Faculty and independent scholars

Candace S. Alcorta

Research Scientist, Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut

What are the universal elements of religion, why is adolescence a preferred developmental period for the acquisition of religious knowledge, what role does music play in the religious transmission of social algorithms, and what is the relationship between religion and non-human ritualized behaviors? These questions are at the heart of my research. As an anthropologist and behavioral ecologist, I am interested in understanding the relationship between religion, cooperation, and the evolution of human symbolic systems. The interface between communal religious behaviors and individual neurophysiology, particularly during adolescence, is of specific interest to me. I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand and the United States where I most recently studied the relationship between adolescent religious involvement and resilience.

Email: candace.alcorta@uconn.edu

Connie Barlow

In traveling the USA with my husband, Michael Dowd, as “America’s evolutionary evangelists”, my interest in Evolutionary Religious Studies is two-fold. First, by accessing the scholarly literature on how religions evolve and what the core adaptive features are at individual- and group-selection levels, I aim to shape my presentations and posted religious education curricula for more effective impact. Second, my interactions with children, youth, and adults as a religious educator allow me to qualitatively test ideas for enhanced effectiveness and to observe the “religious impulse” (and attempt to discern its ancient adaptive roots) in my own very liberal faith tradition, Unitarian Universalism.

Website:http://thegreatstory.org

Justin L. Barrett

Senior Researcher, Centre for Anthropology & Mind, Institute of Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, 58A Banbury, Oxford, OX2 6QS, United Kingdom

My primary research interests concern how natural human cognitive structures inform and constrain religious expression, making some kinds of beliefs and practices more recurrent than others. Evolutionary perspectives may broaden and deepen findings in the cognitive science of religion. Current research foci include the development of God concepts in children, cultural evolution and transmission, and philosophical implications of bio-psychological explanations of religion.

Website:http://www.icea.ox.ac.uk

Jesse M. Bering

Director, Institute of Cognition and Culture Queen's University, Belfast

In studying religion, I am interested in the basic cognitive processes underlying religious thought and behaviour. For example, the social cognitive mechanisms enabling people to view natural events, such as illness or misfortune, as being symbolic of a message from some supernatural agent, or as being'about' a prior social transgression, may be universal to human psychology.

Website:http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/InstituteofCognitionCulture/Staff/JesseMBering/

Michael Blume

Visiting Lecturer at the Departments of Study of Religion, Heidelberg University & Leipzig University

I did my magister thesis on young muslims in Germany and my doctorate thesis on testing “neurotheologies” (neurobiological theses on religion). Since then, I have focused on the evolution of religiousness and especially on the demography of religious communities. Empirical data troves like e.g. the German ALLBUS survey 2002, the World Value Survey and especially the Swiss Census 2000 as well as the historical and actual records of many religious communities like orthodox Jewry or Amish all show that there are very strong reproductive benefits aligned to religious affiliation. My findings correspond strongly with assumptions of evolutionary theorist Friedrich August von Hayek.

Website:http://www.blume-religionswissenschaft.de/english/index_english.html

Joseph A. Bulbulia

Senior Lecturer, Programme in Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

I am interested in whether evolutionary game theory sheds light on puzzling features both of religious cognition and the institutional organisation of religious groups. Recently I've become interested in mathematical descriptions of processes underlying the evolution of these features, in experimental economics, and the relevance of religion to current debates in the philosophy of biology.

Website: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/religion/staff/joseph_bulbulia/index.html

Adam B. Cohen

Assistant Professor (social area), Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1104

My interest in evolution and religion is to understand why there is religious diversity. Can certain selection pressures and ecological factors help to explain why religions are similar or different in domains like moral judgment, motivation, individualism, or collectivism?

Website: http://www.asu.edu/clas/newpsych/people/acohen.html

Lee Cronk

Department of Anthropology and Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

I use signaling theory to study religion and other aspects of human society, culture, and behavior. I am particularly interested in the role religious signals play in both cooperation and competition within and between human groups.

