New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


  Click on: http://www.birot.hu/arc//view.php?arc=1

  Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
  Title: Acting as a Way of Thinking
  Category: conference paper
  Length:
  Keywords: Ritual, Divination, Embodied Cognition, Performance

  Abstract:    Performance is a central factor in religions around the world,
especially religious ritual. This has been duly noted in anthropological
treatments. The basic question which has baffled anthropologists, is why perform
at all? Why not just say it? The traditional textual paradigm has answered it
with a focus on the meaning or “utterances” produced in ritual, thus reducing
ritual to just another “code” among others that express a symbolic meaning
derived from the cultural system. This does not explain why it should be
performed, since it is just another way of speaking.
     I would like to suggest that part of the explanatory gap of why rituals are
performed as opposed to read or spoken, can be filled by realising that ritual
performance also achieves cognitive effects, that could not have been achieved
through mere talking. This will be done by considering the case of the most
obviously information-procesing type of ritual : divinatory ritual, whose main
function is to produce knowledge of what is hidden. By integrating the new
insights it can hopefully shed new light on the performative processes involved
in religious ritual.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


  Click on: http://www.csr-arc.com//view.php?arc=2

  Author(s): Anders Lisdorf
  Title: The conflict over Cicero\'s house: an analysis of the ritual element in
De Domo Sua
  Category: published article
  Length:
  Keywords: Ritual, Roman Religion

  Abstract: According to the Romans themselves ritual was at the heart of their
culture.
Strangely, this centrality of ritual has not been matched by a corresponding
sensitivity
to how ritual was to be interpreted. Ritual has most often been viewed as
an empty formalism devoid of any true belief. It is argued in this article that
this
view of ritual is an ethnocentric construct stemming from a Christian conception
of belief, which does not adequately account for the peculiarities of ritual
based
religions. Taking the seemingly obscure and little studied case of the conflict
over Cicero’s house as a case, it is argued that E. Thomas Lawson’s
and Robert
N. McCauley’s ritual theory might help to overcome this misconception of
ritual.
This enables us to see how Cicero explicates implicit beliefs entailed by the
ritual
actions. Ultimately the evidence seems to support the reverse interpretation:
that ritual was taken very seriously.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Gabriel Levy
  Title: Religious “Cognition”: Between Integrated Physiology and
Network
  Category: published article
  Length: 16
  Keywords: Religion; Davidson; Boyer; Sperber; Triangulation; Networks

  Abstract: Recent scholarship in the cognitive science of religion
would have us believe that we are somewhere close to a
cognitive explanation of religion. I argue that it will take us a step even
closer if we give up on the project of reductive
psychology. Recent cognitive approaches to religion are
excessively psychological, focusing primarily on the brains of
individual subjects. Since the brain develops in the context of
non-cognitive physiological and network processes, and
concepts and actions in the world depend on non-cognitive
physiological and network processes, we can say that these
processes are just as important to understanding religion as those
processes that take place in individual heads.
I thus argue that any ‘bottom-up’ approach must look to
the field of integrated physiology, while any ‘top-down’
approach must look to pragmatism. An individual’s cognitive
capacity for religion may only be understood in relation to the
physiological systems, notably the endocrine system, and in light
of a sophisticated network theory. After some introductory
remarks, I describe in detail some of the physiological
constraints on cognition. This domain very loosely corresponds
to what Searle, following John Dewey calls “background”. I
then describe the notion of triangulation, which corresponds to
Searle’s “network” and Dewey’s
“environment”. The last section lays out some of the implications of
the argument for
religion.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Gabriel Levy
  Title: The Biblical polemic against divination in light of the domestication of
folk psychology
  Category: book
  Length: 30
  Keywords: Literacy; Relevance; RT; Davidson; Writing; Language; Hebrew Bible;
Prophecy

