Scott Atran is director of research at the Institut Jean Nicod at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. He is also Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Psychology and Natural Resources and the Environment at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A respected cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, his publications include Fondement de l'histoire naturelle, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science, and Folk Biology. He has done long-term fieldwork in the Middle East and has also written and experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature. He currently directs an international, multidisciplinary project on the natural history of the Lowland Maya.

With almost 1000 references and discussions of most of human history and culture, from Neanderthal burials to suicide-bombers in the Palestinian anti-colonialist struggle, this book is consciously and truly encyclopedic in scope, and shows both breadth and depth of scholarship...the reader finds himself constantly challenged and provoked into an intellectual ping-pong game as he follows the arguments and the huge body of findings marshalled to buttress them...Atran managed to combine the old and the new by relating the automatic cognitive operations to existential anxieties. This combination will be a benchmark and a challenge to students od religion in all disciplines.

• 1: Introduction: An Evolutionary Riddle Part I: Evolutionary Sources 2: The Mindless Agent: Evolutionary Adaptations and By-products 3: God's Creation: Evolutionary Origins of the Supernatural Part II: Absurd Commitments 4: Counterintuitive Worlds: The Mostly Mundane Nature of Religious Belief 5: The Sense of Sacrifice: Culture, Communication, and Commitment Part III: Ritual Passions 6: Ritual and Revelation: The Emotional Mind 7: Waves of Passion: The Neuropsychology of Religion Part IV: Mindblind Theories 8: Culture without Mind: Sociobiology and Group Selection 9: The Trouble with Memes: Inference versus Imitation in Cultural Creation 10: Conclusion: Why Religion Seems Here to Stay