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Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Book by Pascal Boyer · 3 quotes · Evolution, Mind, Cognition

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Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
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“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.”

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Book:Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
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“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.”

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Book:Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
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