Evolutionary psychology of religion

Last updated

The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion. As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand cognitive processes, religion in this case, by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might serve. [1]

Contents

Mechanisms of evolution

Scientists generally agree with the idea that a propensity to engage in religious behavior evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. There are two schools of thought. One is that religion itself evolved due to natural selection and is an adaptation, in which case religion conferred some sort of evolutionary advantage. The other is that religious beliefs and behaviors, such as the concept of a protogod, [2] [3] may have emerged as by-products of other adaptive traits without initially being selected for because of their own benefits. [4] [5] [6] A third suggestion is that different aspects of religion require different evolutionary explanations but also that different evolutionary explanations may apply to several aspects of religion. [7]

Religious behavior often involves significant costs—including economic costs, celibacy, dangerous rituals, or the expending of time that could be used otherwise. This would suggest that natural selection should act against religious behavior unless it or something else causes religious behavior to have significant advantages. [8]

Religion as an adaptation

Richard Sosis and Candace Alcorta have reviewed several of the prominent theories for the adaptive value of religion. [4] Many are "social solidarity theories", which view religion as having evolved to enhance cooperation and cohesion within groups. Group membership in turn provides benefits which can enhance an individual's chances for survival and reproduction. These benefits range from coordination advantages [6] to the facilitation of costly behavior rules. [5]

Sosis also researched 200 utopian communes in the 19th-century United States, both religious and secular (mostly socialist). 39% of the religious communes were still functioning 20 years after their founding while only 6% of the secular communes were. [9] The number of costly sacrifices that a religious commune demanded from its members had a linear effect on its longevity, while in secular communes demands for costly sacrifices did not correlate with longevity and the majority of the secular communes failed within 8 years. Sosis cites anthropologist Roy Rappaport in arguing that rituals and laws are more effective when sacralized. [10] Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Sosis's research in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind as the best evidence that religion is an adaptive solution to the free-rider problem by enabling cooperation without kinship. [11] Evolutionary medicine researcher Randolph M. Nesse and theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard have argued instead that because humans with altruistic tendencies are preferred as social partners they receive fitness advantages by social selection, [list 1] with Nesse arguing further that social selection enabled humans as a species to become extraordinarily cooperative and capable of creating culture. [16]

Edward O. Wilson's theory of "eusociality" strongly suggests group cohesion as the impetus for the development of religion. Wilson posits that the individuals of a small percentage of species (including homo sapiens, ants, termites, bees and a few other species) replicated their genes by adhering to one of a number of competing groups. He further postulates that, in homo sapiens, thanks to their enormous forebrains, there evolved a complex interplay between group evolution and individual evolution within a group. [17] [ page needed ]

These social solidarity theories may help to explain the painful or dangerous nature of many religious rituals. Costly-signaling theory suggests that such rituals might serve as public and hard-to-fake signals that an individual's commitment to the group is sincere. Since there would be a considerable benefit in trying to cheat the system—taking advantage of group-living benefits without taking on any possible costs—the ritual would not be something simple that can be taken lightly. [4] Warfare is a good example of a cost of group living, and Richard Sosis, Howard C. Kress, and James S. Boster carried out a cross-cultural survey which demonstrated that men in societies which engage in war do submit to the costliest rituals. [18]

Studies that show more direct positive associations between religious practice and health and longevity are more controversial. Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen summarized and assessed the results of 100 evidence-based studies that systematically examined the relationship between religion and human well-being, finding that 79% showed a positive influence. [19] Such studies rate in mass media, as seen in a 2009 NPR program which covered University of Miami professor Gail Ironson's findings that belief in God and a strong sense of spirituality correlated with a lower viral load and improved immune-cell levels in HIV patients. [20] Richard P. Sloan of Columbia University, in contrast, told the New York Times that "there is no really good compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health." [21] Debate continues over the validity of these findings, which do not necessarily prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship between religion and health. Mark Stibich claims there is a clear correlation but that the reason for it remains unclear. [22] A criticism of such placebo effects, as well as the advantage of religion giving a sense of meaning, is that it seems likely that less complex mechanisms than religious behavior could achieve such goals. [8]

Religion as a by-product

Stephen Jay Gould cites religion as an example of an exaptation or spandrel, but he does not himself select a definite trait that he thinks natural selection has actually acted on. He does, however, bring up Freud's suggestion that our large brains, which evolved for other reasons, led to consciousness. The beginning of consciousness forced humans to deal with the concept of personal mortality. Religion may have been one solution to this problem. [23]

