Everyone knows the experience: you happen upon a wreck and know you shouldn’t look but can’t help it. While there is a chance of seeing something disturbing, you look regardless. There should be a word for this and in the absence of one, I will call it car-wreck voyeurism. I felt something like this after [...]
Tags:adaptation·ancestral environment·ASD·Aspergers·autism·autism spectrum disorder·autistic·EP·evolutionary psychology·fantasy·fitness·foraging·gathering·hunting·Jared Reser·Just So Stories·maladaptive·orangutans·Panglossian·Panglossian Paradigm·parsimony·peer review·pleiotropy·Plio-Pleistocene·Psychology Today·Satoshi Kanazawa·sociality·solitary forager hypothesis·spandrels·speculation·Thomas Hobbes
In a few days Jesse Bering’s new book, The Belief Instinct, will be published in the United States. It has already been published in the UK as The God Instinct. The title change seems a bit odd and the opposite of what one might have expected. Something like ninety percent of Americans believe in God, [...]
Tags:anthropomorphism·autism·cognitive illusion·Faces in the Clouds·Jesse Bering·neolithic·Paleolithic·shamanisms·Stewart Guthrie·The Belief Instinct·The God Instinct·theory of mind
A new book, The Prehistory of Compassion, is generating a fair amount of press coverage. The title has a familiar ring to it and seemingly riffs Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind. I would not be surprised if this is the case, given that Mithen and the authors are UK archaeologists with Cambridge connections. [...]
Tags:altruism·anthropoids·Antonio Damasio·autism·autistics·Brandon Keim·collaboration·compassion·cooperation·empathy·Eocene·evolution of emotions·feelings·group level selection·invisible agents·Jennifer Viegas·non-physical beings·Penny Spikins·Steven Mithen·The Prehistory of Compassion·The Prehistory of the Mind·World Vision
Evangelicals love their demons — which they claim to see or sense in just about everything bad that happens. All it takes is some exorcism or “casting out” and all will be well.
As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of autism’s effects is a lack of “theory of mind.” This in turn renders [...]
Tags:autism·casting out demons·demons·evangelicals·exorcism·gay·homosexuality·Pentecostals·theory of mind
The title of today’s post may appear to be an unlikely combination, but given yesterday’s post about autism and religion, I thought it would be worthwhile to review Nicholas Humphrey’s classic article, “Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind.” As should be apparent, my title borrows from Humphrey.
When Humphrey published this article [...]
Tags:autism·cave art·Nadia·Nicholas Humphrey·Richard Klein·shamans·Steven Mithen
There is a substantial body of research on the origins of religion which suggests that supernatural thinking arises, at least in part, from what is often called a “hyper-active agency detection device.” Evolutionary psychologists, such as Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion) and Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained), assert that this [...]
Tags:agency detection device·autism·Pascal Boyer·Scott Atran·theory of mind