  Abstract: This paper proposes that the polemic against divination in the Hebrew
Bible should be understood in the context of the invention of writing.  The
polemic was a result of reflection on folk psychology made possible by robust
literacy.  The first part of this paper presents some background about the
production of scrolls and the effects of literacy.  I then use the communication
theories of Wilson, Sperber, and Davidson to generate five communicative
principles in the domain of folk psychology, which I argue change in the context
of ‘advanced’ literacy.  The effects of writing on the communicative
principles are understood in terms of the differences between divination and
prophecy.  I argue for a new form of Biblical criticism that I term cognitive
criticism.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Anders Lisdorf
  Title: The spread of non-natural concepts - evidence from the Roman prodigy
lists
  Category: published article
  Length: 23
  Keywords: Counter-intuitive, transmission, history, Roman religion

  Abstract: Pascal Boyer, Justin Barret and associates have recently developed
precise and testable
hypotheses about what makes a concept attention-demanding, easier to recall and
therefore
has increased probability of being transmitted. Two theses are tested: 1) that
all else being
equal counterintuitive concepts are better remembered than bizarre, and bizarre
better than
common; 2) that counterintuitive concepts containing certain templates, which
involve the
activation of theory of mind expectations should have greater success. The
research so far
has been in controlled experiments, but it should be possible to test the theses
“in the
wild”. The evidence from the roman prodigy reports offers us such a
possibility. It also
enables us to check for variation across time, which hasn’t been done
before. Thesis 1)
is conŽ rmed, but not thesis 2). It is argued however that this is not a disconŽ
rmation of
Boyer’s general thesis. By considering the context it is argued that it
does not disconŽrm
the basic assumption of the theory. The evidence could suggest that when the
“social
inferential potential” of templates activating TOM expectations is not
used it has no
transmission advantage. It is also argued that the speciŽ c distribution shows
that what
is normally considered local cultural factors, have a real effect on what is
transmitted.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Anders Lisdorf
  Title: What\'s HIDD\'n in the HADD? - A Cognitive Conjuring Trick?
  Category: none
  Length: 14
  Keywords: HADD, Theory of Mind, Superhuman Agents, Gods

  Abstract: The consensus in the cognitive study of religion is that some sort of
hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the origin and
spread of beliefs in superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors among
human populations. While it is expressed differently in different authors, they
all agree that some sort of hyperactive agency detection is a basic function of
human cognition, which is what Justin Barrett has called the Hyperactive Agency
Detection Device or HADD. But what is it? And isn’t it a bit much to ask
of one cognitive function to be the origin of religious belief? Problems arise
when we begin to consider the neural basis: It is not there, or more precisely
it doesn’t work that way. Like the magician pulling rabbits from the hat
this explanation may be a “self”-conjuring trick, only for us the
hat is a HADD and the rabbits are superhuman agents (no reference to
were-rabbits intended). This paper will try to point to a more parsimonious
explanation.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
  Title: If a dog pricks up its ears like a wolf, it is a bad sign…
  Category: book
  Length: 17
  Keywords: omens; Ruth Millikan; sign

  Abstract: This article is a theoretical and philosophical investigation of why
omens are known in virtually all human cultures.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Westh, Peter
  Title: Anthropomorphism in God concepts: The role of narrative
  Category: conference paper
  Length: 22
  Keywords: anthropomorphism; HADD; intuitive ontology; agency; gods; religion;
superhuman agents; Theory of Mind; theological correctness; story comprehension;
narrative

  Abstract: There is an emerging consensus among current, cognitive theories of
religion that the detection and representation of intentional agents and their
actions are fundamental to religion. By no means a monolithic theory, this is an
argument with several separate lines of reasoning, and several different kinds
of empirical evidence to support it. This essay focuses specifically on the
notion that people tend to spontaneously make inferences about gods  based on
intuitive, ontological assumptions, and on one of the main pieces of evidence
that is cited to support it, the narrative comprehension experiments conducted
by psychologists Justin L. Barrett and Frank C. Keil. It is argued that the
experimental data in fact do not support the conclusions that have been drawn
from them.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
  Title: Why the Ouija Board Seemed to Take on a Personality - The Effect of
Ritual Action on the Evaluation of Credibility of Divination
  Category: pre-print
  Length: 31
  Keywords: ritual; divination; credibility

  Abstract: How can divination be perceived to give credible information about
matters not otherwise available to normal human perception? While divination
exists in all known cultures in the world nothing much is know about how
divinatory information is represented. In this article it is investigated why
information acquired through divination comes to be regarded as credible. One
thing universally true of divination is that it employs ritual action to produce
information. It is argued that in ritual a displacement of intention takes place
which produces a deficiency in the intentional structure of the action. A hidden
or counter-intuitive agent is inferred in a repair process as the source of the
divinatory information. Previous research has shown that counter-intuitive
agents are not usually represented as having the same epistemic restrictions as
normal humans, which would account for why they could give credible information
about matters hidden to normal human perception. An experiment showed that
participants rated divinatory information obtained through ritual action as
significantly more credible than if it were obtained through normal intention
action. While it may be some other character of ritual action than the inference
of agency that produces the credibility of the information, it was investigated
whether divination was sensitive to differences in prestige in the god
associated with the divination technique. The results showed that participants
preferred the divination techniques associated with a high prestige god to that
of a low prestige god. This indicates that ritual action stimulates inference of
a counter-intuitive agent as the source of information, which would account for
the

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Markusson, Gudmundur Ingi
  Title: The Blank Spandrels of Dawkins’ Cathedral—the Origins of
Religion in The God Delusion
  Category: manuscript
  Length: 8
  Keywords: Dawkins; religion; spandrels; by-product; mind; children; blank
slate; memes; origins; evolution

  Abstract: While Dawkins embraces the spandrel position which dominates the CSR
(i.e. that religion is a by-product of cognitive mechanisms that evolution has
devised for other purposes) he still retains a view of the child’s mind as
general purpose, learning device or meme copier, to all intents and purposes a
blank slate. In short, Dawkins’ hypothesis is that religion is a
by-product of childish gullibility. In my view, superimposing a blank slate upon
the multimodal mind of evolutionary psychology in this way makes Dawkins’
account incoherent. Further, his hypothesis cannot account for universal aspects
of religion. Finally, the role of memetics in Dawkins’ account is
criticised.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Saler, Benson; Ziegler, Charles A.
  Title: Atheism and the Apotheosis of Agency
  Category: published article
  Length: 34
  Keywords: theism; atheism; cognition; biological factors; William.S.
Bainbridge; Justin L. Barrett

  Abstract: Enlarging on Justin Barrett\'s accounts of theism and atheism, this
paper suggests that a hypothesized heritable biological factor plays a role in
explaining distributions of theism and atheism across populations. Genetic
variability in populations, it is argued, may give rise to differences in the
sensitivity of the \"hypersensitive agency detection device\" (HADD).

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
  Title: The Effect of Prestige and Expertise on Perceptions of Credibility of
Communication - A Short Survey of Relevant Research
  Category: note, discussion paper
  Length: 6
  Keywords: prestige; credibility; belief; expertise

  Abstract: The note is a smal survey of relevant literature, which concludes
that the prestige of a communicator is the most important predictor of
creibility of second hand information. This is folowed by expertise as the
second most important.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Czachesz, István
  Title: The Emergence of Early Christian Religion: Toward a Naturalistic
Approach
  Category: pre-print
  Length: 22
  Keywords: Christianity; dynamic systems; flocking; emergence; networks;
embodied cognition; recursiveness

  Abstract: This article assesses some algorithmic models of social behavior for
understanding religiosity and look for ways of applying such models to the
emergence of early Christian religion. In dynamical systems, the behavior of the
whole is more than a sum of the behavior of the parts. In other words, the
system displays emergent qualities. In this article I propose ways to look at
religion—and specifically early Christianity—from this perspective.
In particular, I put forward the hypothesis that religious ideas emerge as a
necessary consequence of the sophisticated \"flocking\" rules of human
societies.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Czachesz, István
  Title: The Transmission of Early Christian Thought: Toward a Cognitive
Psychological Model
  Category: pre-print
  Length: 27
  Keywords: transmission; Christianity; orality; memory; serial recall;
epidemiology; innovation; cognitive relevance hypothesis; optimal transmission
hypothesis

