The Pech Merle spotted horses have been one of the key lines of evidence put forward in support of the notion Upper Palaeolithic cave depictions relate to a concern for the supernatural. Recent findings from genetics has cast doubt on this notion in confirming that such horses actually existed during the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe and therefore it is possible real, rather than fictitious, hor...

Supernatural inflation is an attractive model based just on a flat direction with soft SUSY breaking mass terms in the framework of supersymmetry. The beauty of the model is inferred from its name that the model needs no fine-tuning. However, the prediction of the spectral index is ns > ∼ 1, in contrast to experimental data. In this paper, we show that the beauty of supernatural inflation with ...

By the early twentieth century, Britain and all of its Atlantic colonies prohibited the “pretended” use of supernatural powers or rituals such as fortunetelling, obeah, sorcery, and witchcraft. Legislators and others policymakers throughout the Anglophone Atlantic justified these proscriptions using similar narratives; they described occult practitioners as charlatans and vagabonds. Metropolita...

One of the central claims of Norenzayan et al.'s article is that supernatural monitoring and intergroup competition have facilitated the rise of large-scale prosocial religions. Although the authors outline in detail how social instincts that govern supernatural monitoring are honed by cultural evolution and have given rise to Big Gods, they do not provide a clear explanation for the success of...

I take up the challenge of why false beliefs are better than “cautious action policies” (target article, sect. 9) in navigating adaptive problems with asymmetric errors. I then suggest that there are interactions between supernatural beliefs, self-deception, and positive illusions, rendering elements of all such misbeliefs adaptive. Finally, I argue that supernatural beliefs cannot be rejected ...

Schloss and Murray (S&M) have provided an insightful and important contribution to our understanding of the role of supernatural punishment in the evolution of religious systems. Future researchers will need to pay particular attention to their refinements of the cooperation enhancement (CE) and punishment avoidance (PA) approaches. While S&M acknowledge ‘‘considerable empirical support that . ...