As club goods, religions face the problem of free riding. Smaller religious clubs, such as cults or sects, can often surmount this problem through communal pressures or by requiring their members to provide easily monitored signals. Generally, however, such tactics will be unavailable or too costly for large denominations, and, as such, these denominations must look for other techniques to avoi...

The Christian missionary John Thomas Gulick (1832–1923) has long been recognized as an important evolutionary theorist. Most recently, his scientific contributions have commended by biologists skeptical of the sufficiency pan-adaptationist accounts evolution. While Gulick’s work noticed, theological and metaphysical commitments largely dismissed, ignored, or downplayed. This paper argues that t...

The central thesis of P ANKSEPP and P ANKSEPP (2001, henceforth, P&P) is that there are no specially evolved, higher-order domain-specific cognitive mechanisms to speak of. Apart from the basic D ARWINIAN emotions (fear, surprise, anger, sadness, joy, disgust), so-called cognitive ‘modules’ are more likely “the product of dubious human ambition rather than sound scientific reasoning”. What evol...