  Abstract: This article uses current developments in cognitive science to
explore the emergence of early Christian religion. In particular, it considers
Sperber\'s epidemiology model, Rubin\'s serial recall model, ritual form theory,
and Boyer\'s theory of religious concepts for understanding the transmission of
early Christian thought. Whereas Sperber\'s approach focuses on ideas (internal
representations), Rubin concentrates on the transmission of texts (public
representations). Two preliminary hypotheses are put forward in an attempt to
apply cognitive scientific research the formative Christianity: the cognitive
relevance hypothesis about core christological concepts, and the optimal
transmission hypothesis addressing the balance of tradition and conceptual
innovation.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Czachesz, István
  Title: Early Christian Views on Jesus\' Resurrection: Toward a Cognitive
Psychological Interpretation
  Category: pre-print
  Length: 18
  Keywords: resurrection; Jesus; counter-intuitive; agency; ebionites; docetics

  Abstract: This article examines the cognitive capacities of the human mind that
underlie the con¬cept of Jesus’ resurrection. The first part of the
article surveys some alternative tradi¬tions about Jesus\' death and
resurrection in early Christian thought. In the second part, the relevant
cognitive structures will be discussed. We will examine, in particular, how the
human mind deals with agency, intentionality, and counterintuitiveness. The
final part of the study will interpret the idea of the resurrected Jesus in the
light of these cognitive capacities and give an explanation of the long-term
success of the canonical story.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Czachesz, István
  Title: Early Christian Views on Jesus\' Resurrection: Toward a Cognitive
Psychological Interpretation
  Category: pre-print
  Length: 18
  Keywords: resurrection; Jesus; counter-intuitive; agency; ebionites; docetics

  Abstract: This article examines the cognitive capacities of the human mind that
underlie the concept of Jesus’ resurrection. The first part of the article
surveys some alternative traditions about Jesus\' death and resurrection in
early Christian thought. In the second part, the relevant cognitive structures
will be discussed. We will examine, in particular, how the human mind deals with
agency, intentionality, and counterintuitiveness. The final part of the study
will interpret the idea of the resurrected Jesus in the light of these cognitive
capacities and give an explanation of the long-term success of the canonical
story.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Taves, Ann
  Title: Where (fragmented) selves meet cultures: Theorising spirit possession
  Category: published article
  Length:
  Keywords: hypnosis; dissociation; mediums; spirit possession; spiritualism;
suggestion; involuntary experience

  Abstract: Cognitive theories of religious experience, while helpful in
explaining some aspects of spirit possession, do not provide a means of
accounting for the experience of mediums whose ordinary selves are `absent\'
during possession rituals. Using the late nineteenth century medium, Mrs Piper,
as a case study, I argue that hypnosis provides a means of inducing involuntary
experiences similar to those experienced by possessed persons, and that models
of how hypnosis works in both hypnotic `virtuosos\' and ordinary subjects can be
utilised in thinking theoretically about involuntary experiences in religious
contexts. In conclusion, I suggest that phenomena of interest to scholars of
religion might be subsumed under the heading `auto-suggestive phenomena\' and
contrasted with the `hetero-suggestive phenomena\' associated with hypnosis
proper and the `autosuggestive disorders\' associated with hysteria in the
nineteenth century, and conversion and dissociative disorders in the twentieth
century.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Biro, Tamas
  Title: Is Judaism Boring? The role of symbols in “imagistic” Jewish
movements in the nineteenth century
  Category: lecture handout, minor stuff
  Length: 19
  Keywords: Judaism; ritual; McCauley and Lawson\'s model; tedium; networks;
Optimality Theory; spin glasses

  Abstract: Slightly reformulating and then applying the McCauley-Lawson model to
Judaism predicts that traditional Judaism is a “boring” system of
rites. This is why the new streams emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century – Chassidism and the Yeshiva movement, as well as reform and
orthodoxy – can be also viewed as attempts to reach a more balanced
systems, besides their well-accepted social-historical explanations.

