Scott Atran packs a lot into his subtitles. 'Evolutionary Landscape': that's the new idea in this book about gods. The human mind has evolved with numerous capacities. Each distinct capacity is well adapted to performing a group of tasks in its domain. Individuals possess these capacities in varying degrees, but they are part of the universal genetic inheritance of the human race. For example, the capacity for stereoscopic vision is a human birthright, though some of us have a severe squint, have lost an eye, or have brain damage. Atran urges that these capacities are prominences - mountains - in a landscape, and that natural selection is the core explanation of how they got there. The landscape can also account for many aspects of human beings for which there is no adaptive value. For example, the human race has a pervasive tendency towards religious conviction. This is not because religious conviction is well adapted to survival: quite the contrary. Religion does make use of evolved capacities, but it is able to do so because those capacities overstep the domains to which they are adapted.

LRB 21 October 2004 | PDF Download