Religion is an evolutionary puzzle. It involves beliefs in counterfactual worlds and engagement in costly rituals. Yet religion is widespread across all human cultures and eras. This begs the question, why are so many people attracted to religion?
In The Attraction of Religion, essays by leading scholars in evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and religious studies demonstrate how religion may be related to evolutionary adaptations because religious commitments involve fitness-enhancing behaviours that promote reproduction, kinship, and social solidarity. Could it be that religion is wide-spread, at least in the modern world, because it helps to facilitate cooperative breeding? International contributors explore the philosophical and theoretical arguments for and against the use of costly signalling, sexual selection, and related theories to explain religion, and empirical findings that support or disconfirm such claims. The first book-length treatment that focuses specifically on costly signalling, sexual selection, and related evolutionary theories to explain religion, The Attraction of Religion will be an important contribution to the field and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of evolutionary psychology, religion and science, the psychology of religion, and anthropology of religion.
Jason Slone is Associate Professor of Cognition and Culture at the School of Arts and Sciences, Tiffin University, USA.
1. Introduction, Jason Slone (Professor of Cognition and Culture, School of Arts & Sciences, Tiffin University, USA)
2. What does Religion have to do with Sex? A View from Biology, Jason Bulbulia (Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University, New Zealand), and Richard Sosis (Professor of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, USA)
3. Identifying Causal Variables in the Emerging Study of Religion and Sexual Selection Theory, James A. Van Slyke ( Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Fresno Pacific University, USA)
4. Losing My Religion: A Life-History Analysis of the Decline in Religious Attendance from Childhood to Adulthood, Jason Weeden (independent academic)
5. How is it with thy religion, pray? Selection of Religion among Individuals or Groups, Michael Blume (Chair of Religious Studies, Jene University, Germany)
6. Killing in the Name of: Religiously-Motivated Violence as a Sexual Weapon, Yael Sela (doctoral student in psychology, Oakland University, USA),Todd Shackelford (Chair of Psychology, Oakland University, USA), and James R.Liddle (doctoral student, Florida Atlantic University).
7. Costly Signaling Theory, Sexual Selection, and the Influence of Ancestors on Religious Behaviour, Craig Palmer (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri, USA)
8. The Dividends of Discounting Pain, Pierre Lienard (Assistant Professor of Anthroplogy, University of Nevada, Las Vagas), Matthew Martinez (Researcher, Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vagas)
9. Religions as Firms: What do they sell? A Microeconomics Theoretical Approach to Religiosity and Ritualized behaviour, Panagiotis Mitkidis (Researcher, Interacting Minds Center, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University,Denmark)
10. Does Ritual Exploit Kinship Cognition? Jon Lanman (Lecturer in Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland), Ryan McKay (Senior Lecturer in psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London,UK), and Harvey Whitehouse (Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford,UK)
11. The Evolutionary Psychology of Theology, Andrew Mahoney(Independent Researcher, Guest Lecturer at Victoria University, Australia)
12. Evolutionary Anthropology of Ritualized Mortuary Behaviour: The Case for Sexual Selection, Lee McCorkle (Director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Bibliography
Index
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