Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create by Pascal Boyer (review)

Pascal Boyer is a French and American cognitive anthropologist teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. He gained renown for his study of religion as a by-product of specialised brain machinery (Boyer 2001). Minds Make Societies champions the same approach in new fields, using mostly second-hand data. Boyer intends to draw the outlines of a new social science arising from convergent research in biology, psychology, economy, anthropology and other disciplines. As a new natural science of social phenomena, it distances itself from distinguishing nature from nurture and reverts to the infra- or subpersonal working of neural circuits rather than to agents’ conscious will, social facts or cultural norms. Boyer wants anthropologists and fellow social scientists to use natural selection as a methodological estrangement against false evidence, and as a ground on which to build precise, testable hypotheses about puzzling aspects of the human mind.

Each of the seven chapters attempts to demonstrate that we exhibit specific preferences and myopias in several domains because our biological cognitive systems were designed by natural selection to meet what pressures were recurrent in the Pleistocene (2.5 million to 12,000 years before the Common Era). The rival hypotheses Boyer considers are said to share a naive conception of information as something entering agents' minds without any need for dedicated mechanisms with rules and content of their own.

In Chapter 1, ideological depictions of ethnic others as invaders are seen as secondary interpretations of intuitions sparked by an unconscious framing of situations as zero-sum games, a framing adapted to keep encroaching groups away from key territories (such as water holes or hunting grounds) and to put threatening males of the other group in a subordinate position. Cognitive specialisations to recruit social support and to perform (or prevent) raids and ambushes are taken to account more satisfactorily for ethnic tensions in contemporary urban settings and for the “predictable script” of civil conflicts than social psychology’s hypothesis about tribalism and discriminatory stereotypes.

An evolved epistemic vigilance helps us detect liars and manipulators, by motivating us to gain reputational information and to question the likeliness of others’ sayings. However, people fall prey to rumours and even show up wanting to see these taken seriously. This apparent paradox is unfolded throughout Chapter 2, where Boyer hypothesizes an adaptively lighter and faster processing of threat signals, and an evolved capacity not only to seek support, but also to moralise recruitment (turning the acceptance or refusal to disseminate the threat signal into an “either with or against us” thinking).

Building on Religion Explained (Boyer 2001), in Chapter 3, Boyer defines supernatural concepts as by-products of cognitive systems dedicated to inanimate things, to animate beings, to intentionality, to fairness and the like, systems whose intuitive expectations are overtly violated or subtly confirmed by supernatural concepts. He holds that the “primitive” supernatural concepts were mainly imagistic and pragmatic-minded, not contained in any doctrine, nor uniting believers in communities. As such, they would have few, if any parallel with religions, understood as professionalised organisations born of large kingdoms, empires and city-states, which standardised both the content and the use of supernatural concepts. On this account, the functionalist explanation of religion as a human universal, answering an urge to make sense and to cooperate, is no longer tenable. Religion as such no longer has a raison d’être as a concept.

Against their description as natural or self-evident parts of human nature, family and kinship are shown in Chapter 4 to be compromises between diverse evolved preferences that work independently and sometimes in conflict. The evolutionary rise of stable pair bonding is reconstructed through the once hotly debated “primitive contract” of sex for meat, which Boyers reappraises to mean meat and protection against rape and infanticide for the certainty of fatherhood. This latter concern, Boyer advances, motivates male control over female mobility, dressing and sexuality in private and public spaces. The evolved wiring of the...