and gods that are not material but have the same mental capacities as humans. According to Boyer, there are only a few such combinations of intuitive and counter-intuitive material that are optimal for acquisition and memory - and these happen to be the most frequent ones in the world's religions. In this cognitive paradigm belief in supernatural agents is natural and part of human cognition. However, religion is not "special". That is, there are no specific mental systems that create religious ideas. Rather, these ideas are an expected by-product of mental systems that evolved for other reasons, not for religion. For instance, we easily entertain the notion of a "god" or "ghost" because of our intuitive psychology, what psychologists sometimes call "Theory of Mind". Justin L. Barrett has argued that Boyer’s book, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion is an attempt to reform traditional models and allow understanding religion in terms of cognitive science. Boyer dismantles many traditional assumptions of cultural studies. However, Barrett claims, Boyer lacks clarity – mostly due to the shift in anthropological to psychological jargon. Minds Make Societies In this book, Boyer explains the relevance of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution to understanding human societies, from the small-scale communities in which humans evolved to modern mass-societies. The blurb states that the book "integrates insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies". In Boyer's view, this new integrated social science can provide new answers, based on scientific evidence, to important questions about society. Each of the six chapters in the book focuses on one of these questions: (1) Why do humans favor their own group?, (2) Why do people communicate so much wrong information (rumors, superstition, etc.)?, (3) Why are there religions?, (4) What is the natural family?, (5) How can societies be just? and (6) Can human minds understand human societies? One running theme in the book is that social sciences can progress if they abandon "chimerical" notions like "nature" and "culture", that do not correspond to anything in the world. Social scientists should also abandon classical assumptions that name problems instead of solving them, like the idea that power is similar to a force, or that social norms exist outside the heads of human beings. Boyer recommends the kind of "consilient" social science outlined by E.O. Wilson, and he argues that