Editorial: Imaginative culture and human nature: Evolutionary perspectives on the arts, religion, and ideology

In the overview describing this Research Topic and soliciting participants, we said that the Research Topic encompassed four main areas in the evolutionary human sciences: evolutionary behavioral science, gene-culture coevolution, emotions, and “cognitive neuroscience, which has identified the Default Mode Network as the central neurological location of the human imagination.” The 20 articles accepted for publication fulfilled our expectations for the first three of these Research Topics. All the articles make extensive reference to research in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. Many of the articles discuss the evolved cognitive dispositions that make cumulative culture possible. Several articles make emotions a salient part of their arguments. Only one article gives serious attention to the Default Mode Network (DMN) (Newberg et al., “Orgasmic Meditation”). Over the past two decades, a rapidly expanding body of research has revealed that the DMN makes it possible to abstract away from the immediate present, to think about past and future, to enter into other minds, and to construct fictional worlds (Buckner and DiNicola, 2019; Carroll, 2020; van Mulukom, 2020).