interconnectivity to humans for

interconnectivity to humans for millennia. Just as computers have capacities and processes that are transduced through but extend far beyond the hardware of a single computer, the human brain has evolved to promote social and cultural capacities and processes that are transduced through but that extend far beyond a solitary brain. To understand the full capacity of humans, one needs to appreciate not only the memory and computational power of the brain but its capacity for representing, understanding, and connecting with other individuals. That is, one needs to recognize that we have evolved a powerful, meaning making social brain. Social species, by definition, create structures beyond the individual— structures ranging from dyads and families to institutions and cultures. These emergent structures have evolved hand in hand with neural and hormonal mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors (e.g., cooperation, empathy, altruism, etc.) helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. From an evolutionary perspective then, the social context is fundamental in the evolution and development of the human brain. The observable consequences of these higher organizations have long been apparent, but we are only now beginning to understand their genetic, neural, and biochemical basis and consequences. To fully delve into these complex behaviors, science needs to deal with the invisible forces that shape human life, whether it is in the form of physical, biological, or psychological forces. For instance, anthropomorphism, the irrepressible proclivity to attribute Page |14 human characteristics onto nonhuman objects to achieve meaning, predictability, and human connection, is beginning to be subjected to productive multi-level scientific analysis. Experimental studies have shown that manipulations which increase feelings of social isolation without the possibility of resolving these feelings through human interaction have the compensatory effect of increasing people’s tendency to anthropomorphize, including heightened beliefs in God. This scientific work has implications for understanding claims regarding the success of religious practices such as solitude as paths to feeling closer God. Research on anthropomorphism has now identified developmental, situational, dispositional, and cultural factors that modulate people’s tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents ranging from technological gadgets to animals to gods, and the neural mechanisms underlying this transconfiguration of nonhuman objects into human-like agents are beginning to be revealed. Guided by the insights from these new scientific theories of anthropomorphism, historical analyses may be worthwhile to determine whether concepts of god have changed across time and cultures such that god was created in the image of the believer rather than vice versa. Xenophanes (6th century B.C., cited in 9), for instance, was apparently the first to use the term “anthropomorphism” when describing the similarities between religious agents and their believers, noting that Greek gods were invariably fair skinned and blue-eyed whereas African gods were invariably dark skinned and dark-eyed (joking that cows would surely worship gods that looked strikingly cow-like). Brain imaging research has confirmed HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021260