Replacing the irreplaceable

In an editorial we published two years ago (Sosis et al., 2022), we announced that Religion, Brain & Behavior (RBB) would begin a transition process in which our long-time editors would be passing the editorial reigns to the next generation of scholars. We began that process by bringing John Shaver on board. The following year, Suzanne Hoogeveen and Irene Cristofori joined our editorial team, and David Rohr replaced Joel Daniels as RBB’s Assistant Editor (Cristofori et al., 2023). Last issue, Joseph Bulbulia made his half-Irish exit (Bulbulia, 2024).

Joseph bid farewell in his own editorial, so now it is our turn to express ourselves. But words can’t even begin to capture Joseph’s contribution to RBB and the biocultural study of religion. Possibly, insights from his own pathbreaking research can help. Joseph’s early work explored the application of evolutionary signaling models to understand the selective pressures that have shaped religious behavior and cognition, and his theoretical and empirical studies have done much to clarify how actions speak louder than words (Bulbulia, 2004; Bulbulia & Mahoney, 2008; Bulbulia & Sosis, 2011). We hope our actions adequately express our sincere gratitude and the immense debt we owe Joseph for his tireless work on the journal. To what actions are we referring? To fill the massive gap that Joseph’s departure has left, we are bringing four new editors on board! We are all aware that Joseph is irreplaceable, but we greatly look forward to working with our new colleagues, who will be familiar to most of our readers: Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway, University of London), Michael Price (Brunel University), Robert M. Ross (Macquarie University), and Joseph Watts (University of Canterbury). We are very fortunate to have such exceptional scholars joining our editorial team.

Below, our new editors will introduce themselves. Before doing so, however, we sadly note the passing of one our original editorial board members, Dan Dennett. Many of us at RBB had the privilege of working with Dan on various projects, engaging with him, and maybe most enjoyably, arguing with him. The publication of Breaking the Spell (Dennett, 2006) played a vital role in catalyzing evolutionary research on religion, and the popularity of his book fostered an academic excitement that surely facilitated our ability to secure a publisher for RBB when we were founding the journal. Dan will be remembered as a scholar of great integrity and it was an honor to have him serve as an editorial board member.

Ryan McKay

I’m a psychologist who studies belief formation. I’ve always been interested in religion but have a somewhat complicated personal history with it. I hail from a small town in Western Australia, where I was raised in a religious household and had to go to church. Apparently, though, I asked too many questions and the minister ended up refusing to confirm me, saying he had “the power of discernment” and that my “heart wasn’t in it.” This caused some consternation in my family but was a formative intellectual experience for me. Later, at university in Perth, I enrolled in a philosophy course and decided that I wanted to be a philosopher of religion. I ended up being talked out of this plan by a family friend who argued I would never make a living out of this (they were probably right). So, I majored in psychology instead.

I completed my PhD in cognitive neuropsychiatry at Macquarie University in Sydney, under the supervision of Max Coltheart and Robyn Langdon. My thesis was on clinical delusions, including both “garden-variety” delusions like persecutory delusions and more exotic examples like the Capgras and Cotard delusions. My main aim was to reconcile “defence” theories of delusions, which view delusions as serving some kind of psychological/emotional function, with “deficit” theories, which construe delusions as functionless (indeed, dysfunctional) departures from ordinary cognitive and perceptual operations (McKay et al., 2005, 2007). But my thesis also included a chapter on the relationship between religion and delusion (McKay, 2004). I ended up traveling to the US to present my ideas about religion and delusion at a conference on religion, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology in Portland, Maine, where I met Joe Bulbulia, Jesper Sørensen, and Pascal Boyer, and thus was introduced to the cognitive science of religion.

Later I completed postdoctoral positions in various fields, including philosophy, economics and anthropology. I spent a year at Tufts University with Dan Dennett, where we explored the idea of adaptive misbelief (McKay & Dennett, 2009). And in 2007 I joined Harvey Whitehouse’s “Explaining Religion” project, as part of which I spent several happy years in Belfast (with Jesse Bering), Zürich (with Ernst Fehr), and Oxford (with Harvey himself). My arm of the project was the relationship between religion and morality (e.g., McKay & Whitehouse, 2015, 2016), and in Belfast I had the great good fortune of sharing a flat with Nicolas Baumard, with whom I had many animated discussions about this topic (Nicolas is no slouch on this issue; e.g., Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Baumard et al., 2015; Fitouchi et al., 2023).

