The past two decades have seen a growing interest in evolutionary and scientific approaches to religion. The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting and emerging field. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the handbook pulls together scholarship in the following areas:

• evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR)
• cultural evolution
• the complementarity of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and cultural evolution

Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: Cliodynamics, cultural group selection, costly signaling, dual inheritance theory, literacy, transmitting narratives, prosociality, supernatural punishment, cognition and ritual, meme theory, fusion theory, sexual selection, agency detection, evoked culture, social brain hypothesis, theory of mind, developmental psychology, emergence theory, social learning, cultural cybernetics, cultural epidemiology, evolutionary and cultural psychology, memetics, by-product and adaptationist theories of religion, systems and information theory, and computer modeling.

This Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and anthropology. It will also be very useful to those in related fields, such as psychology, sociology of religion, cognitive biology, and evolutionary biology.

Author: Yair Lior
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 05/27/2024
Series: Routledge Handbooks in Religion
Pages: 524
Weight: 2.2lbs
Size: 9.69h x 6.88w x 1.09d
ISBN: 9781032324234

About the Author

Yair Lior is Doctor of Religious Studies at Boston University, USA, and a research associate at the Center for Mind and Culture (CMAC), Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Justin Lane is co-founder and CEO at CulturePulse Inc. (USA/Slovakia), Scientific Advisor at DEKK Institute (Bratislava, Slovakia), and collaborates as a researcher with the Slovak Academy of Science (Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology).