Ecological signalling

Abstract

We propose an ecological signalling model for religious cooperation. The model explains how religious cognition and cultures may coevolve to reliably support cooperative interactions among estranged partners by automatically expressing and synchronising cooperative behaviours. We explain how this automation will be ratifi ed by selection-genetic and cultural-wherever cooperation is threatened by insecurity rather than by cheating. Ecological signalling is interesting because it predicts the centrality of aff ective and motor processing to religious cognition, suggesting that religious cognition may be somewhat more intricate than the processing of supernatural beliefs and counterintuitive memories, the dominant perspective assumed by many contemporary cognitive scientists. If the ecological model is on the right track, what researchers conceive as “religious beliefs” and “religious concepts” are probably best approached as features of more extensive evolutionary designs organised to promote cooperative exchange. These more extensive designs evolve to aff ect the whole body, not merely the concepts that are believed. Ecological signalling is interesting because it explains lingering puzzles in the data on religion, and suggests new lines of empirical research.