Atran & Norenzayan/Religion's Evolutionary Landscape: BBS Call for Commentators

Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article Religion's Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion by Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Atran-12172002/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html (please note that this list is being updated) If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= ** IMPORTANT ** ======================================================================= To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would anticipate commenting upon. (Please note that we only request expertise information in order to simplify the selection process.) Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation, indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list, which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. ======================================================================= ======================================================================= Religion's Evolutionary Landscape: Counterintuition, Commitment, Compassion, Communion Scott Atran University of Michigan Ara Norenzayan University of British Columbia ABSTRACT: Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an "Innate Releasing Mechanism," or "agency detector," whose proper (naturally-selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims. KEYWORDS: Agency, Death anxiety, Evolution, Folkpsychology, Maya, Memory, Metarepresentation, Morality, Religion, Supernatural http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Atran-12172002/Referees/ ======================================================================= ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Jeffrey Gray - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------