Ritualization reduces anxiety
Martin Lang and Radim Chvaja published a chapter discussing the relationship between ritual and anxiety in The Routledge Handbook of Evolutionary Approaches to Religion.
Why did memetics fail?
In the 70s, two scientific approaches to the evolutionary study of culture emerged – memetics and the gene-culture coevolutionary theory. While the gene-culture coevolutionary theory still thrives, memetics appears to be a dead scientific discipline. Why?
Radim’s paper, which focuses on diachronic development of memetics rather than its logical inconsistencies, claims that while the field of gene-culture coevolution focused on testing hypotheses, memetics got preoccupied with the ontology of the meme as a discrete unit of selection, strictly applying the gene-centered approach to culture, and differentiating between biological and memetic fitness. Thus, memetics was unable to study the adaptive function of culture, an approach that proved fruitful in the gene-culture coevolutionary theory.
You can find the article here: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/posc_a_00350
