We describe and evaluate an integrative hypothesis for the origin and evolution of human religious cognition and behaviour, based on maximization of inclusive fitness. By this hypothesis, the concept of God is represented by one's circle of kin and social salience, such that serving God and serving this circle become synonymous. The theory is supported by data from anthropology, evolutionary th...

C harles Darwin was curious about the workings of the eye and corresponded with William Bowman and Cornelis Donders about its structure and function. In his On the Origin of Species in 1859, he took care to make the case that even such a complex organ as the eye could arise by natural selection. In other contexts, Darwin also gave particular weight to observations that revealed imperfections in...

Do non-religious adults - despite their explicit disavowal of religious beliefs - have a tacit tendency to view nature as purposefully created by some being? This question was explored in three online studies using a speeded judgment procedure, which assessed disbelievers in two different Western cultures (United States and Finland). Despite strong performance on control trials, across all thre...

Abstract The early modern fairy is a long ignored transgender figure. This article presents transhistoricist analysis of how range “transgender” concepts manifest in the literary imagination—instabilities, transformations, ambiguities, or indeterminacies sex and gender—through representation fairies supernatural. It focuses on Ariel Shakespeare's Tempest, Duessa Spenser's Faerie Queene, Jocastu...

For generations, folk medicines have been used to cure various diseases with supernatural and naturalistic causations. With ethnographic descriptive design, mananambals, Tambal Binisaya vendors, loyal patrons served as key informants in this qualitative study. In obtaining the data, observations, field notes, interviews were main instruments investigate inculturation, which is underlying phenom...

Individuals attribute more psychological (e.g., forget) than biological (e.g., eat) or physical (e.g., be touched) properties to supernatural beings (Shtulman, 2008). It is unclear how those domains each contribute to an overall conception of a supernatural being (e.g., God). Undergraduate students (N = 341) responded to nine questions representing the three domains or factors (psychological, b...

Given that mythmakers must construct stories that ore comprehensible to their audience, it is reasonable to expect stories to be conceptually natural even when their topics deal with the supernatural. Thus, OS stories ore adapted to human conceptual structure, they should reflect characteristics of that structure. An examination of the types of magical transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses on...