It will be, however, demonstrated that not in every case is a balanced system
achieved through the introduction of special-agent rituals, as McCauley and
Lawson propose – in fact, this solution is only typical to Chassidism.
Other streams make use of different techniques, and the role of symbols will be
emphasised in creating these new movements. Additionally, the role of symbols
will be put into a network theoretical context in two different ways: the social
network and the network of concepts and symbols.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Adam, R. J.
  Title: Fundamentalism: A Synthesis of Cognitive and Cultural Perspectives
  Category: published article
  Length: 10
  Keywords: fundamentalism; cognitive development; culture; Piaget; Fowler;
religious development

  Abstract: This article proposes a synthesis of cultural and cognitive
perspectives on religious fundamentalism. Cultural perspectives provide insights
into the contents of fundamentalisms in socio-historical contexts. Cognitive
perspectives provide insights
into the cognitive operations that contribute to a fundamentalist mentality. A
synthesis of the two perspectives reveals significant interactions between
cultural contents and cognitive operations. I apply a neo-Piagetian
interactionist theory of cognitive development to engage the cultural content of
religious fundamentalisms. I provide illustrative examples of cultural contents
from Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms that reflect and perpetuate a
particular type of cognitive structure. The synthesis contributes to the
understanding and engagement of religious fundamentalism.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Czachesz, István
  Title: Magic and Mind: Toward a New Cognitive Theory of Magic, With Special
Attention to the Canonical and Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles
  Category: pre-print
  Length: 29
  Keywords: magic; counter-intuitive; superstitious conditioning; variable
reinforcement; Bernoulli game

  Abstract: This study establishes a new cognitive scientific theory of magic and
connect such theorizing with the evaluation of instances of magical practice in
the canonical and apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The first part of the article
addresses the hitherto neglected difference and inter-action between magical
competence and magical performance. The second part deals with explanatory
mechanisms that underlie magical performance. In third part, I suggest that
magical manipulations arise from operant conditioning. The final part summarises
my new theory of magic.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Cohen, Emma
  Title: The Mind Possessed: The cognition of spirit possession in an
Afro-Brazilian religious tradition.
  Category: book
  Length: 256
  Keywords: Psychology, religious; Spirit possession - Brazil; Afro-Brazilian
cults

  Abstract: The cognitive science of religion has made a persuasive case for the
view that a number of different psychological systems are involved in the
construction and transmission of notions of extranatural agency such as deities
and spirits. Until now this work has been based largely on findings in
experimental psychology, illustrated mainly with hypothetical or anecdotal
examples. In The Mind Possessed , Emma Cohen considers how the psychological
systems undergirding spirit concepts are activated in real-world settings.
Spirit possession practices have long had a magnetizing effect on academic
researchers but there have been few, if any, satisfactory theoretical treatments
of spirit possession that attempt to account for its emergence and spread
globally. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during eighteen months of
fieldwork in Belem, northern Brazil, Cohen combines fine-grained descriptions
and analyses of mediumistic activities in an Afro-Brazilian cult house with a
scientifically-grounded explanation for the emergence and spread of ideas about
spirits, possession and healing.
Cohen shows why spirit possession and its associated activities are inherently
attention-grabbing. Making a radical departure from traditional anthropological,
medicalist and sociological analyses, she argues that a cognitive approach
offers more precise and testable hypotheses concerning the spread and appeal of
spirit concepts and possession activities.
This timely book presents new lines of enquiry for the cognitive science of
religion (a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship) and
challenges the theoretical frameworks within which spirit possession practices
have traditionally been understood.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
  Title: The Dissemination of Divination in the Roman Republic - A Cognitive
Approach
  Category: dissertation
  Length: 309
  Keywords: divination; intention; Roman religion; ritualization; omen

  Abstract: The dissertation constructs a model of how divination is represented
in the cognitive system. The model is expanded to include ecological and social
factors. The result is a list of factors stipulated to promote the transmission
of divination in a population.

