coming soon – ‘The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures’ by Nicholas Wade
Written on November 11, 2009
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures by Nicholas Wade is a preorder as I’m writing but due out from Penguin tomorrow (Nov 12) so it may be available by the time you’re reading this.
Product description from the author’s website:
The Faith Instinct presents a novel approach to religion. It explores the evolutionary origins of religious behavior in early humans, and traces the cultural development of religion from its origins up until to the present day.
The book does not challenge the central belief of either atheists or people of faith, since it offers no opinion as to whether or not God exists. It’s about religious behavior and its value to the first human societies and their successors.
Based on evidence from anthropologists’ studies of religion, and new findings from genetics and archaeology, The Faith Instinct concludes that religious behavior was favored by natural selection because of the survival advantage it conferred on early human groups.
The religion of early peoples, who lived as hunters and gatherers, underwent a profound cultural transformation as the hunter gatherers formed the first settled societies. The form of religious observance shifted from all-night communal dances, to the spring and harvest festivals of early agricultural societies, to the forms of religion more familiar today. The Faith Instinct retraces the historical context in which Judaism, Christianity and Islam arose, and analyzes how religion has retained many of its ancient roles even in modern secular societies.
An excerpt, reviews and more are available at the author’s website.
