Genealogy of Religion

Exploring the Origins, History and Future of Religion

Entries Tagged as 'group size'

Altruism in Religionless Rats

December 9th, 2011 · 5 Comments · Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, Morality

No one who has ever kept rats as pets (as I have) will be surprised by a study that appeared in yesterday’s Science and is getting major media coverage. In “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats,” the authors report:
Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether [...]

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Robert Bellah on Religious Evolution

August 18th, 2011 · No Comments · Axial Age, Cultural Evolution, History, Neolithic

In less than a month, we will be able to lay our hands on Robert Bellah’s much anticipated Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age.

It will be the latest in a string of books over the last decade which purport to explain the origins and development of what we today call [...]

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The Sins of an Evolutionary Psychologist

April 22nd, 2011 · 5 Comments · Emotions, Evolutionary Adaptation, Methodology

In a recent essay on the cult of David Foster Wallace, Nathan Heller notes that DFW’s mature work deals with the crisis of contemporary pluralism: “how to think intelligently and truthfully about the world when that world is full of intelligent and truthful people who adhere to irreconcilable schools of thought.” While Heller [...]

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Pair Bonding & Ritual Marriage

March 18th, 2011 · 6 Comments · Ecology, Evolution, Ritual

Over the past few years, something like a perfect storm has been brewing over human pair bonding and the profound impacts it has wrought on human social structure. This is a welcome development in a field that has long been dominated by those who wish to root the relatively modern idea of marriage in ancient [...]

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Sizing Up Kinship: Larger Groups Win

March 16th, 2011 · 8 Comments · Evolution, Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, Hunter-Gatherers

There are a number of scholars who claim that “religion” evolved as an adaptation. What kind of adaptation? A group level adaptation. The story usually goes like this: at some unknown time during the middle or upper Paleolithic, certain groups of hominins developed proto-religious beliefs. These beliefs supposedly caused group members to dance, sing, and [...]

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Proto-Religious Foragers v. Non-Religious Foragers

February 9th, 2011 · 3 Comments · Archaeology, Evolution, Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, Hunter-Gatherers

In a recent post on group level selection and the evolution of religion, I observed that if we assume such selection was operating on human groups during the Paleolithic, three factors play a major role in determining which groups come out on top. These three factors are: (1) group size, (2) technology, and (3) language. [...]

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Group Level Selection? The Non-Evolution of Religion

January 16th, 2011 · 15 Comments · Evolution, Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, History, Ritual

There are a number of scholars who claim that “religion” evolved as an adaptation.  What kind of adaptation? A group level adaptation. The story usually goes like this: at some unknown time during the middle or upper Paleolithic, certain groups of hominins developed proto-religious beliefs. These beliefs, which are rarely if ever specified, somehow gave [...]

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Making Religious Babies: A Cultural Phenomenon

October 5th, 2010 · No Comments · Cultural Evolution, Ecology, Evolution, Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct, Hunter-Gatherers, Shamanism

As I noted in A Tale of Two Religion Scholars, Dr. Michael Blume’s research (which you can find at Homo religious) shows that religious groups out-reproduce their secular counterparts.  The data are solid and correspond to the commandments of most religions: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
Given that religious people make more babies than secular people, Blume [...]

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The “Sin” of Sodomy and Demographic Imperatives

July 13th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Ecology, Economy, Evolutionary Adaptation, History, Morality, Power, Ritual

When attempting to determine whether something is “natural ” (vis-a-vis yesterday’s post on Catholicism and homosexuality) one good way of investigating the issue is to use the genealogical method.  So far as I can tell, there are no hunter-gatherer or pre-Neolithic societies that had taboos against homosexuality.  We can therefore trace the history of the [...]

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