Scott Atran

Scott Atran (* 1952 in New York City ) is an American anthropologist .

He received his PhD from Columbia University and then became an assistant to Margaret Mead . He has taught at Cambridge, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He is currently Research Director of Anthropology at the French Center National de la Recherche Scientifique and teaches at the École normal supérieure . He also teaches psychology at the University of Michigan and in New York. His research topics include a. Studies on the cultural formation of the human understanding of nature (so-called folk biology , or ethnobiology ), in the field of religious studies the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion as well as research on the limits of the rational choice approach in the social sciences. He became known, among other things, through empirical studies on the ecological adaptation of the economy of the Maya and other settlers on Lake Petén-Itzá in Guatemala and on the psychology of suicide bombers and his criticism of "new atheists" such as Sam Harris , Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg .

Works

• Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (1990)
• In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)
• Folk Biology, ed. with Douglas Medin (1999)
• Plants of the Peten Itza 'Maya, with Ximena Lois and Edilberto Ucan Ek (2004)
• The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature, with Douglas Medin (2008)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the atheism debate, see An Edge Discussion of BEYOND BELIEF: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival Salk Institute, La Jolla November 5-7, 2006 [1] .