The evolutionary and cognitive sciences have recently experienced an explosion of work on religion, cooperation, and morality, and in particular on their interrelationships. The emerging framework promises to re-energize these long-languishing topics by bringing a fully interdisciplinary approach to these topics that synthesizes the integrative rigor and precision of the evolutionary sciences with the depth of history and ethnography. The series will feature both leading researchers on these topics from Vancouver and experts from across the globe.
This year’s seminar series will be held at 5pm at Green College (except where noted):
the Green College Coach House
6201 Cecil Green Park Road, The University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
September 10th, 2012 – Buchanan A103 @ UBC 5 pm
David Sloan Wilson
Binghamton University
“Religion and Spirituality in the Context of Everyday Life”
Religion and spirituality are often discussed as “big” philosophical and scientific questions, but they also need to be understood in the context of everyday life. The small city of Binghamton, New York, includes almost 100 religious congregations, along with many non-churchgoers with their own religious/spiritual/secular beliefs. The city can be studied as a “cultural ecosystem” using the same theories and methods that are used to study biological ecosystems. This approach to religion and spirituality can be employed at other geographical locations and provides a new perspective on the “big” philosophical and scientific questions.
September 11th, 2012 – SFU Harbour Centre 7:30 pm
David Sloan Wilson
Binghamton University
“Using Evolution to Improve the Quality of Everyday Life”
Evolution is not only a theory that explains the diversity of life–it can also be used to improve the quality of everyday life. I will explain how Darwin’s theory provides a powerful public policy toolkit and provide examples ranging from empowering neighborhoods, to teaching at-risk students, to rethinking economics.
October 1st, 2012
Ara Norenzayan
UBC
“The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions”
I begin by addressing two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history, 1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among genetic strangers in the last twelve millenia, and 2) the cultural spread of prosocial religions during the same period. I argue that these two developments were fundamentally related. I explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by Big Moralizing Gods, credible displays of faith, and other psychological mechanisms that encourage social solidarity, promoted cooperation in large groups. This in turn heralded the emergence of vast prosocial religious groups, and in turn led to the cultural spread of their beliefs and practices. This theoretical synthesis is grounded in the idea that religious beliefs and practices arose as a non-adaptive evolutionary byproduct of ordinary cognitive functions of which some cultural variants were then recruited for prosocial functions in a cultural evolutionary process. This account reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and byproduct approaches to the evolutionary origins of religion, accounts for a variety of empirical observations that neither the byproduct nor adaptationist approaches by themselves have yet tackled, and generates novel predictions.
November 5th, 2012
David Rand
Harvard University
“Spontaneous giving and calculated greed: Intuitive cooperation in social dilemmas”
Cooperation is central to human social behavior. Choosing to cooperate, however, requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Why, then, are people often willing to cooperate, and how can the fundamentally selfish process of natural selection favor ‘altruistic’ cooperation? In this talk I explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual process framework: Are people predisposed toward selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control? Or are we intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favoring ‘rational’ self-interest? I will present data from the economic ‘Public Goods Game’ to investigate this issue, from both correlation and manipulation studies and using both college undergraduates and the more diverse subject pool offered by Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, while reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.
January 7th, 2013
Edward Slingerland
UBC
“The Evolution of Religion and Morality: An Interdisciplinary, Team-Based Approach”
Despite its ubiquity and centrality to human affairs, religion remains, from an academic perspective, one of the least studied and most poorly understood aspects of human behavior. This talk will introduce the theoretical background to a multi-million dollar, 6-year SSHRC Partnership Grant recently awarded to UBC to explore the cultural evolutionary roots of religion and morality, bringing together theorists of religion, philosophers, historians, linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, economists, biologists, and mathematicians to generate hypotheses concerning the evolutionary origins of religion and morality, and to test them with a variety of methods, including textual interpretation, qualitative historical analysis, quantification of historical data, ethnographic observation, controlled laboratory experiments and mathematical modeling. This initiative is founded on the conviction that effectively answering the question of what religion is, and why it plays such a ubiquitous role in human existence, requires going beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries; most generally, it also aims to serve as a model for innovative partnerships that bridge scientific and humanistic training and research, thereby helping to encourage similar interdisciplinary collaborations in the future.
February 4th, 2013
Ann Taves
University of California Santa Barbara
“Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of ‘Religion’”
Researchers have not yet done an adequate job of reverse engineering the complex cultural concepts of religion and spirituality in a way that allows scientists to operationalize component parts and historians of religion to consider how the component parts have been synthesized into larger socio-cultural wholes. Doing so involves two steps: (1) distinguishing between (a) the basic cognitive schemas (e.g., part/whole, path, system, event) that structure a given definition and (b) the specific features used to characterize the basic schemas as “religious” or “sacred” and (2) disaggregating these specific features into more basic cognitive processes that scientists can operationalize and that historians can analyze in situ as people mix and match then to create what we as researchers think of as religion or spirituality.
March 4th, 2013
Paul Bloom
“There is nothing special about religion”
Most people believe in deities, immaterial souls, life after death, and the divine creation of humans and other animals. Research from developmental psychology (including the study of babies) and social psychology supports a minimalist theory of why we have such beliefs, which is that they emerge from the very same processes that give rise to beliefs in other domains, such as science and politics. Finally, although it is often argued that religious beliefs have great moral significance, there is little evidence in support of this view. Overall, religious beliefs just aren’t that special.