Ancestral Bias Quotes

“To sum up, then, fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“People may have finely tuned coalitional capacities, but they do not necessarily have access to how these work. The cues that make some people appear reliable and others less so are computed in ways that often escape conscious attention.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“...coalitional dynamics would predict that whatever outsiders do is often little concern to fundamentalists. What matters is what other members of the group are likely to do.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“...the fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“A common explanation is that we imagine person-like agents who rule our destinies because this produces a reassuring view of our existence and the world around us. We project human features onto nonhuman aspects of our world because that makes these aspects more familiar and therefore less frightening.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“The only people who'll ever figure out who they are, are those who don't know who they are - whereas those who have already accepted their ancestral heritage as their ultimate identity, have no identity to begin with - they are just lifeless photocopies of the past, nothing else.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love