The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual

I really didn't think I would gain much from this article, having done a lot of research into religion while I was making my own choice. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the place of rituals in human history, but I had not considered some of the reasons proposed by Sosis. I liked that the original focus was on ritual as a means of communication and conformation within a group, as that sort of solidarity is fairly central to all religions. It was also interesting how he explained the use of trust and signals with the anecdote of the springbok. Some people would view that as an oversimplification of human signals, but I thought it was quite poetic. The way he explained the cost-benefit aspect of ritual was really easy to understand, something that's hard to find in many of these articles, particularly the mention of the rapid rise of membership in ultra-strict church groups like the Seventh-day Adventists. The game of the kibbutz was an interesting research method and it's gender gap, and I wonder if it could be applied to similar religious societies with the same type of results. Either way, it was nice to see a piece that explored the value of religion from a practical sense.