#1045 Will Gervais - Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species
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Hello everybody, welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Will Gervais. He is a reader in the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London, and today we're talking about his book, Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species. So Dr.
Gervais, welcome to the show. It's a big pleasure to have you one. Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here. So I've already talked on the show with many, many cognitive scientists of religion, so I guess this will be a fun one.
First of all, why do you say in the book that both religion and atheism are evolutionary puzzles? Yeah, I really tried to frame the book as these being two related puzzles that we have to solve just as a project in figuring out how human nature works. And our species is a bit of a weird one. We do a lot of things that you don't see other members of the animal kingdom doing. And a lot of our peculiarities are kind of like an elaboration or exaggeration of something else that we see elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
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