Religious practices may have genetically altered human populations through gene-culture coevolution
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
Category: Causal Relationships
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the lactose-tolerance analogy imply measurable genetic population differences between religious and secular groups today?
Related
- Prosocial religious practices may have genetically altered their adopting groups (similarity 0.92)
- Religious fertility advantages are culturally transmitted, not genetically fixed (similarity 0.84)
- Religious prosocial beliefs may have shaped human genetic evolution (similarity 0.84)
- Religious survival advantage resists explanation by individual or genetic selection (similarity 0.82)
- Cultural evolution favors religious groups that maximize reproduction (similarity 0.82)
- Religious groups expand through higher fertility rates, not just persuasion (similarity 0.82)
- Culture-fueled lactose persistence spread to a third of humanity in ten millennia (similarity 0.81)
- Religious doctrines that boost fertility outcompete rival religious groups demographically. (similarity 0.80)
- Culture has redirected human genetic evolution since Homo erectus, not only recently. (similarity 0.80)
- Religious conservative sexual norms serve demographic group survival (similarity 0.79)
- Cultural evolution has been the central driver of human genetic evolution for eons. (similarity 0.79)
- Fertility and age structure dwarf conversion in shaping religious demographics. (similarity 0.79)
- High fertility plus conversion, not doctrine, make world religions (similarity 0.79)
- Religious practices assembled by cultural evolution, not genetic adaptations (similarity 0.78)