Scott Atran

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

He earned his doctorate at Columbia University and subsequently became assistant to Margaret Mead. He has taught at Cambridge, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He is currently Research Director of the Anthropology of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Addition, he is teaching activities in the field of psychology at the University of Michigan and in New York. His research topics include, inter alia, research on the cultural character of the human understanding of nature (so-called Folk Biology, or Ethnobiology ), in the field of religious studies, cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion as well as research on the limits of the rational choice approach in the social sciences. He was known among other empirical studies on the ecological adaptation of the economy, the Maya and other settlers on Petén Itzá lake in Guatemala and on the psychology of suicide bombers as well as his criticism of the "new atheists " like 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, Ximena Lois and Edilberto Uçan Ek (2004)
• The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature, with Douglas Medin (2008)