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Index
1 Introduction: An Evolutionary Riddle
1.1. Why Is Religion an Evolutionary Dilemma?
1.2. Why Are Religions and Cultures Not Entities or Things?
1.3. What Is an Evolutionary Landscape? A Conduit Metaphor
1.4. Why Are Mickey Mouse and Marx Different from God? Limitations of Cognitive and Commitment Theories of Religion
1.5. Overview
PART I: EVOLUTIONARY SOURCES
2 The Mindless Agent: Evolutionary Adaptations and By-products
2.1. Introduction: The Nature of Biological Adaptation
2.2. Evidence for Adaptation: Analogy, Homology, Functional Trade-off, Ontogeny
2.3. Sui Generis Human Cognition
2.4. Adaptations as Solutions to Ancestral Tasks
2.5. Reverse Engineering and Its Limits
2.6. The “Just-So” Story of the Self
2.7. The Mystery Tale of Language
2.8. Evolutionary “By-products”
2.9. Is the Big Brain Just a Spandrel Maker?
2.10. Evolutionary Psychology: A Tentative Research Paradigm
2.11. Summary: The Mindless Agent
3 God’s Creation: Evolutionary Origins of the Supernatural
3.1. Souls and Spirits in Dreams and Shadows
3.2. Modularity and Domain Specificity
3.3. Agency
3.4. The Natural Domain of Agency: Evidence from Infant Development
3.5. Telic Structures and the Tragedy of Cognition
3.6. The Supernatural: Agency’s Cultural Domain
3.7. Attachment Theory: Are Deities but Parental Surrogates? The Devil They Are
3.8. Summary: Supernatural Agency Is an Evolutionary By-product, Trip-Wired by Predator-Protector-Prey Detection Schema
PART II: ABSURD COMMITMENTS
4 Counterintuitive Worlds: The Mostly Mundane Nature of Religious Belief
4.1. Natural and Supernatural Causality
4.2. Mythical Episodes
4.3. Cultural Representations
4.4. Relevance and Truth: Why Cod’s Word Cannot Be Disconfirmed
4.5. Quasi Propositions
4.6. Counterintuitions
4.7. Memorability for Minimally Counterintuitive Beliefs and Belief Sets
4.8. Displaying Truth: Metarepresenting Supernatural Worlds
4.9. Summary: Making Possible Logically Impossible Worlds
5 The Sense of Sacrifice: Culture, Communication, and Commitment
5.1. Sacrifice: A Nonrecuperable Cost
5.2. Altruism: Cooperating to Compete
5.3. Fundamentalist Intolerance of Other “Species”
5.4. Syncretism, Social Competition, and Symbolic Inversion
5.5. Social and Supernatural Hierarchy
5.6. The Evolutionary Rationality of Unreasonable Self-Sacrifice
5.7. Sincere Self-Deception: Vengeance and Love
5.8. Ceremonial Mediation, Magic, and Divination
5.9. Summary: Religion’s Enduring Embrace
PART III: RITUAL PASSIONS
6 Ritual and Revelation: The Emotional Mind
6.1. Remembering Rituals: Doctrines and Images
6.2. Some Problems: Liturgy Isn’t Logical, Frequent Arousal Isn’t Rare
6.3. Schemas and Encoding Specificity: Episodic versus Semantic Memory
6.4. Affecting Memories
6.5. Ceremonially Manipulating Memory’s Evolutionary Imperatives
6.6. Spirit Possession, Sudden Conversion, Mystical Experience: Ritual Resolution without Rehearsal
6.7. Routine Ritual: Rehearsal with Only the Promise of Resolution
6.8. Summary: Ritual and Revelation: Extraordinary Displays of Ordinary Means
7 Waves of Passion: The Neuropsychology of Religion
7.1. Neurobiological Evidence: The Amygdala and Stress Modulation
7.2. Adrenaline-Activating Death Scenes Heighten Religiosity: An Experiment
7.3. Neurotheology: Science and Moonshine
7.4. A “God Module” in the Temporal Lobe? Not Likely
7.5. Religion and Psychopathology: Epilepsy, Schizophrenia, Autism
7.6. Summary: Mystical Episodes Inspire New Religions, but Don’t Make Religion
PART IV: MINDBLIND THEORIES
8 Culture without Mind: Sociobiology and Group Selection
8.1. Sociobiology, or Mystical Materialism
8.2. Are Norms Units of Cultural Evolution?
8.3. Emulation, Display, and Social Stabilization
8.4. Functionalism Rules Croup Selection
8.5. Leapfrogging the Mind
8.6. Nebulous Norms
8.7. Group Selection in Biology: A Notational Variant of Inclusive Fitness
8.8. Case Studies of Human Group Selection? Hardly
8.9. Cultural Epidemiology: A Garden Experiment in the Maya Lowlands
8.10. The Spirit of the Commons
8.11. Belief Systems as Group Evolutionary Strategies? Don’t Believe It
8.12. Summary: Norms and Group-Level Traits Are Notional, Not Natural, Kinds
9 The Trouble with Memes: Inference versus Imitation in Cultural Creation
9.1. Memes Are Nonbiological but Strictly Darwinian
9.2. What Is Unique about Memes?
9.3. Brain and Mind Building
9.4. Good and Bad Memes
9.5. Mindblind Memetics
9.6. The Multimodular Mind: Evidence for an Alternative
9.7. No Replication without Imitation, Therefore No Replication
9.8. Commandments Don’t Command and Religion Doesn’t Reproduce
9.9. Imitation versus Inference
9.10. Summary: Cognitive Constraints on Culture
10 Conclusion: Why Religion Seems Here to Stay
10.1. Religions are costly, hard-to-fake commitments to counterintuitive worlds
10.2. Religions aren’t adaptations but do conform to an evolutionary landscape
10.3. Supernatural agents arise by cultural manipulation of stimuli in the natural domain of folkpsychology, which evolved trip-wired to detect animate agents
10.4. Metarepresentation allows moral deception but also enables one to imagine supernatural worlds that finesse modular expectations so as to parry the problem
10.5. Emotionally motivated self-sacrifice to the supernatural stabilizes in-group moral order, inspiring competition with out-groups and so creating new religious forms
10.6. Existential anxieties (e.g., death) motivate religious belief and practice, so only emotional assuaging of such anxieties—never reason alone—validates religion
10.7. Neurobiological comparisons of mystical states (e.g., trance) to pathological states (schizophrenia, epilepsy) underplay agency and prefrontal cortical activity
10.8. Sociobiology (unknown genes direct religious behaviors) and group selection theory (religious cultures are superorganisms) ignore minds as causes of religion
10.9. Religious notions don’t replicate as memes imitated in host minds but recreate across minds through inferences and evocations driven by modular constraints
10.10. Secular Science and Religion: Coexistence or a Zero-Sum Game?
Notes
References
Index
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