ABSTRACT
Evolutionary psychology, with its branches in the cognitive science of religion, is but one of several models by which evolutionary theory can be applied to culture. The cognitivist approach is typically focused on mental processing rather than social behavior. Evolutionists, in distinguishing the genotype and the phenotype, take the first to refer to inherited genetic structure and the second to mean the expression or appearance of that structure in terms of physical and behavioral traits. The phenotypefrom the Greek, phainein, "to show" is then the visible properties of an organism that are produced by the interaction of the genes and the environment. "psychic unity of mankind" became an object of postmodern derision, the newer cognitive/evolutionary approaches to religion are a distinct move to recapture that psychic unity at a species level underlying the surface of cultural differences. The concept of behavior, in short, removes the ostensibly unbridgeable gulf that one intuitively wants to place between culture and nature.
