Religious prosocial beliefs may have shaped human genetic evolution

Evidence

Drawing together evidence from across the evolutionary, cognitive, and social sciences, the argument in this book offers this third path that locates the origins of prosocial religions in a powerful combination of genetic and cultural evolution. This alternative has three foundations. First, it builds directly on the cognitive approach, which provides important clues about how certain intuitions and cognitive biases push human minds toward some recurrent templates that support supernatural beliefs. Second, it combines cognitive tendencies with cultural evolution to explain how some cultural mutants of these beliefs spread in populations at the expense of rival mutants. Third, understanding the forces of cultural competition30 between groups helps us explain why groups that stumbled on such successful mutants spread and expanded. Therefore, one virtue of this “third way” is that it reconciles and consolidates important insights and observations from both social and cognitive approaches. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 50

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Lays out the book’s three-part framework: cognitive biases, cultural mutation competition, and intergroup cultural competition — a useful precis of the whole argument.
• XREF: The ‘third way’ mediating purely cognitive and purely social accounts parallels the reader’s own integration of Norenzayan with Baumard’s partner-choice and Henrich’s cultural evolution literature.

Related

• Religious survival advantage resists explanation by individual or genetic selection (similarity 0.90)
• Prosocial religious practices may have genetically altered their adopting groups (similarity 0.88)
• Religious practices may have genetically altered human populations through gene-culture coevolution (similarity 0.84)
• Demographic success of prosocial religions explains their global prevalence today (similarity 0.82)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rivals through group solidarity advantages in warfare (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural evolution has been the central driver of human genetic evolution for eons. (similarity 0.81)
• Religious belief stems from both intuitive cognition and cultural transmission mechanisms. (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural evolution favors religious groups that maximize reproduction (similarity 0.81)
• Religious practices assembled by cultural evolution, not genetic adaptations (similarity 0.81)
• Prosocial religions outcompeted rival groups historically and scaled up human social organization (similarity 0.80)
• Prosocial religions produce large-scale cooperation and then spread culturally (similarity 0.80)
• Religious fertility advantages are culturally transmitted, not genetically fixed (similarity 0.80)
• Religious groups expand through higher fertility rates, not just persuasion (similarity 0.80)
• Culture has redirected human genetic evolution since Homo erectus, not only recently. (similarity 0.80)
• Religion is an evolving family-resemblance package, not a natural kind (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Religious practices may have shaped human genes, but proof is pending #corroborates (0.95) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 853