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Meaning-making has been one of the primary domains of religion throughout history, and some have claimed that this is religion's central function. Yet, the modern era has seen a proliferation of other social institutions that generate meaning for people. Here we reflect on what religious meaning-making can tell us about meaning-making in secular institutions, with a particular focus on sport. Sport as a meaning-making institution is puzzling since sports are generally considered leisure activities, not serious enough to provide meaningful structure and purpose to human lives. Nonetheless, people do derive meaning from sport and we argue that because sport shares many features with religion, it offers a unique opportunity to examine a secular meaning-making institution. We offer a theoretical framework for the study of meaning-making that derives from our conceptual approach to religion as an adaptive system. We use this approach, and other anthropological research, to delineate seven general characteristics of human meaning-making systems: collective, constructed, subjective, narrative, relational, transcendent, and growth-oriented. These features of meaning-making systems highlight why sport has been so successful at offering meaning to sport enthusiasts, both fans and athletes alike. We conclude with a brief speculative evolutionary scenario that may explain our proclivity for seeking meaning, and why secular institutions will continue to fill that role when religious worldviews are not compelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the evolution of religion has approached religions as adaptive complexes of traits consisting of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioural and developmental features that are organized into a self-regulating feedback system. Religious systems, it has been argued, derive from ancestral ritual systems and continue to be fuelled by ritual performances. One key prediction that emerges from this systemic approach is that the success of religious beliefs will be related to how well they are connected to rituals and integrated with other elements of the religious system. Here, I examine this prediction by exploring the rich world of Jewish demonology. As a case study, I briefly survey the historical trajectory of demonic beliefs across Jewish communities and focus on one demon, a ruach ra'ah, that has survived the vicissitudes of Jewish history and maintained its relevance in contemporary Jewish communities. I argue that it has done so because of its linkage with a morning handwashing ritual and its effective integration into the core elements of Jewish religious systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been increasing interest in the evolutionary study of religion, but perfunctory fractionalization has limited our ability to explain how and why religion evolved, evaluate religion's current adaptive value, and assess its role in contemporary decision-making. To move beyond piecemeal analyses of religion, I have recently offered an integrative evolutionary framework that approaches religions as adaptive systems. I argue that religions are an adaptive complex of traits consisting of cognitive, neurological, affective, behavioral, and developmental features that are organized into a self-regulating feedback system. Here I explore four advantages of this systemic approach to religion: it avoids definitional problems that have plagued the study of religion, affords a contextual understanding of religious belief, informs current debates within the evolutionary study of religion, and provides links to both the natural sciences and humanities. I argue that the systemic approach offers the strongest potential for real progress and broad application of evolutionary theory to the study of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What universal features of the mind interact with specific ecologies to produce expressions of violent religious nationalism? To shed light on this question, we focus on a case study of the Yugoslav Wars, asking: How did different religious groups in the Balkans move from cooperative relationships to violent ones? We argue that the most prevalent theories invoked to answer this question fail to adequately explain the change, namely, both the rise and fall of violent religious nationalism in the Balkans. To that end, we employ a systemic framework of religious change to examine historical data and ethnographic interview excerpts from ex-fighters and survivors of the Yugoslav Wars. This framework takes religion as it is practiced by communities to be a complex adaptive system, and models how religions adapt to local socioecologies. In employing this framework, three questions are addressed: (1) What features of cognition contributed to religiously motivated mass violence; (2) Which constituents of the religious system triggered those features; and (3) What socioecological factors were those constituents responding to? We argue that popular support for religious violence--and eventually its rejection--involved a set of higher-order functions, which McNamara calls the centralized executive self. This decision-making system was decentered by religious specialists who raised social pressures; group rituals that sustained community engagement; and identity-markers that signaled group commitments. While support for violence was a response to community threats during state-level succession, the eventual rejection of violence by religious leaders and communities was due to socioecological factors, such as rising health threats and declining birth rates brought about by the wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group violence, despite much study, remains enigmatic. Its forms are numerous, its proximate causes myriad, and the interrelation of its forms and proximate causes poorly understood. We review its evolution, including preadaptations and selected propensities, and its putative environmental and psychological triggers. We then reconsider one of its forms, ethnoreligious violence, in light of recent discoveries in the behavioral and brain sciences. We find ethnoreligious violence to be characterized by identity fusion and by manipulation of religious traditions, symbols, and systems. We conclude by examining the confluence of causes and characteristics before and during Yugoslavia's wars of disintegration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the article "Using Neurosociology and Evolutionary Sociology to explain the Origin and Evolution of Religions" by Jonathan Turner is presented.

