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The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion.As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution.
either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage; or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, saw religion as an exaptation or a spandrel, in other words: religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons.
The challenge for the psychology of religion is essentially threefold: to provide a thoroughgoing description of the objects of investigation, whether they be shared religious content (e.g., a tradition's ritual observances) or individual experiences, attitudes, or conduct;
Critical reception of Religion Explained has been mixed.. The psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi called the book "a milestone on the road to a new behavioral understanding of religion, basing itself on what has come to be known as cognitive anthropology, and pointedly ignoring much work done over the past one hundred years in the behavioral study of religion and in the psychological ...
Research in evolutionary psychology suggests that the brain is a coordinated network of domain-specific modules corresponding to various adaptations that emerged in our evolutionary history. [ 3 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] Most claim that a capacity for religious thoughts is not a modular adaptation itself, but an evolutionary byproduct of multiple ...
Attachment theory began with evolutionary psychologist John Bowlby in 1969. Attachment theory was initially grounded in the observation that human beings appear to be born with an innate psychobiological system (the "attachment behavioral system") that motivates them to seek proximity to significant others (attachment figures). [1]
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) saw religion as an illusion, a belief that people very much wanted to be true. Unlike Tylor and Frazer, Freud attempted to explain why religion persists in spite of the lack of evidence for its tenets. Freud asserted that religion is a largely unconscious neurotic response to repression. By repression Freud meant ...
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (ISBN 9780226901350) is a 2002 book by David Sloan Wilson which proposes that religion is a multi-level adaptation—i.e., a product of cultural evolution developed through multi-level selection.