Since 2010 I’ve been based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where I head up the Morality and Beliefs Laboratory (MaB-Lab). My work on religion these days spans a few different topics. I’m still interested in the connections and distinctions between religious beliefs and clinical delusions and have worked on this (admittedly contentious) topic with my fellow editor Rob Ross (McKay & Ross, 2020, 2021; Ross & McKay, 2017, 2018). I also continue to work on the relationship between religion and morality, often in collaboration with Will Gervais. A key strand of my recent work on this topic has looked at the underpinnings, and consequences, of moral prejudice against the non-religious (Gervais et al., 2017, 2024). In a recent registered report study, for example, we found that people associate choice of the religious oath in court with credible testimony; and that jurors who themselves swear an oath discriminate against defendants who decline to do so, being more likely to find them guilty (McKay et al., 2023). Finally, with Charles Efferson and others, I’ve critiqued a prominent general claim in the cognitive science of religion: that due to recurrent asymmetric error costs in the evolutionary past, humans possess cognitive biases that predispose them to believe in gods, particularly moralizing gods (Efferson et al., 2020; McKay, 2018; McKay & Efferson, 2010; McKay et al., 2018).

I’m really excited about joining the team at RBB!

Michael Price

I’m currently Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University London, where I use evolutionary theory to look for new insights into religiosity and spirituality. My approach has always been evolutionary. I discovered evolutionary psychology as an undergraduate, three decades ago, and have believed ever since that psychobehavioral traits are often best understood via an understanding of the biological and/or cultural evolutionary processes that brought them into being. I haven’t always focused on religiosity, however.

As a PhD student at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology (University of California, Santa Barbara), I researched possible psychological adaptations for group cooperation—for example, the tendency of more cooperative members to experience punitive sentiment towards less cooperative members—in study populations drawn from both California and an Amazonian hunter-horticulturalist society (Price, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Price et al., 2002; Tooby et al., 2006). I continued to study the evolutionary psychology of group cooperation in my first two postdoctoral jobs, first as a researcher at Elinor Ostrom’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (jointly sponsored by Indiana University and the Santa Fe Institute), then as Visiting Lecturer at the Olin School of Business, Washington University in St. Louis.

I joined Brunel’s Psychology Department in 2006. Group cooperation remained a focus (Price & Johnson, 2011; Takezawa & Price, 2010), but I also began researching possible evolutionary explanations for diverse kinds of social beliefs, including attitudes about equality, leadership, and sexual morality (Price et al., 2014; Price & Van Vugt, 2014). This research included several studies of anthropometric predictors of social cognition, most involving use of 3D body scanning technology (Price et al., 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017).

Around 2017 I re-read The Life of the Cosmos by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin (1997). Smolin discusses how a process of cosmological natural selection—operating on a population of reproducing universes (i.e., a multiverse)—could select for universe “phenotypes” that more effectively used black holes as a means of reproduction. It’s a highly speculative theory (though Smolin does specify ways to test it), but also an intriguing case study in how much explanatory power evolutionary theory could potentially offer, even in non-biological natural domains. Smolin’s book inspired my interest in Universal Darwinism—the idea that generalized processes of selection and adaptation may generate not just biological order but all forms of natural order (Campbell & Price, 2019; Price, 2017, 2019). It also inspired me to think more deliberately about the psychology of religiosity, because Smolin’s emphasis on higher-order “purpose” (i.e., adaptive functionality) seemed vaguely yet distinctly “religious” to me; this type of emphasis is vanishingly rare among serious scientific theories, but common among belief systems that we’d normally identify as religious or spiritual (e.g., “belief in a higher plan”). I became increasingly curious about whether such belief could mediate the well-documented positive correlation between religiosity and health—in contrast with the more common view that the key mediator here would be religious social support (Price & Launay, 2020).