The article comments on research on the relationship between religious and anxiety. Topics discussed include the effect of ritual practice to decrease or increase anxiety, the use of Holi and Navratri rituals for stress reduction, and the importance of ethnographic and quantitative stress data in the study of the correlation of ritual and anxiety.

Ritual behaviors of some form exist in every society known to anthropologists. Despite this universality, we have little understanding of how ritual behavior varies within populations or across the lifespan, nor the determinants of this variation. Here we test hypotheses derived from life history theory by using behavioral observations and oral interview data concerning participant variation in Fijian kava-drinking ceremonies. We predicted that substantial variation in the frequency and duration of participation would result from (1) trade-offs with reproduction and (2) the intrinsic status differences between ritual participants. We demonstrate that when controlling for household composition, men with young offspring participated less frequently and exhibited greater variance in their time spent at ceremonies than men without young children. However, men with a larger number of total dependents in their household participated more frequently than those with fewer. Moreover, we found that men's ascribed rank, level of education, and reliance on wage labor all significantly predict their frequency of attendance. We also found that the number of dependents a man has in his household is positively correlated with total food production, and the amount of kava he cultivates. In general, these results suggest that ritual participation is part of an important strategy employed by Fijian men for both achieving status and developing social alliances. Variation in participation in kava ceremonies by Fijian men therefore reflects the constraints of their current life history condition and their inherited rank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that a closer look at the practices and tools that humans use to support willpower, and the cultural contexts in which they are employed, can broaden the applicability of Ainslie's theory and facilitate the development of more effective self-control techniques. To support our argument, we examine Alcoholics Anonymous's method of temptation resistance known as "playing the tape through" (PTT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the idea that religion is a transsomatic adaptation. At the genic level, the religious system constitutes an extended phenotype that has been fashioned by natural selection to overcome socioecological challenges inherent in human sociality, primarily problems of cooperation and coordination. At the collective level, the religious system constitutes a cognitive niche. We begin our discussion focusing on the former and concentrate our attention on the “sacred coupling” of supernatural agency and ritual behavior. We detail the complex connections between genes, cognitive faculties, and their expression in religious contexts, followed by a discussion of how religious ritual functions to maintain relative social order. We conclude with a discussion about the relevance of niche construction theory for understanding the adaptive nature of religious systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Applying evolutionary analyses to the study of religion is fraught with complications and potential misunderstandings. Most notably, the evolutionary sciences do not offer one clear procedure to study religion or any human activity. Here we describe the behavioral ecological approach to religion. We explain the theoretical motivations behind behavioral ecological research and discuss the methodologies employed to conduct this research. We argue that despite its limitations, behavioral ecology can offer important benefits to religious scholarship by providing a coherent and powerful framework for generating, testing and discarding hypotheses about specific aspects of religious behaviors and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does religion motivate cooperation? How do the factors (genetic and cultural) that cause these motivations variously evolve, and why are they conserved? Cooperative-signalling theories of religion answer these questions by generalising from well-supported principles and research in the life sciences. Cooperative-signalling theories are interesting because they explain existing puzzles in the data about religions, and lead to testable hypotheses. This article discusses how signalling theory has been applied to explain the evolution and conservation of religiously motivated cooperation at small and large social scales, and reviews evidence relevant to evaluating these applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many scholars have argued that rituals serve to help individuals cope with challenges that arise under uncertain conditions. Ongoing research has been examining this claim with data collected on how Israeli women use psalm recitation to cope with the stress of war and terror. Here we compare the efficacy of psalm recitation among religious women who remained in northern Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War and women who relocated to central Israel, out of reach of Hizbollah Katyusha attacks. We show that psalm recitation is associated with lower rates of anxiety among women who remained in the north, but no such relationship was found among women who relocated outside of the warzone. We argue that psalm recitation reduces anxiety caused