Website:http://anthro.rutgers.edu/faculty/cronk.shtml

Malcolm Dean

Independent Scholar, Journalist, Los Angeles, CA

NeoDarwinism has reached its dogmatic and imperialistic peak, aggressively spilling over its original domain to lay extraordinary claim as an exclusively privileged hypothesis in many fields. As a result, much interesting work in alternative hypotheses goes unrecognized, or is deliberately dismissed. In particular, research in thermodynamic, Information-based, and cognitive approaches to the evolution of all kinds of systems goes unrecognized by shrill voices intent upon the ridiculous and futile aim of eliminating religion from human culture. While Evolutionary Psychology and other approaches claim to be studying "information," they take no account of the deep relationship between Information and thermodynamics, a central discovery of 20th Century science. My research in Cognitive Thermodynamics may provide a model of culture and religion consistent with evidence of this relationship from many fields of investigation.

Email: malcolmdean@gmail.com

Daniel C. Dennett

University Professor Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155

I am interested in encouraging scientific research on religion across all topics and boundaries. My own professional concerns are with theories of cultural evolution and the ways in which culturally evolved adaptations have accumulated in religions. In particular, I am focussing with some associates on what I call belief in belief, in its various manifestations.

Websites: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/

Michael Dowd

I have a practical interest in studying and contributing to evolutionary religious studies. My passion and skill at this season in my life is to help the existing religions (particularly Christianity) evolve in ways that are more adaptive for individual psychologies, group cooperation, and planetary health in this modern and postmodern world. I am pursuing this goal (with my wife, Connie Barlow) as “America’s evolutionary evangelists.” My 2007 book, THANK GOD FOR EVOLUTION!, endorsed by five Nobel laureates and 120 other luminaries across the religious and philosophical spectrum, is intended to play a key role in this process.

Website: http://thankgodforevolution.com

Russell Gray

Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

I am interested in in using phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses about aspects of religion such as belief in higher gods or belief in an afterlife.

 

Websitehttp://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/people/Gray/Russell.htm

William Scott Green

Professor of Religious Studies; Senior Fellow, Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, 33124

I am interested in comprehensive theories that demystify religion and make it intelligible. Evolution seems to offer unusual promise as an empirical framework for describing, analyzing, and comparing religions.

Website:http://www6.miami.edu/UMH/CDA/UMH_Main/1,1770,2472-1;48494-3,00.html

Stewart Elliott Guthrie

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Fordham University, New York City, New York

My continuing work on evolutionary approaches to religion began with my 1980 paper, A Cognitive of Religion, which proposed that our sense that humanlike agents are present stems from an evolved, better-safe-than-sorry perceptual strategy. The strategy produces hair-trigger judgments that such agents or their traces are present, in, for example, natural phenomena. The agents imagined are humanlike primarily in their mentality and symbolic communication, and they provide the most significant possible interpretations of things and events. Other animals, especially the great apes, produce analogous interpretations of natural events such as thunderstorms. All but the last of these propositions now are widely accepted in cognitive studies of religion.

Email:guthrie@fordham.edu

Jonathan Haidt

Associate Professor, Dept. of Psychology, University of Virginia P.O. Box 400400, Charlottesville VA 22902

I study the evolutionary origins of morality, but cannot stand to read any more accounts of kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Yes, these two processes shaped our moral emotions but there is so much more going on. Theorists have often missed these other aspects because the research community is composed almost entirely of secular liberals (which includes me) who limit the moral domain to matters of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. My research shows that in most cultures, and even among religious conservatives in Western cultures, the moral domain also includes issues of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. These latter three “foundations” of morality serve not to protect individuals from each other but to bind groups together to enhance their ability to compete with other groups. I believe that multi-level selection theories are likely to prove essential for understanding the origins and mechanisms of these “binding” systems. Religion seems likely to have played a crucial role in the major transition that enabled human beings to live in large cooperative societies.

