Religion, prosociality, assortative sociality, and the evolution of large-scale cooperation: a few remarks on Martin & Wiebe

In their paper, Luther H. Martin and Donald Wiebe put forward three types of claims. The first type concerns current research agendas in the Cognitive Science of Religion. In this regard, they claim both that these agendas neglect religion’s connection with violence by emphasizing its presumed relation with prosociality and that this neglect involves a hidden bias. The second type concerns the social function of religion. Here, they claim that religion is fundamentally tied to assortative sociality rather than prosociality. The third type concerns a possible causal link between religious prosociality and the evolution of large-scale cooperation. Here, they claim that religious prosociality did not play any pertinent causal role in such evolution. We do not address the first issue in our reply, though we would like to say that Martin & Wiebe have a partial reading of the csr literature in this respect, which undermines the strength of their related claims. We address the other two issues in turn, but, before discussing their related claims, we characterize some basic distinctions that will frame our subsequent remarks.