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Contemporary suicide terrorists from the Middle East are publicly deemed crazed cowards bent on senseless destruction who thrive in poverty and ignorance. Recent research indicates they have no appreciable psychopathology and are as educated and economically well-off as surrounding populations. A first line of defense is to get the communities from which suicide attackers stem to stop the attacks by learning how to minimize the receptivity of mostly ordinary people to recruiting organizations.

Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring cultural by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional, and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion exploits only ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents. The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, and folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception. Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an “Innate Releasing Mechanism,” or “agency detector,” whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival – such as predators, protectors, and prey – but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, and faces on clouds. Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order. However, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified. Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.

Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although nonbiological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike in genetic replication, high-fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid \"mutation\" of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration.

Anthropological enquiry suggests that all societies classify animals and plants in similar ways. Paradoxically, in the same cultures that have seen large advances in biological science, practical knowledge of nature has dramatically diminished. Here we describe historical, cross-cultural, and developmental research on the ways in which people ordinarily conceptualize organic nature (folk biology), concentrating on cognitive consequences associated with knowledge devolution. We show that the results of psychological studies of categorization and reasoning from 'standard populations' fail to generalize to humanity at large. The populations most commonly used in studies by psychologists (Euro-American college and university students) have impoverished experience of nature, and this generates misleading results about knowledge acquisition and the ontogenetic relationship between folk biology and folk psychology. We also show that groups living in the same habitat can manifest strikingly distinct behaviours, cognitions, and social relations relative to it. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including commons problems. / L'enquête anthropologique suggère que toutes les sociétés classifient de la même manière les animaux et les végétaux. Paradoxalement, c'est dans les cultures qui ont connu les plus grandes avancées de la biologie que la connaissance pratique de la nature a le plus spectaculairement régressé. Les auteurs décrivent ici des recherches historiques, interculturelles et développementales consacrées à la manière dont on conceptualise habituellement la nature organique (biologie populaire), en se concentrant sur ses conséquences cognitives en ce qui concerne la régression des connaissances. Ils montrent que les résultats des études psychologiques de catégorisation et de raisonnement menées sur des « populations standard » ne peuvent être étendus à l'ensemble de l'humanité. En effet, les populations les plus fréquemment mises à contribution par les psychologues pour ces études (les lycéens et étudiants euro-américains) ont une expérience appauvrie de la nature, de sorte que les résultats peuvent induire en erreur s'il s'agit d'étudier l'acquisition des connaissances et le lien ontogénique entre biologie populaire et psychologie populaire. On sait également que les groupes vivant dans un même habitat peuvent avoir des comportements, des cognitions et des relations sociales extrêmement différents vis-à-vis de celui-ci. Il en découle de nouvelles implications pour les décisions affectant l'environnement et sa gestion, et notamment les problèmes liés aux ressources communautaires.

Press Release Terrorism: Suicide attackers spurred by Internet and lack of ties (p620) Would-be suicide bombers are encouraged to carry out their plans because they tend to live in small groups with fervent political opinions, say the authors of a Correspondence in this week's Nature. Previous analyses have tended to assume that such attackers are focused on clear political aims, such as the emancipation of their native country, but many militants cite more general reasons for their actions, such as fighting against a perceived global evil. Scott Atran and Jessica Stern point to interviews with would-be suicide bombers and their supporters, and conclude that terrorist inclinations are fostered in people who feel humiliated, either through their own experiences or by empathizing with perceived victims of ill-treatment, such as the Abu Ghraib prisoners frequently depicted in the media. These drives can overcome rational self-interest and are not consistent with the dispassionate cost-benefit analyses often attributed to organized suicide bombers, Atran and Stern argue. Instead these impulses are fostered through isolation from the host society, perhaps through emigration, which leads to a situation in which people can be influenced by a small, strongly ideological social network. The effect is strengthened by access to the Internet, the authors point out - over the past five years, Islamic 'jihadi' websites have swelled in number from fewer than 20 to more than 4,000.

Comments are offered by Francisco Gil-White, Nora Haenn, Giyoo Hatano & Keiko Takahashi, & Ueli Hostettler. A reply is offered by Atran & Medin. Using a variation on an experimental approach from biology, we distinguish the influence of sociocultural factors from that of economic, demographic, & ecological factors in environmental management & maintenance. This is important to issues of global environmental change, where there is little empirical research into cultural effects on deforestation & land use. Findings with three groups who live in the same rainforest habitat & manifest strikingly distinct behaviors, cognitions, & social relations relative to the forest indicate that rational self-interest & institutional constraints may not by themselves account for commons behavior & cultural patternings of cognition are significant. Only the area's last native Itza' Maya (who have few cooperative institutions) show systematic awareness of ecological complexity involving animals, plants, & people & practices clearly favoring forest regeneration. Spanish-speaking immigrants prove closer to native Maya in thought, action, & social networking than immigrant Q'eqchi' Maya (who have highly cooperative institutions). The role of spiritual values & the limitations of rational, utility-based decision theories are explored. Emergent cultural patterns derived statistically from measurements of individual cognitions & behaviors suggest that cultural transmission & formation consist not primarily of shared rules or norms but of complex distributions of causally connected representations across minds. 2 Tables, 5 Figures, 106 References. Adapted from the source document.

Strong adaptationists would explain complex organic designs as specific adaptations to particular ancestral environments. Weak adaptationists don't assume that complex organic functioning represents evolutionary design in the sense of niche-specific adaptation. For some domain-specific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful, not necessary. With group-level belief systems (religion), strong adaptationism can become spurious pseudo-adaptationism. In other cases (language), weak adaptationism proves productive.

Those who assume domain specificity or conceptual modularity face Fodor’ Paradox (the problem of “combinatorial explosion”). One strategy involves postulating a metamodule that evolved to take as input the output of all other specialized conceptual modules, then integrates these outputs into cross-domain thoughts. It’ difficult to see whether this proposed metamodular capacity stems from language or theory of mind.