Kin selection favors religious traditions: ancestor worship as a cultural descendant-leaving strategy

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the role of religious systems as drivers of the evolution of cooperation in human societies. One suggestion is that a cultural tradition of ancestor worship might have evolved as a “ descendant-leaving strategy ” of ancestors by encouraging increased altruism particularly between distant kin. Speci fi cally, Coe and others have suggested a mechanism of cultural transmission exploiting social learning biases, whereby ancestors have been able to establish parental manipulation of kin recognition and perceived relatedness as a traditional behavior, leading to increased altruism among co-descendants and thereby maximizing the ancestor ’ s long-term inclusive fi tness. Here, we develop a demographically explicit model in order to quantify the resulting increase in altruism and concomitant “ ancestor-descendant con fl ict ” , and to determine the evolutionary feasibility of religiously motivated cultural norms that promote altruism among co-descendants. Our analysis reveals that such norms could indeed drive an overall increase in altruism with potential for ancestor-descendant con fl ict, particularly in low-dispersal settings. Moreover, we fi nd that natural selection can favor traditions encouraging increased altruism towards co-descendants under a range of conditions, with the inclusive-fi tness costs of enacting an inappropriately high level of altruism being o ff set by inclusive-fi tness bene fi ts derived from the cultural tradition facilitating kin recognition.