Scott Atran > Quotes

“IQ is a general measure of socially acceptable categorization and reasoning skills. IQ tests were designed in behaviorism's heyday, when there was little interest in cognitive structure. [...] In other societies, a normal distribution of some general measure of social intelligence might look very different; some "normal" members of our society could well produce a score that's a standard deviation from "normal" members of another society on that other society's test.”
― Scott Atran

“Cultures and religions exist, and are explained, to the extent that they reliably express stucturally enduring relationships among mental states and behaviors and where these material relationships enable a given population of individuals to maintain itself in repeated social interaction within a range of ecological contexts. Cultures and religions are not ontologically distinct “superorganisms” or “independent variables” with precise contents or boundaries. They are no more things in and of themselves, or “natural kinds” with their own special laws, than are cloud or sand patterns. Although”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Everybody, whether they are religious or not, implicitly knows that religion is costly, counterfactual, and even counterintuitive. The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one’s faith deep and one’s commitment sincere. For the moral philosopher and Christian votary Søren Kierkegaard, true faith could be motivated only by “a gigantic passion” to commit to the “absurd.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Los valores sagrados solo acostumbran adquirir una fuerte relevancia cuando son desafiados, de la misma manera que los alimentos adquieren un valor acuciante solo cuando no se tiene acceso a ellos.”
― Scott Atran, This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“A closer look reveals that God may never have been wholly pleased with His most preferred creations in granting them the parts they have. Why did He invert the retina and give humans (but not the octopus) a blind spot? Why, in making us upright, did He render us so liable to back problems? Why did He give us just one head, heart, and liver instead of two? After all, having two lungs and kidneys is surely better than having one of each: if you have only one and it fails, you die; if you have two and only one fails, you live.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“A woman was standing at a bus stop, wildly flailing her umbrella. A curious onlooker approached and asked, “Why do you keep waving your umbrella about?” The woman replied with some annoyance that such an idiotic question should be asked of her: “Why, to keep the pink elephants away, of course.” “But, my dear lady,” the onlooker protested, “there are no pink elephants around.” The woman, exasperated, retorted, “Precisely, because I keep them away.” The Pink Elephant Fallacy is an example of the simplest of all failures of critical thought, circular reasoning.”
― Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists

“If people literally applied counterfactual religious principles and prescriptions to factual navigation of everyday environments they would likely be either dead or in the afterlife in very short order—probably in too short an order for individuals to reproduce and the species to survive. Imagine that you could suspend the known physical and biological laws of the universe with a prayer (or, for those who are less institutionalized, by crossing your fingers). The trick is in knowing how and when to suspend factual belief without countermanding the facts and compromising survival. But why take the risk of neglecting the facts at all, even in exceptional circumstances? As”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“The individuals in a cooperative social group cannot afford to tolerate repeated defections by selfish “free riders,” such as those who hoard food or shirk responsibility for the common defense. Any group too tolerant of defectors would be subsidizing them at its own expense, which would amount eventually to collective suicide. Organisms that temporarily forsake immediate personal advantage in the expectation of equivalent near-term reciprocation from nonkin (“reciprocal altruism”; Trivers 1971) or deferred and roundabout forms of longterm reciprocation through third parties (“indirect reciprocity”; Alexander 1987) must therefore evolve ways of reliably discriminating between a cooperator and a defector.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. —FRANCIS BACON”
― Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists

“Because religious beliefs and experiences cannot be reliably validated through logical deduction or observational induction, validation occurs only by satisfying the emotions that motivate religion in the first place. Religious”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Around the start of the fourth year, the child begins to elaborate an understanding of metarepresentational agency: the child attributes intentional attitudes, such as belief and pretense, to people’s representations of the world. Only then can children examine whether their and other people’s thoughts about the world are true or fictive, likely or incredible, exaggerated or imprecise, worth changing one’s mind for or forgetting.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“All religions have core beliefs that confound these innate expectations about the world, such as faith in physically powerful but essentially bodiless deities. These beliefs grab attention, activate intuition, and mobilize inference in ways that facilitate their social transmission, cultural selection, and historical persistence. New experiments suggest that such beliefs, in small doses, are optimal for memory. This greatly favors their cultural survival. Mature”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“In the course of life, all such systems (i.e., the different evolutionary ridges) are somewhat functionally interdependent, as are components within each system (i.e., the different programs, schema, modules). Nevertheless, each system and system component has a somewhat distinct evolutionary history and time line. There is no single origin of religion, nor any necessary and sufficient set of functions that religion serves. Rather, there is a family of evolutionary-compatible functions that all societies more or less realize but that no one society need realize in full. Religions”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“One such evolutionary system, or ridge, encompasses panhuman emotional faculties, or affective “programs.” These include the basic, or primary, emotions that Darwin first identified: surprise, fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and perhaps contempt. Certain reactions characteristic of the neurophysiology of surprise and fear are already evident in reptiles, and the other primary emotions are at least apparent in monkeys and apes.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Then there are the secondary, mostly “social” emotions, such as anxiety, grief, guilt, pride, vengeance, and love. These may be unique to humans—hence, at the lower level in our evolutionary mountain landscape—and somewhat more liable to cultural manipulation and variation than the primary, “Darwinian” emotions. Thus, only humans seek revenge or redemption across lifetimes and generations, whatever the cost, although the nature of the deeds that trigger insult or remorse may vary considerably across societies, and the means to counter them may range even wider. Another”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“For my purposes, the differences among animistic, pantheistic, and monotheistic religions can be ascribed to differences in the content of beliefs in the supernatural, not to differences in the cognitive structure of those beliefs.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Cultures and religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them. They are not well-bounded systems or definite clusters of beliefs, practices, and artifacts, but more or less regular distributions of causally connected thoughts, behaviors, material products, and environmental objects. To naturalistically understand what “cultures” are is to describe and explain the material causes responsible for reliable differences in these distributions.”
― Scott Atran

