Prosocial religious practices may have genetically altered their adopting groups

Evidence

Nevertheless, it is possible that religious fertility is shaped by a process called gene-culture coevolution. Just as the lactose-tolerance allele spread in less than 10,000 years in groups that adopted milk-producing cows, goats, and camels, it is conceivable that prosocial religious beliefs and practices adopted by some groups but not others might have exerted selection pressures on the human gene pool of these groups. This provocative idea is just starting to receive attention. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 501

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Norenzayan’s own Big God mechanism into biological territory; relevant to evaluating whether the omniscient-gaze mechanism is purely cultural or has genetic substrate.