[...]... question whether even Neanderthals had a theory of mind And if chimps are the equivalent of our distant cousins on the evolutionary tree, Neanderthals are something like our fraternal twins In The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (2009), Coolidge and Wynn point out that a conspicuous clue to the Neanderthals’ theory -of- mind abilities, or rather their absence, is the fact that they didn’t... chimps were asked to reason about the mental states of humans rather than those of their own kind And that’s not even to mention, others pointed out, the fact that Povinelli’s Louisiana apes were raised in concrete -and- steel cages and therefore could hardly be regarded as the best and brightest of their species—or even representative of their species, for that matter, because their cognitive potential had... bored plebes, and the bloated politicians of ancient Greece and gave them all a show During public debates on the most serious matters of the day—from the rape of Helen, to the economy, to the nature of existence itself—he was rumored to have disarmed his grim-faced opponents with a sudden burst of good-natured laughter When the other side returned his laughter amicably, he would obliterate the attempts... after a bout of teasing by an older sibling: We seem to see husbands and wives and little brothers But what we really see are bags of skin stuffed into pieces of cloth and draped over chairs There are small restless black spots that move at the top of the bags of skin, and a hole underneath that irregularly makes noise The bags move in unpredictable ways, and sometimes one of them will touch us The holes... people, these deaf-mute children—most of whom grew up before the invention of a standardized symbolic communication system of gestures, such as American Sign Language (ASL)—had no access to the typical explanatory balms of science and religion in calming these bothersome riddles Without language, one can’t easily share the idea of a purposeful, monotheistic God with a naive child And the theory of natural... of restless, sweaty forms, one admirer, the Greek lexicographer Suidas, gushed that Gorgias “was the first to give to the rhetorical genre the art of deliberate culture and employed tropes and metaphors and figurative language and hypallage and catachresis and hyperbaton and doublings of words and repetitions and apostrophes and clauses of equal length.”1 In the Phaedrus (circa 370 BC), Socrates refers... there perhaps something like a belief instinct”? In the chapters that follow, we will be exploring this question of the innateness of God beliefs, in addition to many related beliefs, such as souls, the afterlife, destiny, and meaning You’re probably already well versed in the man in the street’s explanations for why people gravitate toward God in times of trouble Almost all such stories are need-based... hostile, to the pair Eventually, a mob of cruel children corners the boy and begins pelting the “kindhearted” balloon with stones, ultimately popping it There’s something of a happy ending, though, with the smiling boy being hoisted off to an unknown destiny by the other resident helium souls of Ménilmontant, sympathetic balloons that, we can only assume, have been inspired by the “death” of their persecuted... that way?” asked the reporter “Yes, yes, he was a real character with a spirit of his own.”32 As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the weight of selective importance placed on our theory -of- mind skills, we sometimes can’t help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven’t even a smidgeon of a neural system there to generate the psychological... a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there…watching, knowing, caring Perhaps even judging But, in fact, that’s just your overactive theory of mind In reality, there is only the air you breathe After all, once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck out the exotic crosscultural plumage of strange . The BELIEF INSTINCT The BELIEF INSTINCT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOULS, DESTINY, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE Jesse Bering W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York • London Copyright © 2011 by Jesse Bering Originally. Jesse Bering Originally published in Great Britain under the title The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life All rights reserved For information about permission. plebes, and the bloated politicians of ancient Greece and gave them all a show. During public debates on the most serious matters of the day—from the rape of Helen, to the economy, to the nature of