Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - April 2012 - Volume 35, Issue 02  

Open Peer Commentary

Parasite stress is not so critical to the history of religions or major modern group formations

Scott Atrana1

a1 UMR 8129, CNRS / Institut Jean Nicod – Ecole Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France. Satran@umich.edu http://sitemaker.umich.edu/satran/home

Abstract

Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) central hypothesis is that strong in-group norms were formed in part to foster parochial social alliances so as to enable cultural groups to adaptively respond to parasite stress. Applied to ancestral hominid environments, the story fits with evolutionary theory and the fragmentary data available on early hominid social formations and their geographical distributions. Applied to modern social formations, however, the arguments and inferences from data are problematic.

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