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  1. Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols.Candace S. Alcorta & Richard Sosis - 2005 - Human Nature 16 (4):323-359.
    This paper considers religion in relation to four recurrent traits: belief systems incorporating supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, communal ritual, separation of the sacred and the profane, and adolescence as a preferred developmental period for religious transmission. These co-occurring traits are viewed as an adaptive complex that offers clues to the evolution of religion from its nonhuman ritual roots. We consider the critical element differentiating religious from non-human ritual to be the conditioned association of emotion and abstract symbols. We propose (...)
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  • Does observed fertility maximize fitness among New Mexican men?Hillard S. Kaplan, Jane B. Lancaster, Sara E. Johnson & John A. Bock - 1995 - Human Nature 6 (4):325-360.
    Our objective is to test an optimality model of human fertility that specifies the behavioral requirements for fitness maximization in order (a) to determine whether current behavior does maximize fitness and, if not, (b) to use the specific nature of the behavioral deviations from fitness maximization towards the development of models of evolved proximate mechanisms that may have maximized fitness in the past but lead to deviations under present conditions. To test the model we use data from a representative sample (...)
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  • Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation.Quentin Atkinson & Pierrick Bourrat - 2011 - Evolution and Human Behavior 32 (1):41-49.
    Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural (...)
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  • Evolutionary theories of morality and the manipulative use of signals.Lee Cronk1 - 1994 - Zygon 29 (1):81-101.
    Several attempts have recently been made to explain moral systems and moral sentiments in light of evolutionary biological theory. It may be helpful to modify and extend this project with the help of a theory of communication developed by ethologists. The core of this approach is the idea that signals are best seen as attempts to manipulate others rather than as attempts to inform them. This addition helps to clarify some problematic areas in the evolutionary study of morals, and it (...)
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  • Determinants of time allocation across the lifespan.Michael Gurven & Hillard Kaplan - 2006 - Human Nature 17 (1):1-49.
    This paper lays the groundwork for a theory of time allocation across the life course, based on the idea that strength and skill vary as a function of age, and that return rates for different activities vary as a function of the combination of strength and skills involved in performing those tasks. We apply the model to traditional human subsistence patterns. The model predicts that young children engage most heavily in low-strength/low-skill activities, middle-aged adults in high-strength/high-skill activities, and older adults (...)
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  • Learning, life history, and productivity.John Bock - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (2):161-197.
    This article introduces a new model of the relationship between growth and learning and tests a set of hypotheses related to the development of adult competency using time allocation, anthropometric, and experimental task performance data collected between 1992 and 1997 in a multiethnic community in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Building on seminal work in life history theory by Hawkes, Blurton Jones and associates, and Kaplan and associates, the punctuated development model presented here incorporates the effects of both growth and learning (...)
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