Website:http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/

Marc Hauser

Harvard College Professor, Departments of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology, Cambridge, MA, 021138

My interests focus on the evolution of morality, taking a five-pronged empirical approach: 1) describe the principles that underlie that mature individual's intuitive judgments of right and wrong; 2) characterize the acquisition mechanism for such principles; 3) determine the extent to which such principles are universal and constrain cross-cultural variation; 4) unpack the neurobiological mechanisms that are both necessary and sufficient for making moral judgments; 5) provide an account of the evolutionary building blocks that led to our moral sense, and the pressures that favored particular moral responses. Along these lines, I am particularly interested in the extent to which explicit moral institutions such as religion and law can impact up on our intuitive sense of right and wrong. To address this issue, we contrast the patterns of moral judgments among various religious traditions as well as with atheists.  We also look at small scale societies that lack explicit religious traditions.

The moral sense test is a web based site designed to explore the nature of moral intuitions.  Subjects log on, provide demographic information, and then take a test that is comprised of carefully controlled moral dilemmas, targeting particular moral principles.

Website:http://wjh-www.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/LPPI.html

Dominic Johnson

Edinburgh University

Belief in supernatural punishment is an important promoter of human cooperation. In work with Jesse Bering, I argue that this evolved in tandem with human cognition. Ever since humans evolved complex language and theory of mind, selfish actions incurred a greater probability and severity of punishment, even from absent group members long after the event. Selection pressures would therefore have favored a brake on anti-social actions. An expectation of supernatural punishment for anti-social actions, a feature also dependent on theory of mind, may have served to avoid the fitness costs of imprudent selfishness in the gossiping society of modern humans. This hypothesis suggests that there are fitness advantages of supernatural beliefs at the individual level.

Website:http://www.princeton.edu/~dominic/

Michael E. McCullough

Professor Department of Psychology and Religious Studies, University of Miami, Coral Gables FL 33124-0751

I’m interested in the evolution of moral sentiments and emotions, particularly gratitude, generosity, revenge, and forgiveness. We’re studying the roles that religion might play in facilitating, legitimating, constraining, or hindering the expression of these moral sentiments and motivations. I’m also studying the extent to which religion might influence or rely upon self-control, and I’m interested in exploring what the religion/self-control link might teach us about adaptive functions that religion might have played during human evolution.

Website:http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/mmccullough/Index.html

Patrick McNamara

Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine and Boston VA Healthcare System, Boston, MA 02130

My lab is interested in assessing correlated evolution of ritual practices and God concepts with other life-history, ecologic and bio-cultural variables; the adaptive radiation of various religious practices across cultures and historical time and proximate brain mechanisms of religiosity.

Website: www.bumc.bu.edu/len

Michael J. Murray

Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor in Philosophy and the Humanities, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA 17604

My interests primarily concern the philosophical implications of evolutionary and cognitive psychological accounts of religion.

 

Website:http://www.fandm.edu/x11326.xml

Ara Norenzayan

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Canada

In a species with tremendous cultural diversity, the capacity for religion tops the list of species-specific core human universals. Most people in most cultures are deeply religious, yet psychologists have a quite poor understanding of this phenomenon that is both a product and a shaper of human psychology. I think it makes sense to think of religion not as a naturally selected adaptation, but as a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that canalizes the cultural transmission of religious beliefs and behaviors into convergent but culturally distinct pathways. This means that religious beliefs are the product of cultural transmission constrained by evolutionary psychology. I use the tools of experimental social psychology to study the psychological roots of supernatural beliefs, how these beliefs are transmitted and stabilized in populations, and how religious beliefs are implicated in sacrifice, altruism, and violence.

Website:http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~ara

Lluis Oviedo

Ordinary Professor of Theological Anthropology at the Antonianum University, and Invited Professor at the Gregoriana University about issues of religion, science and society; both in Rome - Italy

In the last years I got increasingly involved in the cognitive study of religion, an interest which has produced several papers. The central focus of my research is trying to understand the dynamics presiding the origin and development of religious ideas. It seems highly relevant to any study of the Bible and the changing of the images of the deity along the time. Finding too reductive the current approach, I am trying to extend the number of factors involved in such an evolutionary process, which should take into account - at least - the conscious dimension, the role of feelings and the role played by symbols and its grammar.

