Abstract

Psychological Inquiry Copyright © 2002 by 2002, Vol. 13, No. 3, 201–238 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Sex, Marriage, and Religion: What Adaptive Problems Do Religious Phenomena Solve? David M. Buss Department of Psychology University of Texas, Austin Religion is best regarded as an impressive array of nomena. Interested readers are referred to Kirkpatrick diverse phenomena. As Pargament (this issue) noted, (1999), who provided the most insightful evolutionary “religiousness is too rich and too complex to be cap- analysis to date of many varieties of religious experi- tured by easy formulas or simple summaries.” Expla- ence, including spirits and other unseen forces, ani- nations for some religious phenomena, such as rituals mism, priests, medicine men, and shamans, morality, and rites, may fail to account for other phenomena such ethics, mystical experiences, and beliefs about death. as piousness or prayer. Kirkpatrick (1999) phrased this Rather, this article has a more delimited aim, seeking to illustrate how an evolutionary analysis might shed a point succinctly: “‘Religion’ … refers to such a diverse modest light on just a few delimited components of re- and multifaceted constellation of beliefs and behaviors ligious phenomena as they relate to sex and marriage. that it is highly