Cognitive Attractors and the Cultural Evolution of Religion
Open accessAbstract
We use data on a cultural fitness landscape, recently inferred from a large-scale cross-cultural survey of religious practices (6000+ years, 407 cultures), to provide new insights into the dynamics of cultural macroevolution. We report three main results. First, we observe an emergent distinction between the long-run fitness of a religious practice, and its short-term stability: in particular, some low-fitness practices are nonetheless highly stable. Second, despite the exponentially large size of the landscape, we find a small number of cultural attractors, and 70% of all observed configurations flow into just four, which we label "monastic", "evangelical", "indigenous", and "pre-Axial". Finally, we find large variation in the evolvability of different traits, with some (such as a belief in punishing gods) strongly fixed by context, and others (such as belief in reincarnation) much more fluid.
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- Authors
- Poulsen, V., & DeDeo, S.
- Affiliations
- Santa Fe Institute (US)
- Publisher
- Center for Open Science
- Published
- 2023-06-26
- OpenAlex
- W4382283311
- Cited by
- 3
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2023: 2
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- religious practice, monasticism, evangelical Christianity, indigenous religion, Axial Age, evolvability
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