256 mind
specific feature of religion as being crucial. But religion, being a cultural suc-
cess story, certainly does not rely on the activation of a single neural system.
Religious concepts are a very likely, but not inevitable, outcome of the proper
functioning of many different mental systems, which did appear because of
natural selection and deserve the label of “mental instincts.” Notions of gods,
spirits, and ancestors are parasites of our mental instincts.
notes
- P. Boyer, “Cognitive Constraints on Cultural Representations: Natural Ontolo-
gies and Religious Ideas,” inMapping the Mind: Domain-Specificity in Culture and Cog-
nition, ed. L. A. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 391–411. - B. Saler,Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Na-
tives and Unbounded Categories(Leiden: Brill, 1993). - J. L. Barrett and F. C. Keil, “Conceptualizing a Non-Natural Entity: Anthropo-
morphism in God Concepts,”Cognitive Psychology31 (1996): 219–247; Boyer, “Cogni-
tive Constraints.” - P. Boyer,The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). - J. L. Barrett, “Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine,”Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion37 (1998): 608–619; P. Boyer and C. Ramble, “Cog-
nitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Recall of
Counter-Intuitive Representations,”Cognitive Science25 (2001): 535–564. - S. E. Guthrie,Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993). - Ibid.
- P. Boyer, “What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and
Cultural Representations,”Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute(n.s.) 2 (1996):
1–15. - J. L. Barrett, “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,”Trends in Cogni-
tive Science4.1 (2000): 29–34. - Andrew N. Meltzoff, “Origins of Theory of Mind, Cognition and Communi-
cation,”Journal of Communication Disorders32.4 (1999): 251–269. - Daniel J. Povinelli and Todd M. Preuss, “Theory of Mind: Evolutionary His-
tory of a Cognitive Specialization,”Trends in Neurosciences18.9 (1995): 418–424; A.
Whiten, ed.,Natural Theories of Mind: The Evolution, Development and Simulation of
Everyday Mind-Reading(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). - H. C. Barrett, “Human Cognitive Adaptations to Predators and Prey” (Ph.D.
diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999). - S. Mithen,The Prehistory of the Mind(London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).
- S. Baron-Cohen,Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). - Helen Tager-Flusberg and Kate Sullivan, “A Componential View of Theory of
Mind: Evidence from Williams Syndrome,”Cognition76.1 (2000): 59–89. - Daniel J. Povinelli and Timothy J. Eddy, “Factors Influencing Young Chim-