are still developing as their understanding of others’ perspectives and local contexts grows with age and experience. Overall, research suggests children are not blank slates morally but rather intuitive morality develops early on.
Moral reasoning in children displays some aspects of “moral realism” - the intuition that actions are intrinsically right or wrong regardless of context or viewpoint. This does not change much with development.
This is noteworthy because children generally get better at understanding different perspectives. But moral judgments remain objective rather than relative to viewpoint.
Evolution may have endowed humans with dispositions for cooperative behavior, as social living requires some restraint against pure self-interest. However, genes for “prosocial” behavior could not evolve purely due to group benefit, as cheaters could exploit cooperation without contributing.
Three mechanisms have evolved to promote cooperation: kin selection (helping relatives shares genes), reciprocal altruism (I help you with the expectation you’ll help me), and group or multi-level selection (selection can act on groups where cooperation aids the group’s survival).
While cooperation provides benefits, the underlying genetic dispositions remain self-interested in propagating one’s own genes or reciprocated support in interactions. Evolution does not produce purely selfless behavior divorced from genetic interests.
“Strategies” in evolutionary accounts refer to organized patterns of behavior, not conscious deliberation. Animals behaving altruistically are not consciously deciding on strategies.
Humans often behave altruistically even when not related to the recipient and without expectation of reciprocation. This goes against predictions of kin selection and reciprocal altruism alone.
Emotions and moral feelings drive behavior in ways that do not seem to maximize individual benefits. This is difficult to explain using standard economic models.
Robert Frank proposed that altruism reveals important aspects of human dispositions for cooperation. Cooperation creates problems of trust and commitment that need to be solved.
“Commitment gadgets” like legal binds, reputation, and passionate emotions have helped solve these problems throughout history by compelling individuals to behave cooperatively even when not immediately advantageous.
A disposition for honesty and cooperation provides opportunities for interaction that would not exist for potential cheaters. Signals of such dispositions would be evolutionarily beneficial despite their costliness.
Moral emotions like guilt help balance the costs and benefits of cooperation vs cheating, making altruism evolutionarily stable.
Moral intuitions connect specific emotional states to particular situations of social interaction. This explains why specific moral prescriptions vary across cultures, but the general connection between morality and social cooperation does not.
Judging situations often requires detailed contextual information about factors like past interactions, intentions, mitigating circumstances, etc. Supernatural agents like gods and spirits are intuitively assumed to have full access to all relevant strategic information about a situation.
This makes supernatural agents naturally suited to serving as the source of our moral intuitions. If an agent knows all the facts, we assume they would make the same moral judgment as our intuition. Representing intuitions as the viewpoint of such an agent provides an easy way to understand where intuitions come from.
The “interested party” model, where gods and spirits have opinions on our actions based on complete information, is more intuitive and active in people’s thinking than models where supernatural agents only provide rules or exemplify values. It fits better with how moral intuitions work and are represented in the mind.
Moral intuitions and reasoning are remarkably similar across human groups and cultures, even without religious concepts. Children naturally develop moral intuitions without linking them to supernatural beings.
Religious moral codes and models are still constrained by the basic moral intuitions that all humans share. Evolution as social cooperators is sufficient to explain the foundations of human moral psychology.
Religious concepts can be seen as “parasitic” upon existing moral intuitions, in that supernatural agents are often inserted into moral reasoning after the fact. But moral reasoning would exist without religious concepts.
Witchcraft beliefs help explain misfortune and provide a target for blame. Though concepts of witches vary, they are often used to interpret recurring negative events. Talking openly about witchcraft can mean taking sides in conflicts.
Beliefs in an “evil eye” stem from interpreting misfortune as a consequence of envy from noticing differences. This phenomenon is widespread cross-culturally.
Illness, accidents and other hardships are often directly attributed to the actions of spirits and ancestors when people seek explanations for misfortune. Supernatural agents are commonly implicated.
Many origin of religion scenarios suggest that religious concepts emerge because some events require urgent explanation but cannot be explained naturally. Gods and spirits fill this explanatory gap.
However, simply describing gods as powerful does not sufficiently explain why they are seen as the source of misfortune. People seem to attribute powers to gods and spirits because they are frequently described as causing misfortune.
Explanations that invoke poor understanding of statistics or randomness do not hold up, as people generally understand natural contingencies and correlations. Even when supernatural causes are invoked, immediate natural causes are also acknowledged.
Supernatural explanations are relevant to the particularities of each case - why this person, at this time. General causal principles do not address specifics.
Focus is more on the reasons or motivations ascribed to powerful agents, not the precise mechanisms of how they act. Reasons relate to social or moral infractions or failures in social exchange/obligations.
Misfortune is generally interpreted through a social lens, consistent with human minds being specialized for navigation of social interactions and evaluations of others’ trustworthiness, ethics of exchange, group membership, etc.
People’s fears of envy and jealousy are centered around those they view as equals or near-equals, not large differences in status or wealth.
What people really fear is being seen as a cheater who gained benefits without paying costs. This is especially salient in direct exchange relationships where differences could indicate cheating.
Differences in wealth or status are not usually seen as resulting from direct exchange, so they do not trigger fears of cheating. Ancestors and market forces are seen as explaining status differences.
Witches are consistently represented as seeking benefits without costs - taking without giving. This fits the model of being a cheater in social exchange. Representations of witches have changed over time to match changing economic conditions.
Beliefs about misfortune are framed according to social interaction and exchange inference systems. Gods and spirits are represented as engaging in social exchange, so they become potential candidates for causing misfortune like humans. They provide identities for conjectural scenarios seeking to explain events.
Some archaeologists believe early humans buried the dead partly to protect from scavengers, though nomadic foraging lifestyle made avoiding scavengers easy. Nonetheless, finds show ritualization of death like decorating bodies or arranging tools with corpses.
Such findings are sometimes cited as evidence early humans had religion, but connecting burial rituals to supernatural beliefs assumes much. We associate death rituals with religion today but need to examine the connection carefully.
Humans are narrative/storytelling beings who try to make causal sense of events. We also mentally simulate possible futures. This exposure to mortality may have prompted religious concepts answering questions/alleviating emotions about death.
However, the “terror management” view that religion comforts against mortality anxiety is too simplistic. Emotions/representations regarding different threats to genetic survival are more complex. Religious views of death also don’t always provide comfort and don’t necessarily promise salvation for good behavior.
To understand the salience of religious death concepts requires examining our varied, inconsistent mental representations/emotions regarding mortality from an evolutionary perspective. Anthropologists note religious outlooks on death often emphasize rather than relieve anxiety.
In every human society, there are rituals and prescribed practices surrounding death. These range from simple to elaborate. Even seemingly simple practices among hunter-gatherers involve ritualized behaviors.
Many societies have “double funeral” rituals, with an initial practice after death followed by a second set of rituals months or years later to more fully transform the deceased. This echoes initiation rituals that mark transitions.
Rituals emphasize the transition from living person to ancestor or dead person. Representations of the dead change after this transition, becoming more generic over time.
People have vague concepts of death and the afterlife in general. More detailed representations relate to recently deceased individuals and any perceived influence they may still have.
The key focus is on dealing with the body and bodily remains after death, through burial, decomposition rituals, etc. Proper treatment and transition of the body is important across cultures.

So in summary, death rituals across societies demonstrate an emphasis on ritualized practices surrounding the body and transition after death, rather than precise theological concepts of the afterlife or mortality. The body and proper treatment or passing of the deceased is the central issue.

Funerary rituals are focused on the transitional period between death and some further state, like preparing the dead for a journey. However, the rituals are really about helping the living cope with the aftermath, not about the anxiety of mortality itself.
Rituals overwhelmingly deal with the physical body - disposing of it properly. The presence of dead bodies seems to create emotional distress for people in a way that is hard to explain by the concept of anxiety over one’s own mortality.
Rather than vague beliefs about death, beliefs about dead bodies seem more definite. We should examine what it is about encountering a corpse specifically that elicits strong reactions from the human mind.
Corpses activate different mental systems - those that process biological things, those devoted to representations of persons, etc. The combination of outputs from these systems may better explain why dealing with corpses is so emotionally fraught.
Notions of corpses as polluting are common. This may be a direct reflection of intuitions from the mind’s contagion system, which prepares us to avoid unseen contaminants through contact-based transmission regardless of dose. People’s vague ideas about pollution may be tapping into this basic intuition about corpses as a pathogenic source.
Humans have intuitive mental systems that produce precise intuitions about biological processes like death and predation, even if our explicit conceptual understanding of these issues may be vague.
Young children show sophisticated understanding of death in contexts involving predation, even though they seem confused by direct questions about human death. This suggests death is handled by different cognitive systems.
Across cultures, people describe someone becoming a “person” as having components like a body, life force, breath, shadow, etc. But the exact concepts vary and are often metaphorical descriptions of intuitions rather than precise definitions.
Intuitions about persons emerge from mental systems like intuitive psychology, which infers others’ minds, and animacy detection, which expects goal-directed movement. Losing these aspects is central to intuitions around death.

So in summary, while explicit concepts of death may be vague, precise intuitions develop early from systems attuned to biological and social aspects of living beings, even if articulating a coherent definition remains difficult. Contexts like predation allow narrower focus on specific intuitions.

Humans have numerous specialized mental systems that help us understand who we are interacting with, such as a person-file system that keeps records of individuals.
These systems include facial recognition, voice recognition, memory of past interactions, and general knowledge about people. They allow us to quickly identify individuals.
However, sometimes these different systems produce inconsistent or incoherent inferences, as when different brain areas are damaged.
Conditions like prosopagnosia affect facial recognition specifically, while Capgras syndrome triggers a mismatch between facial recognition and emotional response to familiar individuals.
Autism relates to difficulties inferring others’ mental states from their behavior.
Dead bodies can induce cognitive dissonance as well, as the animacy system recognizes them as inert objects while the person-file system still associates them with a living individual. This may contribute to feelings like guilt at funerals.
In general, inconsistencies between mental systems can arise from brain impairment or from stimuli like corpses that simultaneously activate different, sometimes incompatible intuitions and inferences. Understanding these dissociations provides insight into human cognition and social interactions.
When a person dies, different mental systems in the brain give conflicting representations of them. The animacy system recognizes they are no longer alive, while the person-file system continues making inferences about them as if they were still a person.
This creates cognitive dissonance, like seeing a dead body as both a familiar person and an inanimate object. It leads to feelings like saying the dead would approve of their funeral arrangements.
Rituals surrounding death aim to resolve this conflict by transforming the body’s state of being. They focus on proper disposal of the corpse rather than descriptions of an afterlife.
Grief is a complex emotion related to both our social dependence and evolutionary history. While death ends interactions, some mental systems still represent the dead person as present, perpetuating grief.
Dead bodies also trigger intuitions related to predation, contagion and pollution. This associates death with being preyed on and explains some of the fear and emotion elicited by corpses.
All these factors prime dead bodies as meaningful objects that activate multiple mental systems. This makes them ripe subjects for cultural elaboration and attribution of supernatural properties to resolve the discomfort of conflicting intuitions.
Rituals involving supernatural agents and concepts are found across many human groups and religions. They typically involve prescribed sequences of actions performed at specific times with expected results.
Rituals are often described as allowing communion with gods/spirits or conveying profound meanings. They also serve as ways for people to interact with supernatural beings, asking for help or demonstrating worship.
However, rituals themselves need explanation for why they are such a universal human activity.
A distinguishing feature of rituals is that specific rules organize the performance, with participants each having a specific role to play. Rituals also have repetitive, stereotyped forms that involve movements, sounds, words in a fixed order.
The fixed, rigid nature of rituals helps imprint supernatural concepts onto cognition in an intent, repeated manner. This may have provided an evolutionary advantage by solidifying group identities and coordination around shared religious concepts.