An empirical investigation of all known divination practices is carried out with
respect to the factors stipulated to be of importance in the dissemination of
divination. On the basis of this investigation it is possible to see how the
cognitive, ecological and social factors relate to each other and their
respective importance.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Westh, Peter
  Title: Iluminator of the wide earth; Unbribable judge; Strong weapon of the
Gods: Intuitive ontology and divine epithets in Assyro-Babylonian religious
texts
  Category: manuscript
  Length: 30
  Keywords: Boyer; anthropomorphism; counter-intuitive; culture; gods; history;
intuitive ontology; religious language; literacy; superhuman agents.

  Abstract: A characteristic feature of Assyro-Babylonian religion was the
repeated use of conventionalized phrases to address and describe the gods.
Often, religious texts such as prayers and ritual incantations consisted of
little more than the heaping up of such epithets. If the gods were indeed
culturally postulated superhuman agents, divine epithets were the actual
cultural postulates being made regarding them.

This paper presents the results from a survey of divine epithets applied to the
deity Shamash in a large corpus of Assyro-Babylonian  religious texts. The
epithets are categorized according to their conceptual content and underlying
ontology, and a quantitative analysis of their use and distribution within the
corpus is performed. On this background, some of the predictions made by Pascal
Boyer regarding the role of evolved, intuitive ontologies in the formation and
transmission of religious concepts, are discussed. It is concluded that while
Assyro-Babylonian concepts of the divine do seem to fall rather neatly into the
basic ontological domains proposed by Boyer, violations of intutive ontological
assumptions do not seem to play the prominent role that his theory predicts.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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  Author(s): Rosset, Evelyn
  Title: It\'s no accident: Our bias for intentional explanations
  Category: published article
  Length: 10
  Keywords: intentionality; intentional explanation; explanatory biases;
heuristics and biases; social cognition; development; action perception

  Abstract: Three studies tested the idea that our analyses of human behavior are
guided by an "intentionality bias," an implicit bias where all actions are
judged to be intentional by default. In Study 1 participants read a series of
sentences describing actions that can be done either on purpose or by accident
(e.g., "He set the house on fire") and had to decide which interpretation best
characterized the action. To tap people's initial interpretation, half the
participants made their judgments under speeded conditions; this group judged
significantly more sentences to be intentional. Study 2 found that when asked
for spontaneous descriptions of the ambiguous actions used in Study 1 (and thus
not explicitly reminded of the accidental interpretation), participants provided
significantly more intentional interpretations, even with prototypically
accidental actions (e.g., "She broke the vase"). Study 3 examined whether more
processing is involved in deciding that something is unintentional (and thus
overriding an initial intentional interpretation) than in deciding that
something is unpleasant (where there is presumably no initial "pleasant"
interpretation). Participants were asked to judge a series of 12 sentences on
one of two dimensions: intentional/unintentional (experimental group) or
pleasant/unpleasant (control group). People in the experimental group remembered
more unintentional sentences than people in the control group. Findings across
the three studies suggest that adults have an implicit bias to infer intention
in all behavior. This research has important implications both in terms of
theory (e.g., dual-process model for intentional reasoning), and practice (e.g.,
treating aggression, legal judgments).


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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


  Click on: http://www.csr-arc.com//view.php?arc=24

  Author(s): Kelemen, Deborah; Rosset, Evelyn
  Title: The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults
  Category: published article
  Length: 6
  Keywords: teleology; explanation; function; design

  Abstract: Research has found that children possess a broad bias in favor of
teleological -- or purpose-based -- explanations of natural phenomena. The
current two experiments explored whether adults implicitly possess a similar
bias. In Study 1, undergraduates judged a series
of statements as "good" (i.e., correct) or "bad" (i.e., incorrect) explanations
for why different phenomena occur. Judgments occurred in one of three
conditions: fast speeded, moderately
speeded, or unspeeded. Participants in speeded conditions judged significantly
more scientifically unwarranted teleological explanations as correct (e.g., "the
sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life"), but were not more error-prone
on control items (e.g.,
unwarranted physical explanations such as "hills form because floodwater
freezes"). Study 2 extended these findings by examining the relationship between
different aspects of
adults? "promiscuous teleology" and other variables such as scientific
knowledge, religious beliefs, and inhibitory control. Implications of these
findings for scientific literacy are discussed.

