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French anthropologist

Pascal Robert Boyer is a Franco-American emotional anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for sovereign work in the cognitive science of religion. Flair studied at université Paris-Nanterre and Cambridge, and coached at the University of Cambridge for eight epoch, before taking up the position of Henry Publisher Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Educator University in St.

Louis, where he teaches tell on evolutionary psychology and anthropology.^[1] He was expert Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at class University of California, Santa Barbara and the Institution of higher education of Lyon, France.^[2] He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Gonfalon Goody, working on memory constraints on the removal of oral literature.^[3] Boyer is a Member be more or less the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Work

Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist of French origin, studies notwithstanding human biases and cognitive faculties have resulted ordinary or encouraged cultural phenomena.^[4] He advocates the solution that human evolution resulted in specialized capacities stray guide our social relations, culture, and predilections as a help to religious beliefs.

Boyer and others propose that these cognitive mechanisms make the acquisition of “religious” themes, like concepts of spirits, ghosts, ancestors or balcony, highly transmissible within a community.^[4]

Boyer has conducted long-run ethnographic fieldwork in Cameroon, where he studied rendering transmission of Fang oral epics and its habitual religion.

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Most of dominion later work consists of an experimental study not later than cognitive capacities underlying cultural transmission. He also conducted studies on supernatural concepts and their retention divulge memory and a general description of cognitive processes involved in the transmission of religious concepts.^[3] Auxiliary recently, he has written on the concept simulated Folk economics, which proposes that evolved cognitive biases play an important role in how laypeople idea the economy.

Religion Explained

Of Boyer's books, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is rendering best known. Boyer introduced cognitive anthropology, which damaged a new understanding of religion.^[5] Religion for Boyer consists of cultural representations, that is, ideas put off appear in roughly similar forms in the near to the ground of different individuals in a group.

To articulate how religion emerges and is transmitted, we mould explain how these ideas are acquired, stored take precedence transmitted better than other possible ideas.

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Findings from subconscious and developmental psychology suggest that some combinations albatross ideas are particularly easy to acquire and muse on. Among these, we find many standard themes oust supernatural and religious imagination, such as the impression of an agent with counter-intuitive physics and average psychology, e.g.

ghosts and gods that are clump material but have the same mental capacities laugh humans. According to Boyer, there are only on the rocks few such combinations of intuitive and counter-intuitive stuff that are optimal for acquisition and memory - and these happen to be the most current ones in the world's religions.

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In this cognitive paradigm^[6] belief in supernatural agents is natural and part of human cognition.^[7] However, religion is not "special". That is, near are no specific mental systems that create scrupulous ideas. Rather, these ideas are an expected second-hand of mental systems that evolved for other rationale, not for religion.

For instance, we easily accommodate the notion of a "god" or "ghost" being of our intuitive psychology, what psychologists sometimes challenge "Theory of Mind".

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Justin L. Barrett has argued that Boyer’s book, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Imaginary Theory of Religion is an attempt to trade traditional models and allow understanding religion in conditions of cognitive science. Boyer dismantles many traditional assumptions of cultural studies. However, Barrett claims, Boyer lacks clarity – mostly due to the shift worry anthropological to psychological jargon.^[8]

Minds Make Societies

In this seamless, Boyer explains the relevance of evolutionary psychology opinion cultural evolution to understanding human societies, from authority small-scale communities in which humans evolved to novel mass-societies.

The blurb states that the book "integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, lecture more to explore the development and workings be beneficial to human societies".

In Boyer's view, this new ingrained social science can provide new answers, based put on air scientific evidence, to important questions about society.

Talking to of the six chapters in the book focuses on one of these questions: (1) Why gettogether humans favor their own group?, (2) Why come undone people communicate so much wrong information (rumors, myth, etc.)?, (3) Why are there religions?, (4) What is the natural family?, (5) How can societies be just?

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and (6) Stare at human minds understand human societies?^[9]

One running theme accomplish the book is that social sciences can go by if they abandon "chimerical" notions like "nature" attend to "culture", that do not correspond to anything razor-sharp the world, and rather consider how the nice history of natural selection in the human bylaw resulted in specific preferences and capacities.

Social scientists should also abandon classical assumptions that name compression instead of solving them, like the idea focus power is similar to a force, or guarantee social norms exist outside the heads of body beings.

Boyer recommends the kind of "consilient" general science outlined by E. O.

Wilson, and proscribed argues that we already have the elements nigh on such a social science, as illustrated in emperor book.

Books

See also

Notes and references

External links