Other researchers have proposed specific psychological processes that natural selection may have fostered alongside religion. Such mechanisms may include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These three adaptations (among others) allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise, e.g. thunder, lightning, movement of planets, complexity of life. [24]

Pascal Boyer suggests in his book Religion Explained (2001) that there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness. He builds on the ideas of cognitive anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran, who argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology. He argues that one such factor is that it has, in most cases, been advantageous for humans to remember "minimally counter-intuitive" concepts that are somewhat different from the daily routine and somewhat violate innate expectations about how the world is constructed. A god that is in many aspects like humans but much more powerful is such a concept, while the often much more abstract god discussed at length by theologians is often too counter-intuitive. Experiments support that religious people think about their god in anthropomorphic terms even if this contradicts the more complex theological doctrines of their religion. [8]

Pierre Lienard and Pascal Boyer suggest that humans evolved a "hazard-precaution system" which allowed them to detect potential threats in the environment and to attempt to respond appropriately. [25] Several features of ritual behaviors, often a major feature of religion, are held to trigger this system. These include the occasion for the ritual (often the prevention or elimination of danger or evil), the harm believed to result from nonperformance of the ritual, and the detailed prescriptions for proper performance of the ritual. Lienard and Boyer discuss the possibility that a sensitive hazard-precaution system itself may have provided fitness benefits, and that religion then "associates individual, unmanageable anxieties with coordinated action with others and thereby makes them more tolerable or meaningful".

Justin L. Barrett in Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004) suggests that belief in God is natural because it depends on mental tools possessed by all human beings. He suggests that the structure and development of human minds make belief in the existence of a supreme god (with properties such as being superknowing, superpowerful and immortal) highly attractive. He also compares belief in God to belief in other minds, and devotes a chapter to looking at the evolutionary psychology of atheism. He suggests that one of the fundamental mental modules in the brain is the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD), another potential system for identifying danger. This HADD may confer a survival benefit even if it is over-sensitive: it is better to avoid an imaginary predator than be killed by a real one. This would tend to encourage belief in ghosts and spirits. [26] According to Justin L. Barrett, having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them. "Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?" [27]

Though hominids probably began using their emerging cognitive abilities to meet basic needs like nutrition and mates, Terror Management Theory argues that this happened before they had reached the point where significant self- (and thus end-of-self-) awareness arose. Awareness of death became a highly disruptive byproduct of prior adaptive functions. The resulting anxiety threatened to undermine these very functions and thus needed amelioration. Any social formation or practice that was to be widely accepted by the masses needed to provide a means of managing such terror. The main strategy to do so was to "become an individual of value in a world of meaning … acquiring self-esteem [via] the creation and maintenance of culture", as this would counter the sense of insignificance represented by death and provide: 1) symbolic immortality through the legacy of a culture that lives on beyond the physical self ("earthly significance") 2) literal immortality, the promise of an afterlife or continued existence featured in religions ("cosmic significance"). [28]

Religion as a meme

Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene (1976) that cultural memes function like genes in that they are subject to natural selection. In The God Delusion (2006) Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned,[ citation needed ] their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses". In such a conception, it is necessary that the individuals who are unable to question their beliefs are more biologically fit than individuals who are capable of questioning their beliefs. Thus, it could be concluded that sacred scriptures or oral traditions created a behavioral pattern that elevated biological fitness for believing individuals. Individuals who were capable of challenging such beliefs, even if the beliefs were enormously improbable, became rarer and rarer in the population. (See denialism.)

This model holds that religion is a byproduct of the cognitive modules in the human brain that arose in the evolutionary past to deal with problems of survival and reproduction. Initial concepts of supernatural agents may arise in the tendency of humans to "overdetect" the presence of other humans or predators (for example: momentarily mistaking a vine for a snake). For instance, a man might report that he felt something sneaking up on him, but it vanished when he looked around. [29]

Stories of these experiences are especially likely to be retold, passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of standard ontological categories (person, artifact, animal, plant, natural object) with counterintuitive properties (humans that are invisible, houses that remember what happened in them, etc.). These stories become even more salient when they are accompanied by activation of non-violated expectations for the ontological category (houses that "remember" activates our intuitive psychology of mind; i.e. we automatically attribute thought processes to them). [30]

