And what does this have to do with religion? Fundamental social motives and the varieties of religious experience. Roes, F. L., & Raymond, M. (2003). Drug use and addiction: An evolutionary perspective. Not affiliated On the one hand, the reliance on the Diltheyian conception of Geisteswissenschaften and the “territorial approach”, which argues that scholars in the humanities study exceptional and sole cases, has precluded many scholars from viewing events as part of larger evolutionary processes. They are: commitment theory, which postulates that religion is a system of costly signaling that reduces deception and creates Another abiding theme in Evolution, Religion, & Cognitive Science is that of the compatibility of ECSR, either with religious faith and practice or with other scholarly approaches to the study of religion. (2013). Atkinson, Q. D., & Whitehouse, H. (2011). Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions, prospects, and limitations. A., & Buhrmester, M. D. (2017). The second theory regarding the origin of religion is the evolutionary approach. Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F., Willard A. K., Slingerland, W. E., Gervais, R. A., McNamara, R. A., & Henrich, J. Mentalizing deficits constrain belief in personal God. Belief in moralizing gods. Scholars employing an evolutionary approach to the study of religion and religious beliefs search for ultimate explanations of the origin, propagation, and persistence of religious beliefs. Cite as. Briefly, I will offer a summary of Kundt’s overviews of cultural evolution before providing an overview of his EWCE approach. Religion is not an adaptation. Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: A guide for the perplexed. Do triangles play tricks? A. Terrizzi, J. A multidimensional analysis of reproductive and cooperative morals. The ubiquity of religion, cross-culturally and historically, suggests that it is likely to have an evolutionary basis. (2000). Christianity, Islam) are spread so far and wide around the world and why large­scale societies and prosociality are as well. It is argued that each of these approaches can potentially account for important aspects of religion and that frameworks which integrate by-product and adaptationist accounts and draw on the idea of cultural evolution are particularly promising. Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potential misunderstandings. Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. White, C., Baimel, A., & Norenzayan, A. But, here we bump up against yet another potential problem for evolutionary anthropologists. The cultural morphospace of ritual form: Examining modes of religiosity cross-culturally. Here we describe the behavioral ecological approach to religion. (2017). Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior. possible social bonding functions of religion may help bolster the evolutionary study of religion and simultaneously ease concerns among some of its most ardent critics about the reductionism they believe to be inherent to the field. Reddish, P., Tok, P., & Kundt, R. (2016). In this chapter we critically review evolutionary approaches to understanding religion by looking, in turn, at three main perspectives: religion as a by-product, religion as an adaptation, and religion as the product of cultural evolutionary processes. 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. The virtues of intolerance: Is religion as an adaptation for war? “Religion” is complex and diverse. Participation in religious ritual can be very costly for an individual in terms of time, money or even physical pain or bodily harm and the question – from an evolutionary perspective – is why would an individual engage in this costly behavior when there is no obvious reproductive benefit that results? Wlodarski, R., & Pearce, E. (2016). The ecology of religious beliefs. Strassman, B. I., Kurapati, N. T., Hug, E. E., Gillespie, B. W., Karafet, T. M., & Hammer, M. F. (2012). Currently much of the focus on the study of religion more broadly is centered around Abrahamic religions, though Purzycki says, “We know that not all societies are complex, not all religions are Abrahamic, and not all gods are concerned with morality.” We just don’t have a good sense about the variation that exists across cultures, therefore the first step for anthropologists should be describing that variation. Dunbar, R. I. M. (2013). Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. pp 19-53 | We hope that you all enjoyed the AAA/CAA meeting in Vancouver as much as we did…. Sosis, R., & Alcorta, C. (2003). James R. Liddle and Todd K. Shackelford Oxford Library of Psychology. Next, in order to have a better grasp on how and for what purposes religion evolved, we need to explain the variation. Part of Springer Nature. Is religion adaptive. Rottman, J., Zhu, L., Wang, W., Schillaci, R. S., Clark, K. J., & Kelemen, D. (2017). In P. McNamara (Ed.). (2014). How do rituals affect cooperation? The ties that bind us: Ritual, fusion, and identification. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. In a discussion with Purzycki, he suggested the path forward for the study of religion by evolutionary anthropologists can serve two critical purposes. Religious cognition and behaviour in autism: The role of mentalizing. Bulbulia, J. In the most primitive period of a culture, the most basic form of religion begins with an innate feeling that a spiritual force exists. Bulbulia, J., & Sosis, R. (2011). Evolutionary theory includes a number of major hypotheses that can be applied to the study of all traits, including the traits associated with religion. Proponents of this theory believe, as in the subjective theory, that religion originates with man. (2006). Powell, R., & Clarke, S. (2012). Kirkpatrick, L. (2006). As Purzycki suggests, the study of religion seems to be at a critical point and as evolutionary anthropologists, we have particular skills we can bring to bear on the development of scholarship going forward. What predicts religiosity? others they weren’t related to or didn’t know and that through this cooperation, group sizes could expand with minimal conflict. Peoples, H. C., Duda, P., & Marlowe, F. W. (2016). The origin of religion as a small-scale phenomenon. (2017). Johnson, K. A., Li, Y. J., & Cohen, A. This paper discusses some questions associated with the evolutionary study of religion. Cognitive science of religion: What is it and why is it? Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potential misunderstandings. Kirkpatrick, L. (2011). God’s punishment and public goods. On aims and methods in ethology. In her 2015 EAS talk and her 2016 paper, Power describes two modes of religious practice among Hindu and Christian residents living in two villages in rural South India. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. Kanazawa, S. (2015). (2014). This article examines three anthropological theories explaining how religion has evolved and continues to evolve. Evolutionary religious studies: A beginner’s guide. Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Signaling, solidarity, and the sacred: The evolution of religious behaviour. Schmitt, D. P., & Fuller, R. C. (2015). Smith, E. A., Mulder, M., & Hill, K. (2001). In this article, we introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a ‘consilient’ approach to advance the academic study of religion. an overview for an evolutionary approach to religion that is not reliant on “cultural evolution,” which he terms Evolution Without Cultural Evolution (EWCE). Are children “intuitive theists”? Presuming no specialized knowledge of evolutionary theory, this reader-friendly textbook explains why and how communication became the determining factor in human development. Whitehouse, H., & Lanman, J. This has been a challenging few months for all of us, with no end in sight…, We hope that you are all managing to find some peace and balance in these challenging times…. (2017). Koppers approach to the study of religion by anthropologists. Buss, D. M. (1995). Yes, No, Neutral, but mostly, we don’t know. The Evolutionary Approach Though that religion naturally evolved from the simple to complex ant that this evolution was a natural consequence of human nature * Was centered on the questions of when and how religion began Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Human behavioral ecology: Current research and future prospects. Evolutionary Communication presents the first comprehensive evolutionary approach to the study of human communication. Barrett, J. L. (2007). The evolutionary origin of religions 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. The narrower focus thus will be on analysing methodological natura lism and arguments presented to justify it as the preferable position for all scholars of religion… Whitehouse, H., Francois, P., & Turchin, P. (2015). Here we describe the behavioral ecological approach to religion. Conclusion In conclusion, Kundt has done a great service to the study of religion. Nature’s medicine: Religiosity as an adaptation for health and cooperation. logical naturalism and the issue of its justifiability in the evolutionary study of religion as well as for the study of religion in general. This may be why religions with moralistic gods (e.g. Bering, J., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). In their recent Nature paper, Purzycki and his colleagues also show a positive association between the perception of a moralistic god(s) and societal complexity, as well as prosocial tendencies of individuals. Perceiving minds and gods: How mind perception enables, constrains, and is triggered by belief in gods. Understanding the study of religious phenomena as the study of incomparable individual events severely limits the … (2007). Many of us are interested in explaining how particular behaviors allow individual humans to adapt to their surrounding environments in ways that increase their own survival and reproduction, and it isn’t immediately clear that participation in religious behaviors should directly influence either survival or reproduction. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available, Religion, Crime and Punishment Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia. Supernatural believers attribute more intentions to random movements than skeptics: An fMRI study. In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, & E. Harris (Eds.). Kathrine Starkweather is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co­editor of EAS News. Evolutionary Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion Historically, evolutionary anthropologists have allocated the majority of our attention to topics like subsistence strategies, parental investment, warfare, etc. Xygalatas, D., Mitkidis, P., Fischer, R., Reddish, P., Skewes, J., Feertz, A. W., & Bulbulia, J. In E. Slingerland & M. Collard (Eds.). If religion is a western concept that has been used to shore up the authority of the colonial and sovereign state, through shifting, arbitrary demarcations between “religion” tradition, culture, reason, and the nation, then scholars should be wary of treating it as a stable, coherent object of academic study. This force is impersonal and pervades all of creation. Botero, C. A., Gardner, B., Kirby, K. R., Bulbulia, J., Gavin, M. C., & Gray, R. D. (2014). Religion, meaning, and the brain. A., Hennes, E. P., Stern, C., Gosling, S. D., & Graham, J. Watts, F., & Bretherton, R. (2017). The role of evolutionary psychology within an interdisciplinary science of religion. Specifically, within­group prosociality and cooperation are useful for coordinating in subsistence work or warfare – making sure everyone in the group is fed and safe. (2014). © 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Costly signalling increases trust, even across religious affiliations. We have seen an increase in the exploration into evolutionary explanations for religious behavior and religious affiliation in the evolutionary and human behavioral ecological literature over the last few years. Applying evolutionary theory to human behaviour: Past differences and current debates. (2013). This recent focus has also shed new light on the importance of further empirical and theoretical exploration into all aspects of religious behavior and motivations from an evolutionary perspective. Hall, D. L., Cohen, A. Riekki, T., Lindeman, M., & Raij, T. T. (2014). It begins with a discussion of the Darwinian-inspired evolutionary approach to history. Peoples, H. C., & Marlowe, F. W. (2012). The ubiquity of religion, cross-culturally and historically, suggests that it is likely to have an evolutionary basis. How to pursue the adaptationist program in psychology. Powered by. They suggest that this association may be partially responsible for the evolution of social complexity in that religion served as a mechanism through which people were motivated to act in a prosocial way towards The God allusion: Individual variation in agency detection, mentalizing and schizotypy and their association with religious beliefs and behaviours. Kelemen, D. (2004). In W. G. Oxtoby, R. C. Amore, & A. Hussain (Eds.). Evolutionary accounts of human behavioural diversity. Weeden, J., & Kurzban, R. (2013). Origins and evolution of religion from a Darwinian point of view: Synthesis of different theories. Explaining moral religions. In T. Heams, P. Huneman, G. Lecointre, & M. Silberstein (Eds.). Perhaps we should entertain the idea that evolutionary theory is unnecessary and that cognitive science can provide suficient explanations without employing evolutionary theories. Schloss, J. P., & Murray, M. J. Then, I attempt to push Kundt’s reasoning even further. A well-disposed social anthropologist’s problems with the ‘cognitive science of religion’ The adaptationist-byproduct debate on the evolution of religion: Five misunderstandings of the adaptationist program. Historically, evolutionary anthropologists have allocated the majority of our attention to topics like subsistence strategies, parental investment, warfare, etc. Wood, B., & Baker, J. (2016). Baumard, N., & Chevallier, C. (2015). Nettle, D., Gibson, M. A., Lawson, D. W., & Sear, R. (2013). Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Contextual Approaches to the Study of Religious Systems: A Proposition of Synthesis August 2019 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Johnson, D., & Reeve, Z. The role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity: Five predictions and a drum roll. 2011). A primary focus for the group­ level study of evolution and religion has been on ‘moralistic gods.’ Hervey Peoples and Frank Marlowe (2012) found a positive association between the size and social complexity of a society and belief in a moralistic god or gods (meaning the society has perceptions that gods are increasingly knowledgeable of one’s thoughts and actions and that they are increasingly likely to punish violators of social norms). