Adam Barnett
The Psychology and Cultural Evolution of Religion Predicts Bias in Philosophy of Religion
“What is the first business of philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows.” —Epictetus, Discourses, Book 2, Ch. 17.
Ara Norenzayan and Joshua Knobe on “The Mind Report”
Ara Norenzayan (UBC) and Joshua Knobe (Yale) were recently on Bloggingheads.tv, talking about the public perception of atheists.
Overcoming Interdisciplinary Stalemates
A previous generation of historians appears to have grand, often grandiose, ways of describing the Lisbon Earthquake. It “destroyed a firmly fixed image of the divine order on earth” (Seligo 1958, 21), marked “the end of optimism” (McKendrick 1974, 22), “struck the Western world like a thunderbolt, and forever transformed the philosophy of human thought” (Bestermann […]
On Subsistence and the Evolution of Religion
In their recent article, Peoples and Marlowe (PM) contribute another piece in the puzzle of the emergence of moralistic Big Gods. Using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, PM demonstrate that commitment to High Moral Cop-Gods correlates with pastoralism. While some have found a relationship between High Gods and water shortage (e.g., Roes and Raymond […]
Database Planning
On November 14-15 the database working group, consisting of Edward Slingerland, Harvey Whitehouse, Peter Turchin, Mark Collard, and Pieter Francois met on the U Conn campus in Storrs, CT, for an intense, 2-day meeting to finalize the database structure and prioritize goals for the first year. UBC’s database expert, Maria Robinson, flew in to […]
Joshua Knobe – Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist
Part of the Cognitive Science of Morality seminar series, 2012. People sometimes wonder what an individual is like ‘deep down’ or ‘at her core.’ In short, it seems that people are drawn to an essentialist picture of the self. But how exactly do they figure out which aspects of the self counts as the essence […]
Jonathan Haidt – The Groupish Gene
Part of the Cognitive Science of Morality seminar series, 2012. For nearly 50 years scientists have generally agreed that selfish genes shaped human nature to be mostly selfish, with exceptions made toward kin, partners in reciprocity, and a few other cases. Group selection was banished from respectable discourse. But recent findings from multiple fields have […]
Joe Henrich on “This View of Life”
Are Taboos Adaptive? Evidence from the Island of Fiji from This View of Life.
Ara Norenzayan on NPR
Ara was recently featured in a piece on National Public Radio.