One of the attributes of our intuitive psychology of mind is that humans are interested in the affairs of other humans. This may result in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably cross-connect with human intuitive moral feelings (evolutionary behavioral guidelines). In addition, the presence of dead bodies creates an uncomfortable cognitive state in which dreams and other mental modules (person identification and behavior prediction) continue to run decoupled from reality, producing incompatible intuitions that the dead are somehow still around. When this is coupled with the human predisposition to see misfortune as a social event (as someone's responsibility rather than the outcome of mechanical processes) it may activate the intuitive "willingness to make exchanges" module of the human theory of minds, compelling the bereaved to try to interact and bargain with supernatural agents (ritual). [31]

In a large enough group, some individuals will seem better skilled at these rituals than others and will become specialists. As societies grow and encounter other societies, competition will ensue and a "survival of the fittest" effect may cause the practitioners to modify their concepts to provide a more abstract, more widely acceptable version. Eventually the specialist practitioners form a cohesive group or guild with its attendant political goals (religion). [31]

See also

Related Research Articles

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morality</span> Differentiation between right and wrong

Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness", "appropriateness" or "rightness".

Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have been proposed by different authors. According to Jerry Fodor, the author of Modularity of Mind, a system can be considered 'modular' if its functions are made of multiple dimensions or units to some degree. One example of modularity in the mind is binding. When one perceives an object, they take in not only the features of an object, but the integrated features that can operate in sync or independently that create a whole. Instead of just seeing red, round, plastic, and moving, the subject may experience a rolling red ball. Binding may suggest that the mind is modular because it takes multiple cognitive processes to perceive one thing.

Psychology of religion consists of the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to the diverse contents of religious traditions as well as to both religious and irreligious individuals. The various methods and frameworks can be summarized according to the classic distinction between the natural-scientific and human-scientific approaches. The first cluster amounts to objective, quantitative, and preferably experimental procedures for testing hypotheses about causal connections among the objects of one's study. In contrast, the human-scientific approach accesses the human world of experience using qualitative, phenomenological, and interpretive methods. This approach aims to discern meaningful, rather than causal, connections among the phenomena one seeks to understand.

Ritualization refers to the process by which a sequence of non-communicating actions or an event is invested with cultural, social or religious significance. This definition emphasizes the transformation of everyday actions into rituals that carry deeper meaning within a cultural or religious context. Rituals are symbolic, repetitive, and often prescribed activities that hold religious or cultural significance for a certain group of people. They serve various purposes: promoting social solidarity by expressing shared values, facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and regulating emotions.

Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin, 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.

<i>Religion Explained</i>

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a 2001 book by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in which the author discusses the evolutionary psychology of religion and evolutionary origin of religions.

The evolution of human intelligence is closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the origin of language. The timeline of human evolution spans approximately seven million years, from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. The first three million years of this timeline concern Sahelanthropus, the following two million concern Australopithecus and the final two million span the history of the genus Homo in the Paleolithic era.

Cognitive specialization suggests that certain behaviors, often in the domain of social communication, are passed on to offspring and refined to be maximally beneficial by the process of natural selection. Specializations serve an adaptive purpose for an organism by allowing the organism to be better suited for its habitat. Over time, specializations often become essential to the species' continued survival. Cognitive specialization in humans has been thought to underlie the acquisition, development, and evolution of language, theory of mind, and specific social skills such as trust and reciprocity. These specializations are considered to be critical to the survival of the species, even though there are successful individuals who lack certain specializations, including those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder or who lack language abilities. Cognitive specialization is also believed to underlie adaptive behaviors such as self-awareness, navigation, and problem solving skills in several animal species such as chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins.

Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.

The concept of the evolution of morality refers to the emergence of human moral behavior over the course of human evolution. Morality can be defined as a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct. In everyday life, morality is typically associated with human behavior rather than animal behavior. The emerging fields of evolutionary biology, and in particular evolutionary psychology, have argued that, despite the complexity of human social behaviors, the precursors of human morality can be traced to the behaviors of many other social animals. Sociobiological explanations of human behavior remain controversial. Social scientists have traditionally viewed morality as a construct, and thus as culturally relative, although others such as Sam Harris argue that there is an objective science of morality.

Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought, theory, and behavior from the perspective of the cognitive and evolutionary sciences. Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts, practices, and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Evolutionary origin of religion</span> Emergence of religious behavior discussed in terms of natural evolution

The evolutionary origin of religion and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior.