by the uncontrollable conditions of war but is ineffective at combating more mundane, controllable stressors. These findings will be discussed in light of Malinowski's theory of magic and related models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life history theory aims to explain the relationship between life events, recognizing that the fertility and growth schedules of organisms are dependent on environmental conditions and an organism's ability to extract resources from its environment. Using models from life history theory, we predict life expectancy to be positively correlated with educational investments and negatively correlated with adolescent reproduction and total fertility rates. Analyses of UN data from 193 countries support these predictions and demonstrate that, although variation is evident across world regions, strong interactions exist among life expectancy, reproductive investments, and educational attainment, and these relationships occur independently of economic pressures and disease burdens. The interactions are strongest, however, in countries with a life expectancy of ≥60 years as these countries tend to have stable economies and a limited HIV/AIDS burden. These findings suggest that policies aimed at influencing education and reproductive decisions should consider environmental characteristics that drive people's expectations about their longevity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary debate among scholars who study the evolution of religion concerns whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. The dominant position in the field is that religious beliefs and behaviors are byproducts of cognitive processes and behaviors that evolved for other purposes. A smaller group of scholars maintain that religion is an adaptation for extending human cooperation and coordination. Here I survey five critiques of the adapationist position and offer responses to these critiques. Much of the debate can be resolved by clearly defining important but ambiguous terms in the debate, such as religion, adaptation, adaptive, and trait, as well as clarifying several misunderstandings of evolutionary processes. I argue that adaptationist analyses must focus on the functional effects of the religious system, the coalescence of independent parts that constitute the fabric of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examination of the extent to which women in the northern Israeli town of Tzfat recited psalms to cope with the stress of the Second Palestinian Intifada reveals that knowing someone who was killed in the Intifada, experiencing an income loss, and believing that Tzfat would be attacked by terrorists were strong predictors of psalm recitation among self-identified secular but not religious interviewees. Among secular interviewees who believed that Tzfat would be attacked, psalm recitation was negatively correlated with short- and long-term precautionary behavioral strategies such as caution after an attack and avoiding buses, restaurants, and large crowds. No such relationship was found among religious interviewees, although they were less likely to make precautionary behavioral changes. These findings underscore the importance of magico-religious practices as coping mechanisms that may reduce anxiety and provide perceptions of control under conditions of high stress and uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The in-group-out-group bias is among the most widely documented and analyzed phenomenon in the social sciences. We conduct field experiments to test whether the bias extends to the cooperative behavior of one of the most successful modern collectives, the Israeli kibbutz. Despite their promise as universal cooperators, kibbutz members are more cooperative toward anonymous kibbutz members than they are toward anonymous city residents. In fact, when paired with city residents, kibbutz members’ observed levels of cooperation are identical to those of city residents. Moreover, self-selection rather than kibbutz socialization largely accounts for the extent to which kibbutz members are cooperative. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from nonhuman ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose neurophysiological mechanisms underlying such associations and argue that the brain plasticity of human adolescence constitutes an "experience expectant" developmental period for ritual conditioning of sacred symbols. We suggest that such symbols evolved to solve an ecological problem by extending communication and coordination of social relations across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts to correlate collective rituals as an expression and reaffirmation of shared beliefs, norms and values and communal stability and group harmony. Despite having achieved the status of conventional anthropological wisdom, the relationship between ritual performance and group solidarity has not been demonstrated empirically. The kibbutz was originally conceived as a small collective farming settlement in which members based their social and cultural lives on the collective ownership of property and wealth. The kibbutz developed out of an egalitarian ideology. This article seeks to find a reason as to why women are not allowed to participate in certain religious practices. These gender differences in ritual practice provide an opportunity to examine directly how group ritual performance impacts cooperative behavior hypotheses. The article also discusses challenges faced by kibbutzim in promoting and maintaining cooperation among its members.