So in summary, the universal presence of rituals across societies is explained as them serving an evolutionary purpose of solidifying group identities and coordination through rigidly imprinting supernatural concepts and behaviors.

Ritual ceremonies often involve dividing roles along gender lines. For example, initiation rituals among the Gbaya people of Central Africa assign specific roles to men and women within the ceremony.
Rituals typically take place in special locations. Examples given include a specially erected platform near a Hindu temple, a pole in the middle of a village, or a pond in the forest.
Ritual actions must be performed in a precise, prescribed manner. Things like blessing an animal or cleaning sacred relics involve set formulas and procedures, such as rubbing ingredients onto relics in a particular order.
Ritual instruments are also usually special, consecrated objects that cannot be replaced by other items. For example, a special ceremonial sword.
The sequence or script of ritual actions is important and must be followed precisely. People are not allowed to deviate from the prescribed order.

So in summary, the passage discusses how rituals typically involve dividing roles by gender, taking place in designated special locations, following precise procedures and orders of actions, and using ceremonial instruments - all elements that distinguish rituals from other social interactions.

Rituals involve performing specific actions in prescribed ways. While the connection between actions and intended effects is often unclear, rituals elicit a strong sense of urgency - that correct performance is necessary to avoid harm.

Traditionally, this sense of urgency was attributed to rituals invoking powerful supernatural agents. However, rituals likely helped shape concepts of gods/spirits, rather than resulting from them.

Rituals are similar to obsessive-compulsive behaviors in their repetitive, seemingly pointless nature and concerns over purity, pollution and consequences of deviations. Recent understandings of OCD suggest rituals exploit normal psychological mechanisms related to planning, emotions and possible risks/scenarios.

Rituals take on social meaning by defining roles and group identities. While some involve supernatural participation, rituals can exist without gods. Overall, rituals play on innate human tendencies towards ritualized behavior, pattern recognition and risk assessment to shape religious ideas and social order.

Systems in the brain unconsciously assess risks and possible outcomes of actions to maintain safety and avoid dangers. This includes scenarios like not opening a car door until the car stops fully.
In OCD, these risk-assessment systems seem to be slightly distorted and drive compulsive behaviors and intense fears/anxiety if routines are not performed. The neurobiology suggests OCD results from abnormal activation of normal brain functions.
Rituals activate similar mental systems related to avoidance of unseen contaminants or dangers. Elements of ritual scripts trigger intuitions of potential contamination and the need for precise precautions. This helps explains why rituals feel urgently important and precautions must be followed exactly.
Sacrificial rituals in particular present an exchange with gods/ancestors - gifts are given in exchange for protection, prosperity, etc. However, participants actually consume the gifts.Explanations that spirits partake non-materially resolve this logical inconsistency. Rituals also focus attention on actual resource sharing among community members.

Here is a summary of the key points in the passage tagged with [243]:

Rituals often produce important changes in social interaction, but not necessarily the changes claimed as the reason for performing the ritual.
Initiation rituals for boys seem complex and long for reasons beyond just imparting skills or secret knowledge. The “secrets” taught are often vacuous or paradoxical.
Initiation rituals involve painful ordeals and experiences that don’t seem to enhance practical skills like hunting or fighting. This discrepancy needs explanation.
Rituals create a “relational catch” that confuses participants but produces real effects by changing relationships in unintuitive ways.
Initiation rituals better prepare young men for cooperation in risky coalitions by signaling their willingness to cooperate and endure costs, building trust between members.
Even rituals marking life events like birth or marriage produce changes in social relations, though participants may not understand how. The rituals reshape relationships beyond simply acknowledging facts like a birth.

So in summary, the passage argues rituals have social effects beyond their stated purposes, often changing relationships and interactions in unintuitive ways not fully graspable even by participants. This relational dimension is key to understanding why rituals are performed.

Rituals surrounding life events like birth, marriage, etc. seem paradoxical if viewed as merely private matters involving just two people. In reality, such events have broader social implications.
Having children reallocates parental investment resources and changes dynamics of social exchange and cooperation within the community. Birth rituals confirm the child’s survival and trigger a recalibration of social interactions.
Marriage removes two individuals from the pool of possible mates and bundles resources, sex, cooperation within a new stable unit. This impacts everyone’s social interactions, requiring a coordinated change in how the group behaves towards the new couple. Rituals provide a clear before/after distinction.
While people constantly engage in social interaction, they do not truly understand it or view their behavior through lenses of things like strategies, signaling, cooperation, etc. They rely more on vague concepts of likability, trustworthiness.
This lack of conscious understanding of social inference is likely due to emotions being better motivators, complexity of social evaluation, and aspects evolving in smallscale contexts rather than modern large groups.
Rituals make use of scripts, shared experiences and salience to coordinate social changes in ways not fully grasped through conscious thought alone.
People naturally categorize others into social groups like families, social classes, ethnic groups, etc. They have intuitive theories about how social relations work, like what friendship and power dynamics look like in their culture.
These “naive sociologies” vary between cultures but share some common features. They often assume inherent natural differences between social groups that may not actually exist. They also tend to anthropomorphize social groups, describing them as having desires, perceptions, decisions, etc.
The term “naive sociology” was coined by anthropologist Larry Hirschfeld to describe these intuitive but incomplete understandings of social concepts. They develop spontaneously without formal training.
Naive sociologies attempt to make sense of intuitions about the social world but the explicit concepts lag behind and cannot fully explain complex social interactions. This leaves aspects seemingly unexplained and requiring invisible forces.
Rituals help fill this conceptual gap. By accompanying important social processes like marriage or initiation with prescribed actions, it helps cement the belief that the rituals are causally responsible for changes in social status or identity. This gives a magical satisfaction in explaining social phenomena.
Rituals involve prescribed actions that are meant to produce certain social effects, but the connection between the actions and effects is mysterious and not understood.
Not performing cultural rituals as prescribed could be seen as defecting from social cooperation or refusing to enter important social arrangements like marriage.
While rituals do not literally create the social effects, the illusion is created that they do due to the combination of ritual acts and subsequent social changes in a single event.
Including concepts of gods, spirits or ancestors when describing rituals fills the “empty slot” of an unexplained causal mechanism between acts and effects. It’s an easy association to make even if not necessary.
Not doing the rituals properly or skipping them could be viewed as dangerous due to beliefs about violations affecting relationships with supernatural beings or consequences within the social group.

