Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropology at University of Paris and Cambridge, with Jack Goody, working on memory constraints on the transmission of oral literature. Boyer is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Work Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist, studies how human biases and cognitive faculties have resulted in or encouraged cultural phenomena. He advocates the idea that human evolution resulted in specialized capacities that guide our social relations, culture, and predilections toward religious beliefs. Boyer and others propose that these cognitive mechanisms make the acquisition of “religious” themes, like concepts of spirits, ghosts, ancestors or gods, highly transmissible within a community. Boyer has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cameroon, where he studied the transmission of Fang oral epics and its traditional religion. Most of his later work consists of an experimental study of cognitive capacities underlying cultural transmission. He also conducted studies on supernatural concepts and their retention in memory and a general description of cognitive processes involved in the transmission of religious concepts. More recently, he has written on the concept of Folk economics, which proposes that evolved cognitive biases play an important role in how laypeople view the economy. Religion Explained Of Boyer's books, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is the best known. Boyer introduced cognitive anthropology, which provided a new understanding of religion. Religion for Boyer consists of cultural representations, that is, ideas that appear in roughly similar forms in the minds of different individuals in a group. To explain how religion emerges and is transmitted, we must explain how these ideas are acquired, stored and transmitted better than other possible ideas. Findings from cognitive and developmental psychology suggest that some combinations of ideas are particularly easy to acquire and remember. Among these, we find many standard themes of supernatural and religious imagination, such as the notion of an agent with counter-intuitive physics and standard psychology, e.g. ghosts