‘Strong’ theistic naturalism is advocated, so that the notion of ‘special’ divine action is rendered redundant while scientism and a ‘God of the gaps’ notion of God’s action are avoided. A version of this kind of naturalism can affirm miraculous events in the way that Augustine of Hippo seems to have envisaged, which may now be interpreted as analogous to the scientist’s notion of regime change. In this context, some of the insights of evolutionary psychology become important, especially in relation to the evolution of human religiosity, which has significant implications for developing religious pluralism.

Evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology are two complementary approaches to understanding human behavior within the evolutionary social sciences. This chapter reviews the shared histories and current states of these approaches, with an eye toward the futures of both. The chapter explore the many ways in which the theoretical and empirical approaches of evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology overlap and complement each other, highlighting the synergies that lie at the intersection of these approaches. The chapter also addresses the ways in which these approaches diverge in their theoretical assumptions and the phenomena that they have been used to study. Understanding these divergences can help to identify gaps in the understanding of human behavior, and it can point to ways to bridge those gaps through broadening the visions of each approach. The chapter reviews directions in which evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology might evolve in the coming years, including expanding the range of phenomena under study, looking to new sources of theory, and increasing diversity and representation of researchers and communities involved in research.

The goal of this chapter is to answer the question: what is emotion? We begin by presenting a brief overview of the early history of emotion studies, charting a trajectory from the study of emotions from Aristotle in classical times through to the work of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and from Descartes to Hume. and We then move on to those thinkers who are, arguably, responsible for the very beginnings of modern enquiry into emotion study: Charles Darwin and William James. We offer a summary of the three main theoretical approaches to affective science that exist today: the so-called basic emotion view, the psychological-constructionist view and appraisal theory. We will claim there are a number of reasons to favour the appraisal theory account, one of the principal of which is of these being that there are good reasons to suggest it is the one that marries most successfully with relevance theory, the pragmatic framework we adopt. As such, it offers a route ahead for genuinely interdisciplinary research involving those working in pragmatics and those working in affective science.

Chapter 5 investigates mental modularity, which is a central concept in the study of minds, i.e., the notion of mental module which, in this context, refers to a specific, specialized domain-specific mental capacity (such as for language, for vision, for music, etc.). A given module may contain several submodules. We will look at the history of this concept and how it has been understood in different approaches, such as the outdated pseudoscience phrenology, the philosopher Jerry Fodor’s nine criteria for proper modules, massive modularity in evolutionary psychology, and other views. Once modules are postulated, we can ask, separately for each module, about the interplay between nature and nurture: Different outcomes are possible for different modules. Finally, we discuss the notion of ontogenetic, developmental modules.

The chapter investigates the evolutionary origins of human moral cognition. It discusses the relation of moral and legal theory and evolutionary theory. It reconstructs different perspectives on the evolutionary process. Influential current approaches are evolutionary psychology, theories of ontogenetic development on the basis of joint intentions and what one may call "evolutionary pluralism." The latter approach underlines the importance of many factors beyond natural selection that determine the genesis of a certain species and the stochastic nature of evolution. The methodological and theoretical foundations of these competing approaches are discussed. The problem of finding evidence for the properties of early humans is investigated. That state of research in paleoanthropology is recapitulated and discussed in terms of what it teaches us (and leaves undecided) about the genesis of human cognition, in particular moral condition. Taking into account the evidence and the most plausible evolutionary theory, it is argued that there is no compelling reason to assume that the moral principles underlying human rights are irreconcilable with human psychology.

In this chapter, the author discusses interest in serial murder. She posits that interest in gruesome events such as serial killing is linked to morbid curiosity and protective vigilance and discusses her team’s research on this phenomenon. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, to survive, we are genetically preprogrammed to pay attention to that which is harmful. She discusses the lucrative murderabilia industry (i.e., murder-related artifacts for sale) and the popularity of morbid entertainment. This chapter addresses the commodification of serial murder and presents a debate about its sensitivity to the plight of victims. The cases of FSKs Dana Sue Grey and Belle Gunness are highlighted to underscore our profound interest in this disturbing phenomenon.

This chapter discusses the kind, episodic memory, which has recently garnered a great deal of attention from philosophers. In light of current empirical work, it has become increasingly challenging to accept an influential and intuitively plausible philosophical account of memory, namely the “causal theory of memory.” It is unlikely that each episodic memory can be associated with a trace or “engram” that can be shown to be linked by an uninterrupted causal chain to an episode in the thinker’s past. Some philosophers and psychologists have responded by effectively abandoning the category of episodic memory and assimilating memory to imagination or hypothetical thinking. But I argue that there is still room for a distinct cognitive kind, episodic memory, a cognitive capacity whose function it is to generate representational states that are connected to past episodes in the experience of the thinker, which bear traces of these episodes that are individuated not at the neural level but at the “computational level.”

This chapter considers the cognitive construct, domain specificity, which is invoked in a number of different research programs in cognitive science, to indicate cognitive capacities that are limited in certain ways. Some cognitive capacities are restricted in their application to a certain domain, whereas others range freely beyond that domain. The challenge arises in saying what constitutes the domain of a capacity, especially since areas of knowledge do not come neatly compartmentalized. Building on the work of some cognitive scientists, I argue that the best way to understand the proper domain of a cognitive capacity is by invoking evolutionary considerations. This means that domain-specific capacities are individuated etiologically (at least in part), based on their evolutionary history. They are also identified on the basis of their synchronic causal powers, what they can and cannot do, since domain-specific cognitive capacities cannot range beyond their proper domains (whereas domain-general ones can). Given this cluster of causal features, I argue that there is a prima facie case to be made for considering domain specificity to be a cognitive kind.

In this chapter, we consider a cultural evolutionary psychological framework for understanding the origin, maintenance and diffusion of beliefs, and illustrate the utility of such a framework with two case studies – religious belief systems and conspiracy theory beliefs. A cultural evolutionary psychology of belief considers four broad sets of interacting factors: the content of a belief, a belief’s fit with individual conditions, the social dynamics surrounding a belief, and the socioecological conditions that promote or suppress a belief. A cultural evolutionary psychology of belief overcomes the limitations to what we call standard evolutionary psychology, a school of thought that emphasizes the activation of innate cognitive modules for understanding the generation and spread of beliefs. With this chapter, then, we aim to show how social and cognitive science researchers can approach the study of beliefs from an evolutionary perspective without committing to the controversial assumptions of standard evolutionary psychology.

It is clear from the sources that under some emperors, the Roman imperial court could be a social space characterized by violence. This chapter offers a general framework for understanding the key dimensions of court violence – its aetiology, its impact on the court’s image, and the institutions and ideologies restraining it. Drawing on insights into human violence offered by evolutionary psychology, the chapter argues that the latent human capacity for violence was triggered by a court environment with high levels of physical danger, status consciousness, and competition for resources. But in almost all societies, culture and institutions serve to restrain interpersonal violence, to a greater or lesser degree. The second part of the chapter therefore examines the limits placed on court violence by the emperor’s guard forces (the praetorians, the Germani corporis custodes, and the equites singulares), by Roman legal culture, and by Graeco-Roman political theory and ideology.