So in summary, rituals create an illusion of causation between actions and effects, and notions of supernatural danger or detriment can arise from beliefs about properly following ritual prescriptions.

Gods and spirits are inserted into the mental representations or scripts of religious rituals. Rituals involve representations of actions to be performed (sacrifices, blessings, etc.) and concepts of gods/spirits are inserted at certain points.
Rituals can involve gods/spirits playing different roles - as agents performing actions, or as patients being acted upon. Rituals where gods are agents tend to be one-time ceremonies involving transformations (initiations, weddings), while rituals where gods are patients are often repeated (sacrifices to ensure good harvests).
Rituals where gods are agents tend to be more emotionally stimulating, using techniques like loud music or fasting. This may be because one-time transformations are difficult for our intuitive psychology to understand and require strong coordination. Repeated rituals involving gods as patients do not have this coordination problem.
Whether gods are involved or not, rituals are mentally represented as having social effects, like changing relationships or bonding a community. Supernatural concepts help fill a “causal gap” for why rituals work, but social roles/traditions can play a similar role without supernatural beliefs.
Ritual practices are shaped by our evolved psychology, and rituals are appealing because they tap into common cognitive mechanisms like agency detection and an intuitive need to explain causal effects through actions and agents.

The passage questions the common assumption that shared religious doctrines necessarily lead to group identity and cohesion. It argues that the relationships between doctrines, groups, and identities are more complex than commonly portrayed.

It provides two counter examples:

The Buid people of the Philippines do not have a systematic religious doctrine or idea of “religion” as its own domain. They interact with spirits but lack formal doctrines, religious specialists, or view their practices as connecting them to a wider community.
In Java, people nominally adhere to Islam, Hinduism or local spiritual traditions, but in practice blend elements of multiple traditions. Religious identities are internalized rather than clearly dividing people. Shared rituals do not inherently create strong group boundaries or common identity.

The key point is that religious ideas, practices, and identities do not inevitably translate into clearly defined, cohesive religious groups. The relationships between doctrines, identities, and community are context-specific and complex - not a simple progression leading to xenophobia or violence as commonly assumed. More examination of specific cases is needed to understand these dynamics.

These traditions in Java are mixed together and combined more freely than descriptions based on religious affiliation would suggest. People of different religions routinely participate in each other’s rituals and consider each other’s sacred sites.
A key ritual called a slametan illustrates this mixing of traditions. It brings together elements from various Islamic schools, Hindu concepts, and local spiritual beliefs. People view it not as religious confusion but as a creative combination.
Having a single religious identity is problematic in Java. People are pushed to identify with factions for political and social reasons at important life events, but prefer not to be formally bound to any single group.
Compared to the Buid people mentioned, the Javanese have incorporated many religious doctrines, while the Buid have only one coherent set of spiritual notions. This shows how context influences religious development and organization.
The presence of religious specialists is not universal. In some societies, anyone with a perceived connection to spirits can fill this role as needed by the community. Uncertainty often remains around specialists’ identities and loyalties.

This summary analyzes the origins and functions of religious institutions and specialized religious practitioners. Some key points:

Early religious specialists served local communities and relied on personal reputation. Their authority was not tied to a larger organized religion.
The development of literacy, large states, and standardized economic systems allowed religious roles to professionalize into organized “guilds” of specialists.
religious guilds derived livelihood and influence from providing standardized rituals and services. They sought to control markets for these services.
Religious doctrines and texts proliferated as a way for guilds to prescribe standardized practices and knowledge production/control, not the other way around as often assumed.
Examples are given of priests in Benares who extract maximum financial benefits through haggling and control over burial rituals.

So in summary, religious institutions arose not from unique doctrines but from the professionalization and economic opportunities afforded by literate bureaucracies within complex state societies. Standardization of religion followed the rise of specialist religious guilds.

Religious scholars and priests rely on organized guilds or castes to maintain their position in the market for religious goods and services. Because their services dealing with supernatural rituals and agents could easily be provided by outsiders like shamans or local healers, the priests are in a precarious position.

To secure their role, religious guilds try to gain political influence and present their doctrines as standardized brands that are distinct from alternatives. They promote coherent doctrines based on authoritative texts rather than context-specific traditions. This makes their religious concepts and norms stable across time and priests.

By presenting religion in the form of standardized doctrines and using texts as the source of truth, religious guilds strengthen the idea that supernatural beliefs should be described through stable, general principles rather than flexible, personalized practices. However, the complex theologies created by scholars are often irrelevant or distorted by ordinary followers.