“In theocratic societies, adherence to fundamentalism may enhance the fitness of fundamentalists, as opposed to nonfundamentalists, because fundamentalists are more likely to obtain productive resources and have successful offspring, whereas nonfundamentalists are less likely to have access to productive resources and more likely to be punished or killed. It is not likely, however, that natural selection has had the time to cause the difference. Conversely,”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“In religious thought, a person may ride a horse into the sky (Mohammed), ascend to heaven in a chariot of fire (Elijah), rise to the stars in a carriage drawn by six dragons (Huang Ti, the founder of the Chinese empire), or gain knowledge and afterlife in passing through the digestive tract of a feathered serpent (Maya kings). In”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Religious ritual invariably offers a sacrificial display of commitment to supernatural agents that is materially costly and emotionally convincing. Such ritual conveys willingness to cooperate with a community of believers by signaling an open-ended promise to help others whenever there is true need. These expensive and sincere displays underscore belief that the gods are always vigilant and will never allow society to suffer those who cheat on their promises. Such a deep devotion to the in-group habitually generates intolerance toward out-groups.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“During the first year of life, a child acquires the concept of teleomechanical agency: the child is able to perceive an object’s physical movement as goal-directed. In the second year, the child develops comprehension of mentalistic agency: the child attributes internal, mental states, such as perception and desire, to actors in predicting or explaining their actions.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“I dedicate this work to Vasily Arkhipov, the deputy commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine off the Cuban shore who said no to his comrades and may have saved the world. That was on October 27, 1962, around the time my father came home from his defense job and told me at the doorstep to our house that there was “only a twenty-percent chance, son” the next day would never come. No terrorist action today remotely poses that kind of existential threat for our world, and I hope you’ll keep that in mind in reading on.”
― Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists

“In sum, the great apes arguably man1 ifest at least some aspects of teleomechanical agency and mentalistic agency (Suddendorf and Whiten 2001); however, there is no convincing evidence that any animals other than humans possess metarepresentational agency (Heyes 1998; C. Wynne 2001).”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Vengefulness signals that a breach in contract will not be tolerated at any cost, even at the price of the avenging individual’s own life or fortune. In each case, the emotion was presumably selected in response to a statistical range of specific ancestral problems that required abeyance of short-term calculations of selfinterest. Such emotions would have to be “eruptive” to be believed and to convince others, that is, sincerely out of control, hard to fake, and unsuited to apparent self-interest.”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“All religions, I claim, involve counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural beings. Moreover, such beliefs are systematically counterintuitive in the same basic ways. As we shall see, these basic ways of entertaining supernatural beliefs are more or less predictable from a fairly limited set of species-specific cognitive structures. These”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Religious ritual invariably offers a sacrificial display of commitment to supernatural agents that is materially costly and emotionally convincing. Such ritual conveys willingness to cooperate with a community of believers by signaling an open-ended promise to help others whenever there is true need. These expensive and sincere displays underscore belief that the gods are always vigilant and will never allow society to suffer those who cheat on their promises. Such a deep devotion to the in-group habitually generates intolerance toward out-groups. This,”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Cuanto más materialmente inexplicables resultan la propia devoción y compromiso por una causa sagrada -es decir, cuanto más absurdas son-, mayor es la fe que otros depositan en ella y más compromiso genera esta fe por parte de ellos.”
― Scott Atran, This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Hamilton puzzled over the apparently altruistic self-sacrifice of worker bees in forsaking the opportunity to breed in favor of caring for the queen’s young. He realized that the hive’s peculiar genetic structure resulted in workers being so closely related to one another that, in slaving for the queen, they were promoting their own gene pool. It follows that the genetic disposition of a human parent to forgo personal advantage for the sake of his or her child is just a special case of genes selfishly looking out for their own best interests, as is their disposing of the individual who carries them to selfsacrifice (ceteris paribus) for the sake of two siblings, four cousins, or eight secondcousins. There”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion

“Roughly, religion is a community’s costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people’s existential anxieties, such as death and deception. […] The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one’s faith deep and one’s commitment sincere.”
― Scott Atran

“There are several types of comparative analysis for garnering evidence for an evolutionary adaptation: structural or behavioral resemblance in different phyletic lines owing to ecologically driven functional convergence (analogy), functional transformations from the same ancestral character (homology), functional tradeoffs between traits in the same phyletic line, intrageneric or intrafamilial species comparisons, and ontogenetic development. Analogy (homoplasy) reveals adaptation in similar traits that solve similar environmental problems in phylogenetically unrelated species, for example, the wings of bats and birds and flying insects, the eyes of humans and the octopus, and bipedality in therapods (carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus) and humans. Homologies”
― Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion