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religion and reason as natural phenomena
Browsing All Posts filed under »evolution«
Conference report: EHBEA in Amsterdam
The EHBEA meetings are held annually but the last one that I managed to attend was back in 2009 when the conference was held in St. Andrews. The meetings are highly multidisciplinary with a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to evolutionary explanations of human behaviour pursued. In terms of methodology, this year’s had […]
Reading Rossano
May 9, 2012
How did February turn into May? It must have been magic! Among the thousand and one things that have been keeping my away from updating my blog over the last couple of months has been a very much overdue review of Rossano’s Supernatural Selection. Reading the book has been interesting but from a meta perspective […]
Knowledge, Value, Evolution is out
July 30, 2011
The volume edited by Tomas Hribek and Juraj Hvorecky, entitled Knowledge, Value, Evolution, is now out and available in all good internet book-stores (as well as Tesco!) It contains articles by Franz Wuketits, Jonathan Knowles and Jaroslav Peregrin. It also contains an article of mine that I mentioned earlier on this blog. The have-to I […]
Videos from the Religious Ritual, Culture and Cognition conference
August 1, 2010
Back in May 2008 took place a conference that I dearly wish I had attended, the topic of it being very much central to my own work, i.e. cognitive approaches to religious and magical ritual. The conference was organised by Armin Geertz and Jesper Sorensen and took place at the Religion, Cognition and Culture research […]
Language as social coordination
May 11, 2010
A colleague of mine at Warsaw University is organising an international conference on language that is going to include a number of people that are well known to me, including a number of past key-speakers from various Kazimierz Workshops. The conference emphasizes the biological nature of language, underscoring its coordinative function. The aim of the […]
Abstract for talk in Aarhus
May 10, 2010
On May 21st I will be giving a talk in Aarhus to the Religion, Cognition and Culture people in Aarhus. Here is the abstract: Explaining the magic/religion distinction using a dual inheritance model The dual inheritance model of religion seeks to explain it as based upon cognitive byproducts that have been co-opted for prosocial functions. […]
ESF funding application
May 10, 2010
It’s another of those cases where I wish I were more superstitious. I have submitted an application to the European Science Foundation for funding to organise a workshop on dual inheritance models of religion and now have to wait till November to find out if my application was successful. The attraction to cross my fingers […]
Review of dual-inheritance models
March 3, 2010
Everyone understands the feeling of excitement that a child feels upon seeing presents under the Christmas tree. Far fewer can understand that such a feeling can be caused by finding out that a particular academic article has been published. Still, I hope that some can understand or even share my joy at finding out that […]
Embarrassingly bad philosophy on public show
February 25, 2010
There is a lot of bad philosophy out there. Every philosophical tradition also has its typical bad philosophy, with bad continental philosophy tending to use obscure language to make trivial points and bad analytic philosophy tending to split conceptual hairs in a way that has nothing to do with reality. Very often philosophers do lack […]
Discussion of group selection
February 21, 2010
Due to my interest in the work of David Sloan Wilson, I have found myself on the edge of the group selection controversy. Without necessarily wanting to take a stance on the issue of whether such a phenomenon exists, I have found the issue of interest in itself. As luck would have it, some of […]
Just Another Deisidaimon 
April 9, 2013
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