Local gods and spirits tend to differ from place to place based on local rituals and customs. Religious guilds that operate across large regions cannot claim a connection to specific local supernatural beings.
To gain wider appeal, religious institutions promote more generalized cosmic gods and spirits that anyone could potentially interact with through the institution. This replaces local gods and ancestor worship.
Organized religions present standardized views of death and the afterlife that apply universally, rather than local traditions around establishing ancestors or rituals for the dead.
Literacy allows religions to develop complex doctrines, rules, stories, and prescribed rituals. However, standardized religious concepts and practices never fully replace local variations and additions by believers.
Even religions with divisions of labor between universal and local deities, like Hinduism, still experience tensions between standardized religious doctrines promoted by clergy and diverse local beliefs and practices. People interpret religious ideas through their own cultural lenses.
Official religious messages are always incomplete, leaving room for diverse individual understandings. Local beliefs and variants inevitably stick out and co-exist with standardized doctrines. Complete replacement is impossible due to human sense-making and meaning-making processes.
Religious groups, known as guilds, often develop systematic doctrines and teachings that are repeated over time through literacy and regular instruction. However, people have a tendency to make religious concepts more local and personalized by incorporating notions of ancestor spirits and local concerns.
It is difficult for literate religious guilds to prevent people from embracing less organized, less coherent versions of religion that are more practical and focused on local issues. People are never as “theologically correct” as the guilds would like.
There is a tension between the routinized, doctrinal teachings of religious guilds and periodic outbreaks of charismatic, imagistic religious expressions centered around inspired individuals. Religious traditions often oscillate between these two modes of transmission.
Doctrinal teachings activate different cognitive processes than imagistic rituals involving vivid imagery and drama. The routinized nature of doctrinal transmission makes religious institutions vulnerable to dissidence sparked by memorable imagistic practices.
Controlling imagistic rituals is important for religious guilds to maintain stable teachings and services. But doing so risks doctrinal transmission becoming tedious, fueling dissent through demands for novel imagistic experiences. This is the “tragedy of the theologian.”
Essentialist conceptions of social groups are intuitively appealing and elicit strong emotions, but it’s not clear why they seem so convincing.
Experiments show how easily arbitrary social groups can activate tribal “us vs. them” feelings and perceptions of inherent differences between the groups.
Coalitional intuitions - assessing who can be relied on for cooperation - may better explain social behavior than essences. Many groups act more like coalitions than categories defined by essence.
Social categories are often defined essentialistically but actual behavior follows coalitional logic, guided by calculating reliability rather than assumed essences.
Hierarchies of dominance, like race, involve coalitional benefits of in-group favoritism more than just stereotyping. Stereotypes rationalize intuitions about threats from other groups.
People aren’t aware of their sophisticated coalitional computations and moral contradictions, so essentialism provides a more palatable conceptual explanation for social intuitions and behaviors.
Fundamentalist religious movements are often focused on returning to perceived original religious values and opposing modern influences they see as corrupting religion.
These movements use modern technology like schools, media, etc. but react strongly against religious and cultural diversity and competition from other belief systems enabled by modern conditions.
The key issue is not just that other ways of living are possible, but that in modern societies one can dissent from the dominant religious norms and beliefs of their group without necessarily facing social costs or ostracization.
From the perspective of religious coalitions built on trust and solidarity, this low cost of defection threatens the group, as defection becomes more likely if there are no heavy penalties. Fundamentalist movements aim to reinforce strict religious identities and affiliation that are difficult to defect from without facing consequences.
Their goal is to maintain high levels of parochial trust and commitment within the religious in-group by opposing influences that normalize alternative choices and make defection less costly in modern pluralistic societies. Violence may be used to enforce strict doctrines and penalties for defecting from the religious coalition.
The author aims to provide a scientific explanation for why people believe religious and supernatural concepts, rather than dismissing them as “nonsense” without explanation.
There is no single or simple answer, as belief results from the aggregate relevance of activating multiple mental systems and biases in the human mind.
Evolutionary psychology suggests certain mental systems are tuned to find religious concepts intuitively plausible by triggering inference systems related to agency, purpose, coalitions, social norms, etc.
This increases the likelihood religions concepts get built into people’s minds and appear believable, even if evidence is tenuous or superseded by science.
It explains why religions find cultural success and transmission between individuals, not everyone finds them plausible, and their persistence despite modern science.
Rather than a single cause, it is the collective influence and “invisible hand” of multiple cognitive factors interacting that best explains the existence and properties of religious belief across humanity.

In summary, the author argues religious belief arises from activating various evolved psychological tendencies and biases in the human mind, rather than from any single rational consideration.

The author argues that explanations for religion that focus on features of the human mind like superstition, emotion, etc. are insufficient and misleading.
People do not generally question or care about the origins of their beliefs, like believing salt is white. Questioning religious beliefs is more common for skeptics.
It does not require much effort for people to hold religious beliefs. Critics see belief as a failure of mental management, but believers do not see it that way.
Religious claims often violate standards of clarity, consistency, evidence, and refutability that skeptics expect.
Psychological research shows various cognitive biases and effects that can lead people away from clear, evidence-based thinking, and these are likely influential in acquiring religious beliefs.
Simply pointing to cognitive biases is too vague - it does not explain why certain supernatural concepts like gods and ghosts are believed rather than others like talking cats.
The author argues explanations focused solely on cognitive failures or negligence are insufficient and that something more precise is needed to understand religious belief formation.

In summary, the author critiques explanations for religion that focus solely on features of human cognition, arguing a more precise approach is needed to truly understand religious belief.

