There are a number of scholars who claim that “religion” evolved as an adaptation. What kind of adaptation? A group level adaptation. The story usually goes like this: at some unknown time during the middle or upper Paleolithic, certain groups of hominins developed proto-religious beliefs. These beliefs, which are rarely if ever specified, somehow gave [...]
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Over at The Stone, the primatologist Frans de Waal asks whether we can act “morally” without being “religious.” I quote-bracket these terms because they are not without complication, and we should be careful about using them in the context of such discussions. Regardless, de Waal poses some questions for which we have historical answers. For [...]
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After recently watching “The Cove” and a Mad Men episode titled “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” — a clever allusion to Ruth Benedict’s justly famous cultural study of Japan, I decided it was time to bone up on Japanese religions. Japan is a multi-faceted nation and getting your head around its history, culture and people [...]
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A recent study in the American Journal of Primatology examined chimp attacks on humans in Guinea, West Africa. There were not many — only 11 attacks, all non-fatal, between 1995 and 2009. Because chimps are often subject to human predation and eaten as bushmeat, one might expect that such attacks would be followed by swift [...]
Tags:Aboriginal·Aborigines·bonobo·bushmeat·chimp attacks·chimpanzees·chimps·Emile Durkheim·Guinea·Inside the Minds of Animals·Jeffrey Kluger·Kanzi·Kimberly Hocking·last common ancestor·totem beliefs·totemism·totems·West Africa
There have been many articles over the past week reporting that an unusually large group (150 members) of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda has been engaging in systematic territorial expansion by attacking and killing neighboring groups. The Nature article notes that this is “cooperative behavior” and then quotes from the New York Times story:
These [...]
Tags:aggression·Blackfoot·Cheyenne·chimpanzees·chimps·city-states·cohesion·Comanche·cooperation·Cree·Crow·David Sloan Wilson·ecology·Egypt·Flathead·foragers·Gros Ventre·group level selection·Kibale National Park·kinship·Kiowa·Lakota·Levant·Matt Rossano·Mesopotamia·Nicholas Wade·Plains Indians·power·religion·religious warfare·Sarsi·shamans·Shoshoni·territoriality·The Faith Instinct·war
There are many stories in the news today about the remarkable behavior of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Based on genetic and fossil evidence, it seems likely that we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees approximately 6-7 million years ago.
As reported by Michael Balter in Science, chimps living in a zoo consoled a dying [...]
Tags:Barbara King·chimpanzees·commonsense dualism·supernatural thinking·theory of mind
