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1 " Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions. "
― Pascal Boyer , Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
2 " Our inference systems may be there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent in normal human environments for hundred of thousands of years. "
3 " The journalistic cliché that this is the -information age- is misleading if it suggests that in the past, either recent or distant, we did not depend on information. "
4 " Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time. "
5 " There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. "
6 " Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole. "
7 " Humans never invented anything that goes as deep as scientific investigation into understanding why the world is the way it is, nor have we found any other way of seeking knowledge that gets it so consistently right. Doing science is also difficult and frustrating, and in many ways goes against the grain of our spontaneous ways of thinking. "
― Pascal Boyer , Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
8 " Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work. "
9 " Information is our environment, our niche, and as we are complex animals we constantly transform that niche, sometimes in ways that make it possible to acquire even more information from our surroundings. "
10 " We have different sets of intuitive principles for man-made objects and natural beings, because we are toolmakers and must understand the connection between the shape of objects and their functions. We have social expectations because we need social support. As we shall see, we have moral intuitions because we depend on fair exchange to prosper. In each case, having these cognitive dispositions made our ancestors more successful than others at reproduction, which is precisely why they turned out to be our ancestors. "
11 " Experiments show that even three-year-olds have the intuition that rewards should be proportional to contributions, in places as different as Japanese cities and the camps of Turkana nomads in Kenya. Obviously, it does happen that people take more than their share-but that is universally considered exploitative, and people are eager to avoid or shun individuals who do that. "
12 " How did general prosperity encompass the entire world? Here the answer is that prosperity rises, first slowly and then increasinly fast, in all places where people can engage in peaceful and voluntary exchanges. Trade and the innovations that it makes possible provide the only known escape route from poverty. "
13 " So there was a clear economic rationale for an ancestral division of labor, where individuals of each sex contributed more of what was comparatively advantageous to them. Women of course (and sometimes do) hunt, but men are on average more productive hunters; men can (and often do) gather and process foods, but they are not any more productive than women at the task. "
14 " The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination. "
15 " [T]he choice of human groupings for cultural comparisons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a political one. "
16 " Ethnic violence is not an uncontrolled outburst of rage. The fact that it takes such predictable forms means that some common processes are shaping these violent interactions, and that participants have psychological capacities and preferences that make it possible for them to engage in these acts in a coordinated manner. "
17 " Deliberation is made possible by our evolved reasoning capacities, and this explains why, as historians and political scientists have along observed, free and open deliberation generally leads to choices superior to those of autocratic and technocratic systems. "
18 " ...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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " What we mean when we say that something is "cultural" is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it! "