Initially, the passage describes a “judicial model” where information is presented to a “mental judge” which considers the evidence and decides whether to accept or reject it.
However, this breaks down when looking at how the brain/mind actually works. Systems like vision don’t present coherent cases, they just send bits of information to other systems which accept it as fact.
To understand belief formation better, we should look at simple, non-controversial beliefs like views of children’s abilities/immaturity.
Implicit processes in our inference systems intuitively produce representations, not explicit sentences. Our behavior adjusts to these intuitions before we form explicit beliefs.
Explicit beliefs are attempts to interpret and explain the intuitions produced by these implicit mental processes. They come after the intuitions, not before.
Multiple systems like vision, language, morality produce inferences supporting the general belief, but for different situational reasons based on their own “logic”.
Having a belief essentially means being able to assent to an interpretation of how one’s mind works based on these implicit intuitions.
The passage argues that people tend to develop intuitive beliefs about certain topics, like childhood development, without consciously reasoning through the evidence or justifications for those beliefs.
When it comes to religious beliefs, people view them as “special” and think the mental processes underlying them must be different than everyday judgments. William James assumed there had to be something exceptional about how the mind handles religious concepts.
James proposed that mystical or visionary experiences were the source of religious concepts, and that common religious beliefs were just diluted versions of exceptional people’s experiences. This view sees exceptional people as creating religious ideas that were then adopted by others.
However, the passage argues this view is misguided. Studying exceptional experiences alone will not explain why religion exists in general or why it has the forms it does. All people possess capacities for religious-type ideas from an early age, just as they do for other cognitive skills, so exceptional individuals are not the sole source.
Even if new religious visions come from prophets, ordinary people still need pre-existing cognitive mechanisms to make sense of the new concepts. Their minds turn prophetic revelations into coherent religious systems.
Religious concepts borrow from and build upon universal human capacities like intuitive psychology, agent detection, morality, etc. This is why religion can spread and different cultures develop similar concepts like gods and spirits.
It’s misguided to think of religion as a separate domain from ordinary cognition. The processes that produce religious “beliefs” are the same as those for non-religious beliefs.
Religious concepts are represented and used across multiple cognitive systems in people’s minds. For example, notions of ancestors/gods are represented in intuitive psychology, social exchange intuitions, moral reasoning, person identification, etc.
It’s not one centralized system doing the “religious” thinking. Distributed, everyday cognitive mechanisms produce inferences and intuitions that collectively make supernatural agent concepts coherent and plausible to people. This decentralized activation of multiple systems helps explain why people adopt and spread religious beliefs.
Many religious beliefs and inferences can be produced by our ordinary cognitive systems, without explicitly deciding whether general religious assumptions are true.
Systems like intuitive psychology, social exchange, and morality can generate interpretations and plans of action that are compatible with concepts like ancestors or gods, even if the systems themselves are not determining the truth of those concepts.
Seeing others sacrifice to ancestors in exchange for protection, our social exchange system would view this as a meaningful interaction, without judging if ancestors really exist.
Having multiple systems produce inferences aligned with general religious ideas (like ancestors watching) can strengthen the plausibility of those ideas without an explicit evaluation of their truth.
Religions tend to incorporate concepts into many domains like stories, rituals, emotions to give those concepts widespread inferential relevance across different thinking systems. This distributed, multi-system nature makes religious ideas more embedded and less dependent on direct evaluation of their validity.
Being exposed to religious concepts through varied social/cultural exposures and interactions helps embed those concepts into multiple thinking systems from an early age. This makes inheriting one’s familial religion more likely than switching to another.
The question of why some people believe in religion while others do not is complex and may not have a definite answer. Factors like genes, environment, upbringing all influence likelihoods of religious belief but do not definitively explain individual cases.
Religions themselves are not definite objects but rather overlapping sets of mental representations, practices, and communications among different human minds. It is misleading to view religion as opposed to science.
In the West, religion came into conflict with science specifically because certain religious doctrines made factual claims about the natural world that were disproven by science. This has led many to try to redefine religion as addressing only non-scientific questions.
Acquiring religious representations comes naturally from human cognitive dispositions, but acquiring scientific knowledge through evidence and experimentation is more difficult and “unnatural” given our intuitions. Scientific progress relies on atypical social interactions that recruit motivations in non-standard ways.

So in summary, while factors influencing religious belief can be described, the question of differences between individuals may not have a precise answer, and defining religion in opposition to science is an oversimplification.

Religion as we know it likely emerged with modern human cultures around 100,000-50,000 years ago, as evidenced by a symbolic explosion of artifacts with non-practical or representational purposes, like cave paintings.
This coincided with the development of modern cognitive abilities like perspective-taking and fluid information exchange between specialized brain domains/inference systems (intuitive physics, psychology, etc.). This allowed supernatural concepts that violate domain expectations and require decoupling.
However, religion involves more than just counterintuitive concepts - it also connects to inferences about agency, morality, death, social exchange, etc. which likely have very long evolutionary histories.
Early humans possessed many sophisticated cognitive systems, so they only became vulnerable to religious concepts that jointly activated these different domains in an aggregate way. This limited the possible religious ideas to common recurring themes worldwide.
Over vast periods of cultural evolution and transmission of information, some concepts were more likely to spread and re-emerge due to slightly better activating relevant cognitive systems. This can explain the presence of religious themes without positing they provide direct usefulness or fulfill needs.
Religion stems naturally from humans’ tendency to talk about concepts that are not directly observable, like unseen agents or beings that violate intuitions.
Stories about counterintuitive concepts like supernatural agents capture attention and memory because they are inferentially rich.
The human tendency to attribute agency leads to inferences about these unseen agents’ perceptions, knowledge, plans, etc.
Moral intuitions get connected to ideas of powerful agents that can cause harm or misfortune. Rituals develop to appease these agents.
Counterintuitive concepts become linked to social interaction and identity within religious groups.
Some individuals are seen as having special connections to the supernatural agents. They take on religious specialist roles.
Over time, religious concepts evolve and spread due to natural selective pressures operating on communication and transmission between minds, rather than being designed by any intelligence.
Multiple cognitive systems interact to make religious concepts seem intuitively compelling and memorable enough to persist through cultural transmission across many minds. There is no single religious instinct or module.

So in summary, religion emerges naturally from ordinary cognitive biases and tendencies, shaped over time by cultural evolutionary processes rather than being designed or having a single origin.

This passage discusses how studying human propensities toward religious thought can provide insight into the complex workings of the human mind. By examining how the mind constructs supernatural concepts and gives meaning to abstract ideas, we can better understand the architectural features that underlie religious cognition. Several key points are made:

The human tendency to anthropomorphize and imbue non-physical entities with agency and purpose reflects important inferencing abilities of the mind.
Religious and supernatural beliefs vary widely across cultures and individuals, but share common themes related to survival issues like death, misfortune, social control, etc.
Features of the human mind like theory of mind, agency detection, essentialist reasoning, etc. contribute to how religious and spiritual concepts are constructed and understood.
Developmental studies show that certain cognitive capacities important for religious thought, like social cognition and anthropic reasoning, emerge early in childhood.
An evolutionary perspective views religion as arising from cognitive adaptations related to social cooperation, morality and coping with existential threats like mortality.

