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. B. The God allusion: Individual variation in agency detection, mentalizing and schizotypy and their association with religious beliefs and behaviours. Buss, D. M. (1995). Why should prosociality matter to other community members? A. (2017). (2014). Rottman, J., Zhu, L., Wang, W., Schillaci, R. S., Clark, K. J., & Kelemen, D. (2017). Nettle, D., Gibson, M. A., Lawson, D. W., & Sear, R. (2013). In J. Bulbulia, R. Sosis, & E. Harris (Eds.). 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 Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Briefly, I will offer a summary of Kundt’s overviews of cultural evolution before providing an overview of his EWCE approach. How do rituals affect cooperation? Religion poses a problem for evolutionary anthropologists. A multidimensional analysis of reproductive and cooperative morals. Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Belief in a just world. 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. 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. (2011). 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. 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. Kathrine Starkweather is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and co­editor of EAS News. Hall, D. L., Cohen, A. 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. Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. Durrant, R., & Ward, T. (2011). Are children “intuitive theists”? 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. Baumard, N., & Chevallier, C. (2015). Religious cognition and behaviour in autism: The role of mentalizing. Where do gods come from? Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potential misunderstandings. The adaptationist-byproduct debate on the evolution of religion: Five misunderstandings of the adaptationist program. Christianity, Islam) are spread so far and wide around the world and why large­scale societies and prosociality are as well. Koppers approach to the study of religion by anthropologists. Jost, J. T., Hawkins, C. B., Nosek, B. 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. Dunbar, R. I. M. (2013). Schloss, J. P., & Murray, M. J. 2011). Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). 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. In W. G. Oxtoby, R. C. Amore, & A. Hussain (Eds.). The origin of religion as a small-scale phenomenon. Xygalatas, D., Mitkidis, P., Fischer, R., Reddish, P., Skewes, J., Feertz, A. W., & Bulbulia, J. Not affiliated 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. Smith, E. A., Mulder, M., & Hill, K. (2001). Bulbulia, J. the honest signal must be received by community members. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. The cultural morphospace of ritual form: Examining modes of religiosity cross-culturally. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. 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. 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