Minds Make Societies

How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

By: Pascal Boyer

Narrated by: Tom Parks

A watershed book that masterfully integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies

“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.

Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.

©2018 Pascal Boyer. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

illuminating!

I am really impressed by the explanatory power of the evolutionary laws, it really opened my mind to our human nature and also to popular misunderstandings about natural selection.

mankind is all about collaboration, not individual competitions

A Great Idea- Obscured with too many words

The progressively common practice of combining fields of competence and finding new ground or better tools to understand, is a great idea. Boyer takes the idea of evolutionary biology & applies it to sociology to help understand the reason and purpose of many of the acts we do on a daily basis and ultimately to form societies unlike any before us. But he spends so many words describing minutia that the central thread gets foggy if not completely lost. He also intermixes constructs based on reliable data with his conjectures- his best guess- with little distinction between the two.

Incredible Book!

The author did I lot of research to offer all his knowledge for us.

This book worth all the time and price, absolutely it is clear, full of knowledge for who's love learning from the intellectual people.

Paradoxical Evolutionary Psychology?

I loved Dr. Boyer’s Religion Explained. He is anthropologist and he lived with indigenous peoples. It’s a fascinating work. In this book, some 20 years later, he attempts to extend his work to us, invoking evolutionary psychology as a framework.

However, evolutionary psychology is a paradox. It claims to overthrow non-evolutionary thinking on human behavior, but it limits itself only to human culture, and then applies Darwinian principles to that culture.

However, that doesn’t work. The modern synthesis is genetic. Multicellular animals are behaviorial, and that is a second degree of freedom. We can see that in the clownfish, in which every fish is born male, the first one into the territory becomes She, and the second becomes the sole reproductive male. Every other male that arrives is stunted and has zero sexual capacity, and lives a hellish life of a pecking order. This isn’t Darwin, this is neuroendo programming and it is evo-devo, not Darwinian.

Dr. Boyer doesn’t grok that, and his treatment of family is in my opinion so wrong and ignorant of zoology and the synaptic organization of nervous systems as to make it as guilty as the work of earlier anthropologists that he dismisses.

These humanist educated folks are not willing to do the real math and science, and when they start talking about how you and i should behave, then it’s more than Mumbo Jumbo, it skinnerism, Freudianism, and Chomskyism — that is, academic tryanny that destroys ordinary lives. this is not the real story.