Recent article in journal Evolutionary Human Sciences, where LEVYNA members contributed data, asks whether religious denominations accumulate gradually or are generated in rapid bursts associated with specific historical events.
The paper uses computational phylogenetic methods that treat major religious traditions as evolving lineages and models relation of 291 historical religious groups from Indo-Iranian, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian traditions. The analysis then tests for shifts in the birth rate of those individual denominations. We found evidence for birth rate shifts in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian families, corresponding to at least three separate events that have shaped global religious diversity.
Full text can be found here.
In a new paper published in iScience, the LEVYNA team examined whether reliable commitment signaling is driven primarily by intuitive processes or by deliberative cost-benefit reasoning.
In a new study published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, and let by a LEVYNA researcher, we examine a central prediction of secularization theory: that greater material security should be associated with lower religiosity.
