Why did many ancient civilizations believe the human body has 365 bones — one for each day of the year? My new paper in Evolution and Human Behavior explores the cognitive roots of "numerological correspondence." 👇 sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper coming out as a target paper in Religion, Brain & Behavior 🧵I argue against the view in CSR that rituals are characteristically defined by goal demotion and (irresolvable) causal opacity, as well as the bifocal stance theory in the context of magic. Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Why do menstrual taboos--restrictions on food prep, ritual participation, and social contact--recur and persist in diverse human societies? In this new paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, I propose a new framework: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper out in HSSC! We studied hot-cold food beliefs in a Uyghur community in Xinjiang, asking how cultural evolution sustains a traditional classification system across generations while still allowing it to adapt to individual experience. www.nature.com/articles/s41...