In 2019, Dominic Johnson and I began co-leading a re-granting program, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and Issachar Fund, which supported 18 research projects on “The Evolution of Science and Religion as Meaning-Making Systems.” This co-leadership role provided increased opportunities for interaction with other evolution-minded religiosity researchers, and a re-grant for our own research enabled us to investigate the relationship between “belief in a higher plan” and well-being in a cross-cultural sample of 55,230 participants from 54 countries. The entire program was delayed by COVID, but by 2024 all 18 re-grant projects (including our own) had been successfully completed, and we are now in the process of publishing results (Price & Johnson, in press; Price et al., in preparation). My role also allowed me to develop great working relationships with several outstanding RBB-affiliated researchers, and I was excited and honored to eventually be invited on board as an editor

Robert M. Ross

I was born and raised in Aotearoa New Zealand. Foreshadowing my interest in the relationship between religion and evolution, I spent much of my childhood living very near Te Waimate Mission—which was visited by none other than a young Charles Darwin who rhapsodized that it had been “placed there as if by an enchanter’s wand.”¹

I studied for a PhD in cognitive science under the supervision of Robyn Langdon, Max Coltheart, and Ryan McKay at Macquarie University in Australia. My PhD explored the cognitive foundations of delusion-like beliefs and the cultural evolution of folktales. This research suggested that a jumping to conclusions cognitive bias contributes to delusion-like belief (e.g., Ross et al., 2015), something that I’m not sure I believe anymore (Sulik et al., 2023); and that methods and models developed to study biological evolution can be adapted to understand cultural evolution (e.g., Ross et al., 2013), something I still believe (Greenhill et al., 2023).

After finishing my PhD I held several short postdoctoral positions in the UK before returning to Macquarie University for a series of research positions with the philosopher Neil Levy. Over the years my research has come to center on the cognitive science of belief, including religious belief, delusional belief, and belief in misinformation. In addition, I have developed a keen interest in the credibility of academic research, including research in the cognitive science of religion (Ross & Mckay, 2021), which has led me to become involved in large scientific and metascientific projects (e.g., Lagisz et al., 2023), including several religion-focused projects lead by Suzanne Hoogeveen (e.g., Ross et al., 2023).

Much of my current research focuses on variations on a particular theme: a concern that social scientists are not measuring what they think they are measuring. This research has examined the sincerity of participant self-report (Ross & Levy, 2023), the pernicious impact of low quality data on hypothesis testing (Sulik et al., 2023), and the surprisingly weak validity evidence for even very widely-used psychological measures (Higgins et al., 2024). I hope to draw on my engagement with these methodological issues to enhance my editorial work at RBB.

Joseph Watts

I am currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, as well as an Associate Researcher in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. As a researcher, I am broadly interested in using new quantitative methods to study the dynamics of human culture. Much of my research focuses on the cultural evolution of religious systems. This research ranges in scope from micro-level research quantifying the conceptual similarity of peoples’ world explanations (Watts et al., 2020), up to macro-level research modeling how the religious and social traits of cultures co-evolved in human history (Watts et al., 2016). RBB has helped shape my research interests and the direction of my career, so it is very much an honor to join the editorial team.

I received my PhD in Psychology from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2017. During my PhD I was fortunate enough to work with a team that included Joseph Bulbulia, Russell Gray, and Quentin Atkinson, to construct the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religion (Watts, Sheehan, et al., 2015). By applying phylogenetic comparative methods to the Pulotu database, we tested how the religious and social features of Austronesian speaking peoples have co-evolved with one another (Watts et al., 2016, 2018). The first study in my PhD tested the co-evolution of political complexity and concepts of supernatural punishment (Watts, Greenhill, et al., 2015) and extensively drew on the commentaries on this topic provided in the inaugural issue of RBB (Schloss & Murray, 2011).

After completing my PhD I held positions as a Research Fellow in the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Group at the University of Oxford, as well as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. During this time I worked with Robin Dunbar to develop a cross-cultural database on hunter-gatherer religion (Watts et al., 2019, 2022) and ran experiments using text analysis to quantify the extent of similarity between people’s worldviews (Watts et al., 2020).

In 2019 I returned to New Zealand and joined the Religion Programme at the University of Otago. At Otago I initially worked on the Evolutionary Dynamics of Religion, Family Size and Child Success project, led by John Shaver, Rebecca Sear, Mary Shenk, and Richard Sosis. I then led a project using text analysis to study cross-cultural patterns in Theory of Mind. Some outputs from this time include studies suggesting that religious communities provide alloparental support networks (Shaver et al., 2020), as well as forthcoming research comparing the representation of mental state concepts in the vocabularies of Polynesian and European languages.

In 2024 I joined the psychology department at the University of Canterbury. While I am back in a psychology department, the methods and questions I am interested remain interdisciplinary. Theory of Mind and religion also remain the two major foci of my ongoing research. As a new editor of RBB, I look forward to playing an active role in helping RBB to continue to grow over the coming years.

Notes

1 https://visitheritage.co.nz/visit/northland/te-waimate-mission/an-introduction-to-te-waimate/