Email:loviedo@antonianum.eu

John S. Price

Consultant Psychiatrist, Sussex Partnership NHS Trust

A am interested in the capacity for change of belief system as manifested in prophets, cult leaders and psychiatric patients, and the implications this has for rate of group fissioning and so for the balance between individual and group selection. I co-authored "Prophets, Cults and Madness" (London, Duckworth, 2000) with Anthony Stevens.

Website:http://www.johnprice.me.uk

Peter J. Richerson

Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California - Davis, Davis, CA 95616

His research focuses on the processes of cultural evolution. His 1985 book with Robert Boyd, Culture and the Evolutionary Process, applied the mathematical tools used by organic evolutionists to study a number of basic problems in human cultural evolution. His recent books with Boyd include Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, an introduction to cultural evolution aimed at a broad audience and The Origins and Evolution of Cultures, a compendium of their more important papers and book chapters. His recent publications used theoretical models to try to understand some of the main events in human evolution, such as the evolution of the advanced capacity for imitation (and hence cumulative cultural evolution) in humans, the origins of tribal and larger scale cooperation, and the origins of agriculture. He collaborates with Richard McElreath and Mark Lubell in an NSF funded research group devoted to the study of cultural transmission and cultural evolution in laboratory systems. He has collaborated with Brian Paciotti on a study using play in experimental games to estimate the effect of religiousity on prosocial behavior.

Website:http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/richerson/richerson.htm

Benson Saler

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454

I have long been interested in the anthropology of religion, and for some years now have been excited by the light on religion cast by the evolutionary and cognitive sciences.

 

Website: http://www.brandeis.edu/

Stephen Sanderson

Visiting Scholar, Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521

Working on the evolution of religion from two perspectives: (1) whether religion is a true biological adaptation or a byproduct of other cognitive adaptations, (2) the long-term evolution of religion throughout world prehistory and history, including the transition from shamanic to ecclesiastical religions, the transition from polytheism to monotheism, the Reformation, and religious modernity.

Website: WWW.STEPHENKSANDERSON.ORG

Richard Sosis

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-2176

My work has focused on the evolution of cooperation and the adaptive significance of religious behavior, with particular interest in the relationship between ritual and intra-group cooperation. To explore these issues, I have conducted fieldwork with remote cooperative fishers in the Federated States of Micronesia and with various communities throughout Israel, including Ultra-Orthodox Jews and members of secular and religious kibbutzim. I have also pursued ethnohistorical research on 19th century communal societies and conducted economic experiments with student and non-student populations in the United States and Israel.

Website:http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/sosis/

Harvey Whitehouse

Professor of Social Anthropology, Head of the School of Anthropology , University of Oxford , 51 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PE , United Kingdom

After carrying out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain , Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, I developed a theory of 'modes of religiosity' that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists. In recent years, I have focused my energies on the development of collaborative research and founded the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

Website:http://www.icea.ox.ac.uk

David Sloan Wilson

Distinguished Professor, Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902

My interest in religion is part of a more general interest in multilevel selection and human genetic and cultural evolution. In my book  Darwin’s Cathedral and articles on my website, I argue that religions are primarily group-level adaptations.

Website: http://evolution.binghamton.edu/dswilson/

Dimitris Xygalatas

Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Aarhus University, Denmark

I am trained in the Study of Religion and Cognitive Anthropology. I conducted fieldwork among the communities of the Anastenaria of Northern Greece and South-Eastern Bulgaria, where firewalking rituals are performed. My PhD dissertation, submitted at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, , Queen's University Belfast, focused on the motivational aspects of participation in high arousal rituals. I have also translated several books related to the Study of Religion, Anthropology, and Cognition.

Website: http://www.xygalatas.com/