Evolutionary psychiatry, also known as Darwinian psychiatry, is a theoretical approach to psychiatry that aims to explain psychiatric disorders in evolutionary terms. As a branch of the field of evolutionary medicine, it is distinct from the medical practice of psychiatry in its emphasis on providing scientific explanations rather than treatments for mental disorder. This often concerns questions of ultimate causation. For example, psychiatric genetics may discover genes associated with mental disorders, but evolutionary psychiatry asks why those genes persist in the population. Other core questions in evolutionary psychiatry are why heritable mental disorders are so common how to distinguish mental function and dysfunction, and whether certain forms of suffering conveyed an adaptive advantage. Disorders commonly considered are depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, eating disorders, and others. Key explanatory concepts are of evolutionary mismatch and the fact that evolution is guided by reproductive success rather than health or wellbeing. Rather than providing an alternative account of the cause of mental disorder, evolutionary psychiatry seeks to integrate findings from traditional schools of psychology and psychiatry such as social psychology, behaviourism, biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis into a holistic account related to evolutionary biology. In this sense, it aims to meet the criteria of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.

Cognitive ecology of religion is an integrative approach to studying how religious beliefs covary with social and natural dynamics of the environment. This is done by incorporating a cognitive ecological perspective to cross-cultural god concepts. Religious beliefs are thought to be a byproduct of domain-specific cognitive modules that give rise to religious cognition. The cognitive biases leading to religious belief are constraints on perceptions of the environment, which is part and parcel of a cognitive ecological approach. This means that they not only shape religious beliefs, but they are determinants of how successfully cultural beliefs are transmitted.

Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.

Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington (2020-present). He was the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at University of Auckland (2018-2020). He previously served as a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a national longitudinal study started in 2009 that has repeatedly sampled over 45,000 New Zealanders. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social selection</span> Term used in biology

Social selection is a term used with varying meanings in biology.

