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[InfiniteNow]

Here is a book referenced in the video. It relates to the speakers idea of religions representing minimally counterintuitive worlds which present claims and stories which are an optimal compromise between the interesting and the expected.



It's called "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought," and was written by Pascal Boyer in 2001:

Religion Explained - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Haifa, called it "a milestone on the road to a new behavioral understanding of religion, basing itself on what has come to be known as cognitive anthropology, and pointedly ignoring much work done over the past one hundred years in the behavioral study of religion and in the psychological anthropology of religion."[1] He continues: The clearest virtue of this book is that of dealing with the real thing. Even today, most scholarly work on religion consists of apologetics in one form or another, and we are deluged by offers of grants to study “spirituality” or teach “religion and science”. This all serves to make us forget that religion is a collection of fantasies about spirits, and Boyer indeed aims to teach us about the world of the spirits in the grand tradition of the Enlightenment."

A Commentary on "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought" | Serendip's Exchange

Boyer does not make an attempt to take an atheist stance and explain away God as a figment of our imaginations, but rather to explain why we believe what we believe and why some beliefs are so persistent.
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The other problem with this account of the origin of religion—where religion is used as an explanation for natural events—is that religious concepts tend to make things more mysterious and complicated than other types of explanations.
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Boyer discusses specific properties of the human mind, for example, how we produce our inferences, and how they affect our inference systems and our templates to generate different kinds of information about religion. He also discusses which concepts are most likely to be adapted and which ones are not.
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I think one of the most important concepts that Boyer covered was that diversity can rise out of simplicity. Here we have very simple templates about the way the world works, and we have inference systems that help us piece together new bits of information and create new information. Using these inference systems, we are able to build up a more complex body of knowledge about the supernatural, thus creating very complicated religious concepts from very simple beginnings. Just as different varieties of atoms can arise from a few changes in electrons and just as complex macromolecules and organisms can be built from different arrangements, so too can complex ideas and supernatural agents be built from humble templates.

I also found Boyers’ explanations of the way the human brain works very revealing.

Another book referenced relating to the minimally counterintuitive worlds idea is "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion," written by Scott Altran in 2002.

Scott Atran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

He has experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature, on the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and on the limits of rational choice in political and cultural conflict. His work has been widely published internationally in the popular press, and in scientific journals in a variety of disciplines.

David Livingstone Smith reviews In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion by Scott Atran

Religion, like other cultural phenomena, ‘results from a confluence of cognitive, behavioral, bodily and ecological constraints that neither reside wholly within minds nor are recognizable in a world without minds’ – the evolutionary landscape of the book’s title – each defining ridge of which is constituted by a set of psychological faculties. One such influence consists of primary and secondary affective programs. Another involves the social intelligence module, which was probably rooted in ancestral experiences of avoiding predators and hunting prey, and received tremendous impetus by the selection pressures exerted by group living. A third lies in the operation of functionally independent evolved cognitive modules such as those devoted to folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology.

The book begins with a discussion of evolution and, in particular, cognitive evolution. Although much of this will be ‘old hat’ to anyone with a serious interest in evolutionary psychology there are some gems here (I particularly enjoyed the powerful critique of the use of attachment theory to explain religiosity). We then move on to a discussion of the human tendency to detect agency where none is present. The belief in supernatural agency can in large measure be accounted for by the same cognitive adaptation that caused our remote ancestors to interpret the sound of a breeze rustling a bush as the presence of a saber-toothed tiger. In short, ‘supernatural agency is an evolutionary by-product trip-wired by predator-protector-prey detection schema’. The next two chapters cover the counterintuitive nature of religious thought and the significance of sacrifice. In Chapter Six Atran concentrates on the dynamics of ritual and revelation in the context of the cognitive psychology of memory. Chapter Seven, ‘Waves of Passion’, surveys the burgeoning literature on the neuropsychology of religious experience which includes some fascinating accounts of experimental work and a nice critique of Persinger’s work. Chapter Eight criticizes traditional sociobiological and group-selectionist accounts of cultural evolution on the grounds that these strange bedfellows all neglect the causal significance of the cognitive architecture of the human mind in the generation of culture. They are ‘mindblind’. This chapter contains a rather striking account of group selection as ultimately a notational variant of Hamiltonian kin selection, and incisive critiques of group-selectionist claims made by David Sloan Wilson and Kevin MacDonald. Chapter Nine is a marvelous and highly original critical analysis of memetics. The final chapter - ‘Why Religion is Here to Stay’ - pulls it all together.