So in summary, the passage argues that religious propensities can provide a lens for better understanding the innate cognitive capacities and architectural features that constitute the “human mental machinery.” Examining how the mind generates supernatural concepts sheds light on this complex biological system.

Here is a summary of the key points from ozin, 1976:

The paper explores the cognitive basis of disgust and how it relates to associations between certain concepts or domains.
It discusses Paul Rozin’s research on disgust and how it relates to evolved mechanisms for avoiding harm, such as food-related avoidance behaviors. Certain smells, tastes, textures seem universally disgusting as they were likely signs of toxic contamination in our evolutionary past.
Disgust seems to work by association - things become disgusting not based on their intrinsic properties but due to learned associations. For example, things that contact certain disgusting things may themselves become disgusting through association.
Core disgust elicitors seem to fall into categories related to contamination such as by animals, body products, rotting foods, etc. Disgust functions to avoid ingesting or contact with sources of disease or contamination.
The paper examines how associations anchored in disgust domains like disease, moral violations, and lifestyles get extended metaphorically through language and culture to broader domains like ideas, groups, etc. This metaphorical extension of disgust is argued to serve important social functions.
In summary, the paper explores the cognitive basis of disgust in avoiding harm, how it relies on associations, and how those associations get extended metaphorically through language and culture in socially meaningful ways.

Here are the key points from the references:

Parry 1985 distinguishes between general and local gods. General gods are more abstract, conceived in general terms for broad social groups. Local gods are more concrete, attached to specific locales and shrines.
Fuller 1992 discusses how in Hinduism, local gods gradually absorbed elements from Sanskrit texts and epics, becoming hybrid figures worshipped at local levels but incorporating broader Sanskrit narratives and themes.
Original debates about “great” vs “small” traditions from Marriott 1955 and Dumont 1959, with great traditions referring to orthodox, textual traditions and small traditions to local, folk religious practices.
Whitehouse 1995, 2000 discusses imagistic and doctrinal modes of religiosity, with imagistic being episodic, emotionally arousing rituals and doctrinal being regularly occurring rituals emphasizing precise repetition of beliefs.
Atran 1990, Boyer 1990, Rothbart and Taylor 1990 argue that social groups are conceived in essence-based terms. More evidence for this view in Gil-White 2001.
Tajfel 1970 found in experiments that people discriminate based on arbitrary assigned groups in the lab.
Ridley 1996 discusses the concept of “groupishness” or natural inclination to form social bonds.
Fiske 2000 and Sidanius and Pratto 1999 discuss social psychological research on prejudice, discrimination, and coalitional behavior between social groups.
Kurzban 1999 argues coalitional reasoning is a general cognitive adaptation. Bell 1999 discusses its role in clandestine conflicts.

Here is a summary of the references:

The references cover a wide range of topics related to evolutionary psychology and anthropology. Several references discuss concepts of social exchange and how humans reason about social interactions. Other references examine the evolution of human cognition and culture. Specific topics include the neurological basis of social cognition, religion and ritual practices across cultures, moral development, language evolution, artificial intelligence, and more. Research methods include both laboratory experiments and ethnographic fieldwork. The theoretical perspectives draw from evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociobiology and related fields. Overall, the references provide support for an interdisciplinary evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior, psychology and culture.

Here is a summary of the article:

The article examines primate vocalizations and how they may reflect emotions and thought processes. It argues that primate calls are not just signals, but expressions of internal emotional and cognitive states. Different call types likely correspond to different emotional valence (positive or negative). Primate vocal learning abilities also suggest some level of cognitive representation, planning, and intentionality in their vocalizations. Overall, the paper suggests primate vocalizations provide a window into their emotional experiences and thinking, supporting the idea that origins of music and language may have roots in emotional expression and social cognition of our primate ancestors. It contributes to the view in the book that music origins can be traced to emotional abilities in early humans and their primate relatives.

Humans, speakers of an alien language, and the grounding problem. In D.R. Hofstadter & the Fluid Analogies Research Group (Eds.), Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (pp. 253-272). New York: Basic Books.

Summers, K., L. Davis, and J. Afrin. (2002). Motion patterns of female black nectar bats under differing risk conditions suggest sequential summation of risk assessment. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 52(4), 264-272.

Taglialatela, J. P., A. M. Savage, C. Gouzoules, and W. J. Janik. (1999). Vocal learning in Pan paniscus. Journal of Neuroscience, 19(17), 7934–7948.

REFERENCES

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Takahashi, Y. (1999). Attention and facial recognition in prosopagnosia. Neurocase, 5(2), 113–124.

Talo, C. G. (1991). The Supreme Court and American Indian tribes. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Taleb, N. N. (1994). The schizophrenic nature of financial markets. Journal of Behavioral Finance, 8, 19–32.

Talmon, Y. (1964). Family patterns in a kibbutz. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Tan, M. H. (1999). A cultural perspective on moral development and misconduct. In P. Chen (ed.), Regularities discovered in linguistic behavior (pp. 153–187). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tanaka, J. W., and M. J. Farah. (1993). Parts and wholes in face recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 46A, 225–245.

Taton, R., C. Wilson and M. Wilson. (1995) Planetary astronomy from the Renaissance to the rise of astrophysics, 2 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, P. J. and M. Clark. (1991). Cultural preferences and perceived threats: The determinants of small group cohesion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 311-330

Taylor, S. E., and J. D. Brown. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103(2), 193-210.

Tewari, R. (1992). Anthropology of the Hindu succession law. In M. Belsky (ed.), Family, kinship and marriage: Cross-cultural perspectives on gender roles and generation (pp. 128–150). New York: Taylor & Francis.

Toates, F. M. (1998). Ethological and neurobiological perspectives on cognitive structures. In D. Pushcar and M. E. Conway (eds.), Cognitive structures in social and personality psychology (pp. 81–114). London: Routledge.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The human adaptation for culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 509–529.

Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual. Journal of Personality, 58, 17-67.

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Trigg, R. (1970). Reason and commitment. London: Cambridge University Press.

Trumbull, K. L. (1990). Private logic and public justification in classroom discussions. Curriculum Inquiry, 20(1), 45–62.

Tse, P. U. (1998). Wholes and parts: Category criteria in Japanese and English. In W. J. Samarin (ed.), Language in ethnic interaction (pp. 137–174). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Turner, R. (1979). Emotions as the basis of ritual. In R. Turner (ed.), Process, performance and pilgrimage: A study of three ritual populations in South India (pp. 43–58). New Delhi: Manohar.

Tweney, R. D., M. Doherty, E. L. Worner, J. C. Pliske, J. E. Mynatt, K. A. Gross, and A. T. Arkkelin. (1980). Strategies of rule discovery in an inference task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32(1), 109–123.

Uturu, N. E. (1995). Development of conservation and moral judgments from preschool through adolescence: The relevance of formal operations. Adolescence, 30(117), 185–193.

Vaillant, G. E. (1977). Adaption to life. Boston: Little Brown.

Valenstein, E. (1998). Blaming the brain. New York: Free Press.

Vallone, R. P., L. Ross, and M. R. Lepper. (1985). The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(3), 577–585.

Van den Broek, P., J. D. Fletcher, and M. E. J. Risden. (1993). Investigations of inferential processes in reading: A theoretical and empirical integration. Discourse Processes, 16(2/3), 169–180.

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Vining, D. R. (1986). Social versus emotional factors in mate selection: A comparison of U.S. and Japanese trends. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 12(1), 6–15.

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Here are summaries of the references:

Mind: Cross-cultural evidence for human cognitive adaptations among the Shiwiar of Ecuador and the Yora of Peru. Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dissertation examining cognitive adaptations among the Shiwiar and Yora peoples of South America through cross-cultural evidence. Looks at human cognitive adaptations across cultures.

The evolution of human sexuality. Symons, D. (1979). New York: Oxford University Press.

Book examining the evolutionary origins and purposes of human sexuality. Argues sexuality evolved through natural selection and is subject to evolutionary psychological understanding.

Experiments in inter-group discrimination. Tajfel, H. (1970). Scientific American, 223, 96–102.

Journal article reporting on experiments examining discrimination behaviors between social groups. Found people tend to discriminate in favor of their own group over others.

Fits, trances, and visions: Experiencing religion and explaning experience from Wesley to James. Taves, A. (1999). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Book analyzing religious experiences like fits, trances and visions from a historical perspective from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Examines how such experiences were explained.

Imaginary companions and the children who create them. Taylor, M. (1999). New York: Oxford University Press.

Book studying the phenomenon of imaginary companions in children and what they reveal about children’s cognitive and social development.

Here is a summary of the concepts and topics mentioned:

Coalitions - forming them, maintaining them, defections from them. Intuitions about coalitions and groups.
Cantonese Chinese, castes, Brahmans - ethnic and social groups.
Causation, illusions of causal reasoning.
Cheaters, strategies for dealing with cheaters within groups.
Children - their development, understanding of death, autonomy.
Cognitive concepts - concepts as distributed across mental systems, counterintuitive concepts, kind concepts, official vs implicit concepts.
Corpses - counterintuitiveness of, interpretations and taboos around.
Death - human understanding and reactions to it, differences between human and animal death. Funerals and mourning.
Differences - between groups, in doctrines, in norms vs facts, in religious vs nonreligious rituals.
Emotions - role in cooperation, rituals, coalition building, response to concepts and scenarios.
Essences - concepts of essential properties of things and categories.
Expectations - about ontological categories and violations of expectations.
Explanations - both scientific and invisible hand explanations for phenomena. Explanations of rituals and recurrent supernatural themes.
Faces - cognition of and importance in social interaction.
God(s) - conceptions of, existence of, role in rituals and identity formation between groups. Testing concepts of gods.
Goals - of initiation rituals, cognitive and social goals generally.
Groups - ethnic, social, roles in concepts and cooperation between groups.
That covers the main concepts/topics mentioned in the prompt. Let me know if you need any clarification or have additional questions.

Here is a summary of the key points across the given page ranges and topics in your question:

Hunting was an important activity for many groups and was discussed in relation to categorizing, cohesiveness of groups, groups functioning as complex polities, and violent identities.
Guilds played major roles in many societies, operating as literate organizations that helped structure identities and differences within groups.
Identity was a significant topic that was discussed in relation to ethnic ties, violence between groups, and categorization.
Differences between human groupings, including categorization and violent identities, were examined.
The inference systems of various social minds were analyzed in connection with acquiring and sharing information, understanding social interactions, and making inferences about others’ mental states.
Concepts of ethnicity, morality, misfortune, and norms were discussed in the context of groups and interactions between groups.

Here is a summary of the provided terms:

Ion - In chemistry, an ion is an atom or molecule in which the total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons, giving the atom or molecule a positive or negative electrical charge. Ions can be created, for example, by chemical reaction or electron loss or gain.

23, 24 - The numbers 23 and 24.

Muslims - Followers of the religion of Islam. Islam is a monotheistic Abrahamic religion that began in the 7th century CE. Muslims adhere to the teachings of the Quran and consider Muhammad to be the last prophet of God.

Religion - Origins of religion discussed on pages 11-12, 13, 32, 140. Various common features and diversity of religions mentioned. Relation to concepts, morality, political power, experiences, institutions, specialists discussed. Compared to science. Seen as a special domain by some.

Mysteries - Page 19 discusses mysteries in relation to religion.

vs. problems - Religion discussed in relation to problems on pages 2 and 48.

relevant - Page 14 discusses relevance in relation to religion.

Pain - Page 105 discusses pain.

That covers the summary of the provided terms from the passage as requested. Let me know if you need any clarification or have additional questions.

#book-summary

71102.pdf - arumugam