References

  1. ↑ Steadman, L.; Palmer, C. (2008). The Supernatural and Natural Selection: Religion and Evolutionary Success. Paradigm.
  2. ↑ Turner, Léon P. (2014). "9: Neither Friends nor Enemies: The Complex Relationship between Cognitive and Humanistic Accounts of Religious Belief". In Watts, Fraser; Turner, Léon P. (eds.). Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science: Critical and Constructive Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 162. ISBN   9780199688081 . Retrieved 26 July 2019. It seems therefore, for Barrett at least, that universal sociocultural factors do have some role to play in the origins of all proto-god concepts [...].
  3. ↑ Compare for example: Griffin, Daniel F. (2008). "The Existence and General Characteristics of Our Universe". Greater Than Can Be Conceived: The Rationality of Belief in a God Beyond Comprehension. p. 75. Retrieved 26 July 2019. As it is currently defined, proto-god has the potential to cause the existence of our universe, but as of yet we have no reason for thinking that it actually would.
  4. 1 2 3 Sosis, R.; Alcorta, C. (2003). "Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: the evolution of religious behavior". Evolutionary Anthropology. 12 (6): 264–274. doi:10.1002/evan.10120. S2CID   443130.
  5. 1 2 Watts, Joseph; Greenhill, Simon J.; Atkinson, Quentin D.; Currie, Thomas E.; Bulbulia, Joseph; Gray, Russell D. (2015-04-07). "Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences. 282 (1804): 20142556. doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.2556. PMC   4375858 . PMID   25740888.
  6. 1 2 Dávid-Barrett, Tamás; Carney, James (2015-08-14). "The deification of historical figures and the emergence of priesthoods as a solution to a network coordination problem". Religion, Brain & Behavior. 6 (4): 307–317. doi:10.1080/2153599X.2015.1063001. ISSN   2153-599X. S2CID   146979343.
  7. ↑ Lindenfors, Patrik; Svensson, Jonas (2021-04-20). "Evolutionary explanations for religion: An interdisciplinary critical review". Research Ideas and Outcomes. 7: e66132. doi: 10.3897/rio.7.e66132 . ISSN   2367-7163. S2CID   234492800.
  8. 1 2 3 The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by Robin Dunbar and Louise Barret, Oxford University Press, 2007, Chapter 44: "The Evolution of Religion" by Joseph A. Bulbulia
  9. ↑ Sosis, Richard (2000). "Religion and Intragroup Cooperation: Preliminary Results of a Comparative Analysis of Utopian Communities". Cross-Cultural Research . 34 (1). SAGE Publishing: 70–87. doi:10.1177/106939710003400105. S2CID   44050390.
  10. ↑ Sosis, Richard; Bressler, Eric R. (2003). "Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion". Cross-Cultural Research . 37 (2). SAGE Publishing: 211–239. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.500.5715 . doi:10.1177/1069397103037002003. S2CID   7908906.
  11. ↑ Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 298–299. ISBN   978-0307455772.
  12. ↑ Nesse, Randolph (2019). Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry. Dutton. pp. 172–176. ISBN   978-1101985663.
  13. ↑ West-Eberhard, Mary Jane (1975). "The Evolution of Social Behavior by Kin Selection". The Quarterly Review of Biology . 50 (1). University of Chicago Press: 1–33. doi:10.1086/408298. JSTOR   2821184. S2CID   14459515.
  14. ↑ West-Eberhard, Mary Jane (1979). "Sexual Selection, Social Competition, and Evolution". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society . 123 (4). American Philosophical Society: 222–34. JSTOR   986582.
  15. ↑ Nesse, Randolph M. (2007). "Runaway social selection for displays of partner value and altruism". Biological Theory . 2 (2). Springer Science+Business Media: 143–55. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.409.3359 . doi:10.1162/biot.2007.2.2.143. S2CID   195097363.
  16. ↑ Nesse, Randolph M. (2009). "10. Social Selection and the Origins of Culture". In Schaller, Mark; Heine, Steven J.; Norenzayan, Ara; Yamagishi, Toshio; Kameda, Tatsuya (eds.). Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis. pp. 137–50. ISBN   978-0805859119.
  17. ↑ Wilson, Edward O. (2007). The Social Conquest of Earth. Liveright. ISBN   978-0871403636.
  18. ↑ Sosis, R.; Kress, H. C.; Boster, J. S. (2007). "Scars for war: evaluating alternative signaling explanations for cross-cultural variance in ritual costs". Evolution and Human Behavior. 28 (4): 234–247. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.628.3646 . doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.02.007.
  19. ↑ Koenig, Harold G.; Cohen, Harvey J. (2001). The Link between Religion and Health: Psychoneuroimmunology and the Faith Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-514360-4.
  20. ↑ Hagerty, Barbara (2009). "Can Positive Thoughts Help Heal Another Person?". National Public Radio. Retrieved 2009-12-19. Ironson says over time, those who turned to God after their diagnosis had a much lower viral load and maintained those powerful immune cells at a much higher rate than those who turned away from God.
  21. ↑ Duenwald, Mary (May 7, 2002). "Religion and Health: New Research Revives an Old Debate". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-12-19.
  22. ↑ "How Religion Can Improve Health". Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2011-09-01.
  23. ↑ Gould, S. J. (1991). "Exaptation: a crucial tool for an evolutionary psychology". Journal of Social Issues. 47 (3): 43–65. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1991.tb01822.x.
  24. ↑ Atran, S; Norenzayan, A (2004). "Religion's evolutionary landscape: counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion" (PDF). The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 27 (6). Behavioral and Brain Sciences: 713–30, discussion 730–70. doi:10.1017/s0140525x04000172. PMID   16035401. S2CID   1177255.
  25. ↑ Lienard, P.; Boyer, P. (2006). "Whence collective rituals? A cultural selection model of ritualized behavior". American Anthropologist. 108 (4): 824–827. doi:10.1525/aa.2006.108.4.814.
  26. ↑ Barrett, Justin L. (2004). "3". Why Would Anyone Believe in God. AltaMira Press. ISBN   0-7591-0667-3.
  27. ↑ The New York Times Darwin's God March 4, 2007
  28. ↑ Landau, M. J.; Solomon, S.; Pyszczynski, T.; Greenberg, J. (2007). "On the compatibility of terror management theory and perspectives on human evolution". Evolutionary Psychology. 5 (3): 476–519. doi: 10.1177/147470490700500303 .
  29. ↑ Guthrie, Stewart Elliot (1995). Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-506901-3.
  30. ↑ Boyer, Pascal. "Functional Origins of Religious concepts". Archived from the original on 2009-10-10. Retrieved 2009-12-19.
  31. 1 2 Boyer, Pascal (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought . Basic Books. ISBN   0-465-00695-7.

Bundled references

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.