title: Parasite stress is not so critical to the history of religions or major modern group formations.
abstract: Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) central hypothesis is that strong in-group norms were formed in part to foster parochial social alliances so as to enable cultural groups to adaptively respond to parasite stress. Applied to ancestral hominid environments, the story fits with evolutionary theory and the fragmentary data available on early hominid social formations and their geographical distributions. Applied to modern social formations, however, the arguments and inferences from data are problematic.
authors.affiliation: UMR 8129, CNRS / Institut Jean Nicod - Ecole Normale Supérieure, 75005 Paris, France. Satran@umich.edu
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Atran
mesh_terms: D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000523:psychology*; D005195:Family Relations; D006801:Humans; D010272:Parasitic Diseases / Q000523:psychology*; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012919:Social Behavior; D013315:Stress, Psychological