ABSTRACT
Amid the lavish diversity of cultural practices we find a common and puzzling type. People the world over gather together to sing, dance, worship, chant, recite, and march—often with strong emotions—but with behaviours that lack ostensible practical purposes. We may loosely call such practices “collective rituals.” Collective rituals differ from commercial, military, educational, and other cooperative activities because the goals of collective rituals cannot be readily discerned from the behaviours that comprise them. From an evolutionary stance, this lack of ostensible utility for ritual behaviours renders their ubiquity and strong evolutionary conservation remarkable. For what benefit/s have natural and cultural selection conserved ritual activities?
