Highlights•Religious beliefs and behavior across the world are closely linked to restricted
sexual attitudes and behavior.•Religions foster long-term, committed mating strategies by …

The study of human biology includes exploration of all the genetic and environmental
influences on human variation and life history, including impacts of sociocultural and …

Many aspects of religious rituals suggest they provide adaptive benefits. Studies across
societies consistently find that investments in ritual behaviour return high levels of …

Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important
communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its …

Sex differences in religiosity are cross-culturally common and robust, yet it is unclear why
sex differences in some cultures are larger than in others. Although women are more …

Rituals are performed within specific socio-ecological niches, yet the different effects of the
same ritual form across different niches (community contexts) remains unclear. Here, using …

Life history theory anticipates that organisms trade offspring quantity for offspring quality. In
modern human societies this tradeoff is particularly acute because of increased returns on …

Recent theorizing suggests that religious people's moral convictions are quite strategic
(albeit unconsciously so), designed to make their worlds more amenable to their favored …

Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently
debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists …

Across the contemporary world, religious individuals tend to exhibit higher relative fertility
than their secular counterparts, while religions vary substantially in mean fertility levels …