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Published in USA
Nov 2009
320 pages
Genre: History, Science & Current Affairs
Publication Information
Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers for the first time a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion.
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"Sure to be controversial for its reduction of religion to a product of natural selection, Wades study compels us to reconsider the role of evolution in shaping even our most sacred human creations." - Publishers Weekly
"Instead of attacking or defending religion, as so many have done lately, the biggest challenge is to explain how we became the only religious primate. In a spell-binding and wide-ranging account, Nicholas Wade offers a natural history of religion and convincingly explains why the phenomenon is here to stay." - Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy
"It is a rare book that will be read as eagerly by religion's defenders as by its detractors. Building on his rightly admired Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade has written just such a book." - Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography
"As he did earlier for human prehistory in Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade has delivered the most balanced and fact-based account available of a subject fundamental to human self-understanding. His scholarship is thorough, and his writing crystalline and exciting." - Edward O. Wilson, author of Consilience and The Future of Life
"The Faith Instinct is a big winner! Its highly intelligent and much-needed narrative about why religions have proved essential to human success kept me engrossed from its beginning to its final pages." - James D Watson
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Nicholas Wade is a longtime reporter for The New York Times's Science section, which studies by the Times have shown is the most popular section of the paper around the country. Before writing for the Times, he was the deputy editor of Nature magazine in London, one of the world's most prestigious science publications, and a reporter for Science magazine, the world's premier science journal. He is the author or coauthor of five previous books. His most recent book, Before the Dawn, tells the story of human origins in terms of new insights from the human genome.
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