The article cites a study conducted by researchers at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut on the psychology of ritual performance. Overview of the costly-signaling theory of rituals; Appraisal of intra-group cooperation among members of religious groups; Description of a model that addresses various problems raised by a theory of religion.

Presents information on the study that tested the costly signaling theory of religion that posits that religious rituals and taboos can promote intragroup cooperation. Methodology of the study; Results and discussion on the study.

Focuses on the patch choice decisions among human foragers. Calculations of the profitabilities of fishing patch; Emphasis of the per capita return rate of alternative patches; Maximization of the fitness currency.

Several authors have argued that religious beliefs are a way of communicating commitment and loyalty to other group members. The advantage of commitment signals is that they can promote intragroup cooperation by overcoming the free-rider problems that plague most cooperative pursuits. In this article, the author tests this idea using a database on 19th century utopian communes. The economic success and survival of utopian communes is dependent upon solving the collective-action problem of cooperative labor. If religious beliefs foster commitment and loyalty among individuals who share those beliefs, communes formed out of religious conviction should survive longer than communes motivated by secular ideologies such as socialism. Preliminary results from survivorship analysis support this hypothesis; religious communes are more likely than secular communes to survive at every stage of their life course. These results are discussed with reference to a modern communal movement, the Israeli kibbutz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Objectives Methods Results Conclusions Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high‐fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more children and receive more support with their children.We randomly sampled 395 mothers and 745 focal children enrolled in the Kiang West (The Gambia) Longitudinal Population Study cohort. Structured interviews asked mothers who and how often people invest in their children, and about their religious practices. Data were collected at participants' homes on electronic tablet‐based long‐form surveys and analyzed using the Bayesian hierarchical models.Religiosity was weakly associated with women's higher age‐adjusted fertility. Maternal religiosity was negatively related to maternal investment in focal children, but positively associated with total allomaternal support. Specifically, a woman's religiosity was positively associated with allomaternal support from matrilineal kin, other offspring, and affinal kin, but unrelated to paternal, patrilineal, and non‐kin investment.These results suggest that higher fertility among religious mothers may be supported by high levels of investment from biological and affinal kin. Matrilineal kin, other siblings, and affinal kin seem to be the most responsive to a woman's religiosity. Our findings cast doubt on interpretations of women's religious behaviors as signals of fidelity, and instead suggest they may be part of strategies to enable collective allomaternal resources and higher relative fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although religions, as Smaldino demonstrates, provide informative examples of culturally evolved group-level traits, they are more accurately analyzed as complex adaptive systems than as norm-enforcing institutions. An adaptive systems approach to religion not only avoids various shortcomings of institutional approaches, but also offers additional explanatory advantages regarding the cultural evolution of group-level traits that emerge from religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

McKay & Dennett (M&D) observe that beliefs need not be true in order to evolve. We connect this insight with Schelling's work on cooperative commitment to suggest that some beliefs – ideologies – are best approached as social goals. We explain why a social-interactive perspective is important to explaining the dynamics of belief formation and revision among situated partners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Juslin & Västfjäll (J&V) advance our understanding of the proximate mechanisms underlying emotional responses to music, but fail to integrate their findings into a comprehensive evolutionary model that addresses the adaptive functions of these responses. Here we offer such a model by examining the ontogenetic relationship between music, ritual, and symbolic abstraction and their role in facilitating social coordination and cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a response by Richard Sosis and Bradley J. Ruffle regarding the structural-functionalist research paradigm of past generation. Development of costly-signaling model of religious behavior; Correlation of the cost or benefit to the signaler of sending the signal with the signaler's quality; Link of the perceived cost or benefit of ritual performance with intensity of belief.

The fish-sharing patterns on Ifaluk Atoll underscore several limitations of the explanations of food sharing offered by Gurven and suggest that non-foraging labor activities may provide insights into reciprocity and punishment relevant for understanding food-sharing patterns. I also argue that future food-sharing studies should focus on signaling rather than resource holding potential (RHP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malnutrition among women of reproductive age is a significant public health concern in low- and middle-income countries. Of particular concern are undernutrition from underweight and iron deficiency, along with overweight and obesity, all of which have negative health consequences for mothers and children. Accumulating evidence suggests that risk for poor nutritional outcomes may be mitigated by social support, yet how social support is measured varies tremendously and its effects likely vary by age, kinship and reproductive status. We examine the effects of different measures of social support on weight and iron nutrition among 677 randomly sampled women from rural Bangladesh. While we find that total support network size mitigates risk for underweight, other results point to a potential tradeoff in the effects of kin proximity, with nearby adult children associated with both lower risk for underweight and obesity and higher risk for iron deficiency and anaemia. Social support from kin may then enhance energy balance but not diet quality. Results also suggest that a woman's network of caregivers might reflect their greater need for help, as those who received more help with childcare and housework had worse iron nutrition. Overall, although some findings support the hypothesis that social support can be protective, others emphasize that social relationships often have neutral or negative effects, illustrating the kinds of tradeoffs expected from an evolutionary perspective. The complexities of these effects deserve attention in future work, particularly within public health, where what is defined as 'social support' is often assumed to be positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]