Many challenges confront evolutionary scholars of religion. The origins and adaptive value of religion and the conditions that selected for its evolution are difficult to discern. Patterns of religious behavior, like other areas of human social behavior, have undergone significant change over our evolutionary history. Evans-Pritchard 1 argued that dramatic historical changes in religious behavior render it impossible to generalize across categories of religions such as tribal, chiefdom, and contemporary world religions. Evolutionary theories of religion, however, necessarily assume that the relevant behaviors can be generalized across time and space. Moreover, the multiple roles and complex functions of religion render it difficult to capture within a single theoretical approach. Indeed, examining the origins of religion, the development of religious institutions, the ecological determinants of religious behavior, and whether religion is currently adaptive constitute separate areas of inquiry requiring different methodological tools. Even when analyses are restricted to a specific time and place, there is an extensive range of phenomena that fall under the rubric of religion, including myth, ritual, taboo, symbolism, morality, altered states of consciousness, and belief in noncorporeal beings. Concomitantly, there is enormous crosscultural variability within any one of these phenomena.Religious behaviors often entail significant proximate costs, such as time, energetic, and material costs, as well as physical and psychological pain, that appear to be greater than any derived benefits. Consequently, religious behavior poses a genuine challenge for those who employ optimization, rational choice, or other egoisticbased models to explain human behavioral variation. Researchers have sought to unravel this dilemma by positing somatic, reproductive, and psychological benefits conferred by religious behaviors on their practitioners that could outweigh these costs. Realized benefits include improved health, survivorship, economic opportunities, sense of community, psychological well-being, assistance during crises, mating opportunities, and fertility (see Reynolds and Tanner 27 for a review). Various scholars have independently concluded that religious communities are able to offer many of these benefits because religions solve significant communication problems inherent in human life. 28 -31 Although our understanding of how religion solves such problems is still incomplete, recent theoretical and empirical findings offer intriguing clues to religion's evolution and efficacy. WHAT IS RELIGION?While there are countless definitions of religion in the anthropological literature, 6,32,33 belief in the supernatural (that is, noncorporeal beings) Richard Sosis is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. His current research interests include the evolution of cooperation, utopian societies, and the behavioral ecology of religion. He has conducted fieldwork on Ifaluk Atoll in the Federated States...
We also thank the kibbutz movements for their cooperation and for agreeing to provide economic data and Shlomo Getz for supplying timely data on privatization.
The costly signaling theory of religion posits that religious rituals and taboos can promote intragroup cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. To test this theory, the authors collected historical data on the constraints and ritual requirements that eighty-three 19th-century U.S. communes imposed on their members. All communes must solve the collective action problem of cooperative labor to survive; thus, they are an ideal population to assess the impact of ritual and taboo on intragroup cooperation. The authors evaluated whether communes that imposed costlier requirements survived longer than less demanding communes and whether costly requirements and religiosity interact to promote cooperation. The results support aspects of the costly signaling theory of religion and reveal new avenues for its development. The authors discuss some of the shortcomings of the theory and explore ways to expand the theory that incorporate additional features of ritual and religious belief.
A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from largescale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development and, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples.facial attractiveness | evolution | cross-cultural | aggression | stereotyping
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