Human Behaviors That Reduce Evolutionary Fitness

This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on asceticism, written in response to A. K. Petersen's contribution “Asceticism in Human Evolution,” argues that the word evolution should not be used in religious studies for both genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Petersen's article uses the word primarily in the second sense, even though universal features of human societies like asceticism should be explained instead in terms of genetic evolution. This commentary proposes a way to do so.