The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

被引：226

作者：

Atran S. ^{[1
,2
,3
]}

Henrich J. ^{[4
]}

机构：

[1] Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris

[2] John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY

[3] ISR and Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

[4] Department of Economics and Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

来源：

Biological Theory | 2010年 / 5卷 / 1期

关键词：

by-product hypothesis; cooperation; credibility enhancing displays; cultural transmission; group competition; high gods; minimally counterintuitive; morality; religion; rise of civilization;

D O I：

10.1162/BIOT_a_00018

中图分类号：

学科分类号：

摘要：

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people’s commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today’s world. © 2010, Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.

引用

页码：18 / 30

页数：12

共 116 条

[51] Henrich J., Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 53, pp. 3-35, (2004)
[52] Henrich J., A cultural species, Explaining Culture Scientifically, pp. 184-210, (2008)
[53] Henrich J., The evolution of costly displays, cooperation, and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution, Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, pp. 244-260, (2009)
[54] Henrich J., Boyd R., Why people punish defectors: Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208, pp. 79-89, (2001)
[55] Henrich J., Boyd R., On modeling cognition and culture: Why replicators are not necessary for cultural evolution, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2, pp. 87-112, (2002)
[56] Henrich J., Boyd R., Bowles S., Camerer C., Fehr E., Gintis H., McElreath R., Alvard M., Barr A., Ensminger J., Hill K., Gil-White F., Gurven M., Marlowe F., Patton J.Q., Smith N., Tracer D., Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, pp. 795-815, (2005)
[57] Henrich J., Boyd R., Richerson P., Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution, Human Nature, 10, pp. 253-289, (2008)
[58] Henrich J., Ensminger J., McElreath R., Barr A., Barrett C., Bolyanatz A., Cardenas J.C., Gurven M., Gwako E., Henrich N., Lesorogol C., Marlowe F., Tracer F., Ziker J., Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment, Science, 327, pp. 1480-1484, (2010)
[59] Henrich J., Gil-White F., The evolution of prestige, Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, pp. 165-196, (2001)
[60] Henrich J., McElreath R., The evolution of cultural evolution, Evolutionary Anthropology, 12, pp. 123-135, (2003)

← 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 →