Past Activities

This project was dedicated to exploring important and controversial contemporary hypotheses about the relation between the brain, evolution, and religion. For example, does the human neurocognitive system exhibit specializations that support or mediate religious experience of various kinds? Are some core aspects of religious behaviors, beliefs, or experiences adaptive neurobehavioral systems? Or are they mere byproducts of an all-purpose big-brain cognitive system? That the brain somehow mediates some aspects of religiosity is a less controversial claim. But just how the brain manages that feat and what, if any, the implications are for biological anthropology, the neurosciences, theology, and society, remain unanswered questions.

This project was a year-long weekly reading-group and seminar at Boston University organized by Wesley Wildman. Attended by both graduate students and faculty such as Catherine Harris, Brian McCorckle, and Robert Neville, the seminar aimed to read and evaluate key works in the evolutionary psychology of religion. In the second year of this project, Catherine Harris and Brian McCorckle jointly offered a senester-long seminar for credit through Boston University's Psychology Department on these themes.