Terrorists don't kill and die just for a cause. They kill and die for each other. In this rigorous and challenging work that combines the penetrating insight of The Looming Tower and the historic
An illuminating work of religious and cultural anthropology, Talking to the Enemy traces terrorism?s root causes in human evolution and history, touching on the nature of faith, the origins of society
This title presents an analysis of the cognitive consequences of diminished contact with nature that examines the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it,
The author has spent years talking to terrorists - from Gaza and Afghanistan, to Indonesia and Europe. In this book, he delivers a fascinating journey into the mindsets of radicalised people in the tw
This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that
What is it about human nature that makes our species capable of thinking scientifically? Inspired by the debate he set up between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, Scott Atran traces the development of Natural History from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from common conceptions of folk biology. The author proceeds not only from the more traditional philosophical, historical, or sociological perspectives, but from a point of view which he considers to be more basic and necessary to all of these: that of cognition. He applies a 'cognitive' perspective to an explanation of the successive scientific incarnations, transformations, and mutations of what Hume called 'mankind's original stock of ideas'.
The term "folkbiology" refers to people's everyday understanding of the biologicalworld -- how they perceive, categorize, and reason about living kinds. The study of folkbiology notonly sheds light on
Surveys show that our growing concern over protecting the environment is accompanied by a diminishing sense of human contact with nature. Many people have little commonsense knowledge about nature&md
