This book explores how two million years of natural selection left us with a strong tendency to bestow purposeful intention to the natural world—forming a robust cognitive basis for religious belief across human cultures. This cognitive legacy forms the foundation of much of how we interpret the world around us today, and understanding the reasons why and how it evolved can shed light on the peculiar relationships we sometimes form with the many complex social institutions of our time, including one of the most dominant and ubiquitous ones, the nation-state.
To explore how our tendencies for religious belief interact with the complex social institutions we currently live under, we go on a journey from the start of the Pleistocene era to domestication, from ancient states to colonialism, and from the industrial revolution to the birth of modern nations, all while tracking the various biological, cognitive, and social elements that explain why today we interpret the nation-state (and other modern social institutions) in very similar ways to how we understood deities of the ancient past. Understanding why and how this happens requires reconstructing how evolution shaped our cognition, how complex social organizations arose after domestication, how they act as external forces to ourselves, and how they grew into distinct and cohesive social entities that our cognition interprets as purposeful players with agency and intent.
This book continues the long-held tradition in the social sciences of making this type of interdisciplinary synthesis accessible to the general public, and for that reason, it minimizes discipline-specific jargon and describes experiments and results rather than relying on cited works.
Alexander J. Martín is an anthropologist and the Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Archaeology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he manages the Comparative Archaeology Database—a global initiative to collect and digitize archaeological data for the empirical study of prehistoric societies. His research explores how human communities structured their political, economic, and religious institutions as they expanded in size and complexity. By comparing societies across regions and time periods, Martín investigates the cultural foundations that enabled large-scale cooperation, with particular focus on the role of religion—seeking to understand which aspects of religious behavior are universal and which are shaped by the specific needs of individual societies.
