Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics [Paperback]

The scientific study of religion has made significant advances in recent decades, explaining how the mind produces religious ideas, the motivations underlying religious behaviour, and the transmission of religious cultures within and across generations. In Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics, Purzycki and Sosis argue that further progress requires integration of isolated research findings on the various components - ritual, supernatural agent belief, myth, taboo, and so forth - that constitute religion. Religions, they contend, need to be understood as adaptive systems. Drawing from a wealth of ethnographic and experimental evidence, they situate religious systems within their local socioecological contexts, showing how religious culture adaptively responds to economic, environmental, and human health problems, as well as costly threats to cooperation and reproduction. Based in the evolutionary, cognitive, and anthropological sciences, Religion Evolving offers a holistic approach that attends to the complex, interacting features of religious systems. For those of us interested in understanding the ways in which religions are shaped by evolution, this work marks a watershed in the field by bringing together the existing work and synthesizing it into a framework that puts old debates to rest while providing a guide for future inquiry. Morgan, Jonathan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 01 September 2023