Quotes from Pascal Boyer

A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith.

Deliberation is made possible by our evolved reasoning capacities, and this explains why, as historians and political scientists have along observed, free and open deliberation generally leads to choices superior to those of autocratic and technocratic systems.

Humans were designed by evolution to live in societies, but they may not understand how societies work.

How did general prosperity encompass the entire world? Here the answer is that prosperity rises, first slowly and then increasinly fast, in all places where people can engage in peaceful and voluntary exchanges. Trade and the innovations that it makes possible provide the only known escape route from poverty.

Information is our environment, our niche, and as we are complex animals we constantly transform that niche, sometimes in ways that make it possible to acquire even more information from our surroundings.

Experiments show that even three-year-olds have the intuition that rewards should be proportional to contributions, in places as different as Japanese cities and the camps of Turkana nomads in Kenya. Obviously, it does happen that people take more than their share-but that is universally considered exploitative, and people are eager to avoid or shun individuals who do that.