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.07.003, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64428-8_2. Abell, F., Happe, F., & Frith, U. a list of EAS sessions, roundtables, meetings, and social events at AAA 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia as well as other sessions of possible interest, © 2020 Evolutionary Anthropology Society. Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips. Lanman, J. This quest often pairs in debate two opposing perspectives: the adaptationist and “by-product” explanations of religion and religious beliefs. Others, like Benjamin Purzycki, Scott Atran and former EAS president Frank Marlowe, have been examining the contribution of religion to the evolution of increasing population size and societal complexity. Buddhist traditions. Durrant, R., & Ward, T. (2011). Cultural influences on the teleological stance: Evidence from China. (2017). Some scholars, like Richard Sosis, Joseph Heinrich and EAS member William Irons, have been focusing on the evolutionary origins of religion. Norenzayan, A., Gervais, W. M., & Trzesniewski, K. H. (2012). Buss, D. M., Haselton, M. G., Shackelford, T. K., Bleske, A. L., & Wakefield, J. C. (1998). Those who perform greater and costlier acts in the short­term are more likely to be perceived as physically strong and hard­working, while those performing subtle, long­term investment behaviors are more likely to be seen as more devout and more prosocial by their peers. Evolutionary perspectives on religion: An overview and synthesis. The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Finally, scholars such as Richard Sosis and EAS member Eleanor Power have tested specific predictions that have emerged from evolutionary theory regarding the individual benefits of engaging in religious behavior. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Religion. restrict the evolutionary study of religion to genetic systems, and many evolution- ary researchers use a naturalized conception of ‘culture’to explain the systems that express and conserve religions (Geertz and Markusson 2010; Gervais et al. (2011). Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation. A., Fleischman, D. S., Goetz, C. D., Lewis, D. M. G., Perilloux, C., & Buss, D. M. (2010). The authors also suggest that these results may help understand the evolution of the wide­ranging cooperation found in large­scale societies. It is call… The role of evolutionary explanations in criminology. 63.249.93.208. Wilson, D. S., & Green, W. S. (2011). Because interactionists study one-on-one, everyday interactions between individuals, a scholar using this approach might ask questions focused on this dynamic. In C. Sabbagh & M. Schmitt (Eds.). Where do gods come from? Drawing from the latest scientific research, Evolutionary Communication represents a … The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. Hafer, C. L., & Sutton, R. (2016). Atkinson, Q. D., & Bourrat, P. (2011). Tinbergen, N. (1963). Gervais, W. M. (2013). Discerning devotion: Testing the signalling theory of religion. Why should prosociality matter to other community members? (2011). Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion: The Psychology of Religious Experience, 82-104. Bourrat, P. (2015). Therefore, an individual’s costly contribution to the group cooperative effort may be seen as beneficial to all and people with such a reputation may gain individual benefits. Belief in a just world. The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Radek Kundt compares the notion of evolution in cultural evolutionary theories with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory to determine the value of the biological concept for studying culture. Sosis, R., & Bulbulia, J. Extreme rituals promote prosociality. He also introduces an alternative evolutionary approach to the study of culture which does not claim that the principles of neo-Darwinian evolution should be applicable outside the biological domain and shows that this alternative evolutionary approach provides a deeply enriching line of enquiry. In P. McNamara (Ed. Watts, J., Greenhill, S. J., Atkinson, Q. D., Currie, T. E., Bulbulia, J., & Gray, R. D. (2015). Sosis, R. (2009). B. This is the most popular view that is taught or implied in the study of religion. Power showed that community members were perceiving different signals from different modes of practice. Jost, J. T., Hawkins, C. B., Nosek, B. Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2013). Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. manities (e.g., Tylor’s individualist and intellectualist approach vs. Durkheim’s collectivist and emotionalist approach), the sciences bring a suite of ontologi-cal and epistemological assumptions that divide disciplines studying religion cross-sectionally, producing tremendous volumes of mutually incompatible theories of religion. Signalling theory and the evolution of religious cooperation. Evolutionary psychology: New perspectives on cognition and motivation. This chapter focuses on cultural or sociocultural evolution. Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion surveys the historical background of cultural evolution as used in the study of religion, pinpointing major objections to … Scholars employing an evolutionary approach to the study of religion and religious beliefs search for ultimate explanations of the origin, propagation, and persistence of religious beliefs. the honest signal must be received by community members. Brown, G. R., & Richerson, P. J. Religion as a means to assure paternity. Durrant, R., & Ward, T. (2012). Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A. V., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., … Ross, C. (2016). Brown, G. R., Dickins, T. E., Sear, R., & Laland, K. N. (2011). B., Meyer, K. K., Varley, A. H., & Brewer, G. A. Evolutionary accounts of belief in supernatural punishment: A critical review. Evolutionary explanations in the social and behavioural sciences. Power, E. A. What are the causes and consequences of belief in Karma. Evolution in the genus. Evolutionary theory, he says, can tell us why religion evolved and what it was meant to achieve, which means it can explain why the religious act the way they do. Religion is the result of an evolutionary process in human culture. In P. McNamara (Ed.). Religion as an evolutionary byproduct: A critique of the standard model. One topic that has been given only minimal space is religion. The nature and dynamics of world religions: A life-history approach. In S. Clarke, R. Powell, & J. Savulescu (Eds.). Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion surveys the historical background of cultural evolution as used in the study of religion, pinpointing major objections to classical nineteenth-century theories. Religious actions speak louder than words: Exposure to credibility-enhancing displays predicts theism. Researchers focused on a group­level explanation of the role of religion in the evolution of human behavior suggest that an individual might participate in costly behavior because he or she benefits through benefiting the group at large. Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signalling theory of religion. Durrant, R., Adamson, S., Todd, F., & Sellman, D. (2009). Sosis and others have shown evidence for the honesty of the signal: religious signalers across societies are, on average, more prosocial than those who do not signal their commitment to the group via religious ritual. A. However, this assumes that the evolutionary approach is our only option. Richerson, P. J., & Newson, L. (2008). One topic that has been given only minimal space is religion. In his new podcast for the Religious Studies Project, Callum Brown has given us an excellent introduction to the historical approach to the study of religion. Fischer, R., Callander, R., Reddish, P., & Bulbulia, J. In S. Clarke, R. Powell, & J. Savulescu (Eds.). (2013). First Edition. First, individuals may engage in behaviors that are quite dramatic, but only costly in the short­ term, such as piercing their skin with spears, walking across hot coals and becoming possessed by a deity. This is a preview of subscription content. Durrant, R., & Haig, B. D. (2001). Smith, Z., & Arrow, H. (2010). Belief in a just god (and a just society): A system justification perspective on religious ideology. Not logged in (2013). Is religion an evolutionarily evoked disease-avoidance strategy? Johnson, D. D. (2005). Westport, CT: … Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion surveys the historical background of cultural evolution as used in the study of religion, pinpointing major objections to classical nineteenth-century theories. Although evolutionists agree about the general theoretical framework, they have disagreed about which hypotheses best describe the nature of religion. In conversation with Christopher Cotter, Brown outlines rival traditions within the history of religion and demonstrates what each has contributed to our understanding of secularisation. Adaptation, exaptations, and spandrels. First and foremost, we hope that this email finds all of you in good health. On the varieties of sexual experience. Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Subsistence and the evolution of religion. There are three forms of modern Darwinian evolutionism in the social sciences and humanities: the gene-based biological, the social learning-based sociocultural, and gene–culture coevolution dealing with their interaction. Religion poses a problem for evolutionary anthropologists. (2015). The behavioural ecology of religion: The benefits and costs of one evolutionary approach. ), Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. The eleven volumes of the Origin of the Idea of God (Schmidt and Koppers, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, 1920-55) are incredibly erudite-but the theological underpinnings are so evident at every step that all but the historians of ethnology can only regret the enormous input of energy Using costly signaling theory, some have argued that religion is one way to honestly signal one’s commitment to prosociality within the community. Wilson, D. S., & Wilson, E. O. 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