Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it
has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that …

Why do people take revenge? This question can be difficult to answer. Vengeance seems
interpersonally destructive and antithetical to many of the most basic human instincts …

Evidence for human sacrifice is found throughout the archaeological record of early
civilizations, the ethnographic records of indigenous world cultures,,,, and the texts of the …

Considerable progress in explaining cultural evolutionary dynamics has been made by
applying rigorous models from the natural sciences to historical and ethnographic …

Modern phylogenetic methods are increasingly being used to address questions about
macro-level patterns in cultural evolution. These methods can illuminate the unobservable …

Cognitive and evolutionary research has focused on the powerful deities of large-scale
societies, yet little work has examined the smaller gods of animist traditions. In a study of the …

Whitehouse, et al. 1 used the Seshat archaeo-historical databank 2 to argue that beliefs in
moralizing gods appear in world history only after the formation of complex 'megasocieties' …

Quantitative cross-cultural databases can help uncover structure and diversity across human
populations. These databases have been constructed using a variety of methodologies and …

Evolutionary thinking can be applied to both cultural microevolution and macroevolution.
However, much of the current literature focuses on cultural microevolution. In this article, we …

This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in
Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing …