This work seeks to explain the recurrent doubt and misunderstanding of, and hostility towards, naturalistic, Darwinian evolutionary accounts of the origins and development of living organisms. The general theoretic perspective is garnered from the cognitive sciences, and the work begins by pursuing a “strong intuitionist” model, arguing for the relevance and contribution that maturationally natural cognition and intuitive biases have and make towards explaining evolutionary disbelief and anti-evolutionist activities and movements—namely, that in areas such as the representation of species and of teleology, humans exhibit cognitive biases against Darwinian evolution. In other words, because it has many counterintuitive elements, naturalistic evolution is “hard to think” and thus in ways cognitively “unnatural.” This claim is partly the inverse of a common perspective within the cognitive science of religion (from which this work is partly inspired and with which it is in dialogue), which finds religion in many ways cognitively “natural.” This nativist, intuitionist explanatory perspective is also in part a rebuttal to common, popular conceptions of anti-evolutionism as caused by religion, religious belief, faith, indoctrination, and the like. <br/><br/> However, there are limits to the strong intuitionism, and a second goal of the research is to more fully integrate this cognitive science with historical and cultural approaches. Research in social and moral psychology and cultural transmission arguably serve as the “missing link” between “cognition” and “culture.” Universal, panhuman maturationally natural cognition does “constrain and canalize” individual beliefs and values as well as cultural patterns of these; however, cultural particulars together with cognitively-based selective learning mechanisms also allow for individual and cultural differences. Through this interaction of naturally arising intuitions and selective, biased cultural learning and transmission, the actual and differential patterns of evolutionary belief and disbelief can be most fully accounted for. In turn, this model should be of interest and utility for other areas of historical and cultural inquiry, such as the study of religion.
Vaillancourt, Joshua Kyle,
"Darwin's Doubted Idea: The Cognitive Contours of Evolutionary and Religious Thought"
(2013).
Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0736P6H
