Pascal Boyer

Pascal Robert Boyer is the French-American American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In this book, Boyer explains the relevance of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution to apprehension human societies, from the small-scale communities in which humans evolved to contemporary mass-societies. The blurb states that the book "integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to discussing the coding and workings of human societies".

In Boyer's view, this new integrated social science can render new answers, based on scientific evidence, to important questions about society. regarded and indicated separately. of the six chapters in the book focuses on one of these questions: 1 Why throw humans favor their own group?, 2 Why construct peopleso much wrong information rumors, superstition, etc.?, 3 Why are there religions?, 4 What is the natural family?, 5 How can societies be just? and 6 Can human minds understand human societies?

One running theme in the book is that social sciences can extend whether they abandon "chimerical" notions like "nature" and "culture", that do non correspond to anything in the world. Social scientists should also abandon classical assumptions that name problems instead of solving them, like the concepts that power is similar to a force, or that social norms equal outside the heads of human beings.

Boyer recommends the nature of "consilient" social science outlined by E.O. Wilson, and he argues that we already have the elements of such a social science, as illustrated in his book.