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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


  Click on: http://www.csr-arc.com//view.php?arc=25

  Author(s): Ernandes, M.; Winkelman, M.
  Title: Theopoiesis or The Production of \\
  Category: manuscript
  Length: 66
  Keywords: evolution; Biological factors; triune brain; superhuman agents;
theism

  Abstract: Religious ideas have the peculiarity of being universal, so we may
suspect yhat they have some kind of genetic basis, or that religion may be
rooted in genetic predisposition, that operates through the development of
encephalic structures. MacLean elaborated the “Triune Brain” model, and located
in it three principal phylogenetic structures, termed as R-complex, Limbic
System and Neomammalian brain. The R-complex is fundamental for genetically
constituted behaviors as imprinting, or forming social hierarchies.
In a behavioral sense, religious activities consist in submissive displays
performed to appease a dominant individual. According to evolutionary
psychology, all human behaviors are products of internal mechanisms, in
conjunction with inputs that trigger their activation.
In this paper we indicate the acquisition of the consciousness of own mortality
as the input, and in the action of R-complex on the Neocortex as the main
mechanism by which, in the human evolution, the “God” concept emerged.


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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


  Click on: http://www.csr-arc.com//view.php?arc=26

  Author(s): Ernandes, Michele
  Title: Neurobiology and Aztec Cannibalism: A First Encounter and Possible
Convergences.
  Category: note, discussion paper
  Length: 14
  Keywords: nutrition and religion; cannibalism; serotonin; triune brain

  Abstract: Neuronal synthesis of serotonin depends on the plasma “trp/Large
Neutral Amino Acids” ratio, because of competition made by LNAAs against
tryptophan for neuron access. “Trp/LNAAs” ratio value, in turn, tends to be
correlated with amino acid composition of the diet: So a low “trp/LNAAs” ratio
diet lowers brain serotonin synthesis. Serotonin deficiency involves several
behavioural consequences such as tendency towards aggressive behaviour, increase
of intraspecific competition, increase of magic thought or religious fanaticism.
Among cereals utilised for human feeding, maize has a very low “trp/LNAAs”
value.
Maize was firstly and largely utilized by Native American peoples: This is
particularly interesting in the study of the Aztec human sacrifice/cannibalism
complex. Historical data reveal that cannibalism occurred in period of the year
when maize dependence was greater, supporting the hypothesis of Ernandes and
co-workers (that is here reported) that serotonin deficiency among the Aztecs
might have accentuated their religious and aggressive behavior patterns on the
one hand, and on the other it might have led them, unconsciously, towards
anthropophagy in order to attenuate it (rising “trp/LNAAs” value by means of
human proteins) when it became too strong.


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New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


  Click on: http://www.csr-arc.com//view.php?arc=27

  Author(s): Pyysiäinen, Ilkka; Hauser, Marc
  Title: The origins of religion : evolved adaptation or by-product?
  Category: published article
  Length: 6
  Keywords: origins of religion; adaptation; by-product

  Abstract: Considerable debate has surrounded the question of the origins and
evolution of religion. One proposal views religion as an adaptation for
cooperation, while an alternative views religion as a by-product of evolved,
non-religious, cognitive functions. We critically evaluate each approach,
explore the link between religion and morality in particular, and argue that
recent empirical work in moral psychology provides stronger support for the
by-product approach. Specifically, despite differences in religious background,
individuals show no difference in the pattern of their moral judgments for
unfamiliar moral scenarios. These findings suggest that religion evolved from
pre-existing cognitive functions, but may have been subject to selection,
creating an adaptively designed system for solving the problem of cooperation.

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