>Execution, Violent Punishment and Selection for Religiousness in Medieval England

Frost and Harpending, Evolutionary Psychology,

13 (2015), have argued that the increasing use of capital punishment

across the Middle Ages in Europe altered the genotype,

helping to create a less violent and generally more lawabiding

population. Developing this insight, we hypothesise

that the same system of violent punishments would also have

helped to genotypically create a more religious society by

indirectly selecting for religiousness, through the execution

of men who had not yet sired any offspring. We estimate the

selection differential for religiousness based on genetic correlation

data for conceivably related traits, and compare that to

the actual increase in religiosity across the Middle Ages. We

further explore other mechanisms by which religiousness was

being selected for in Medieval England, and conclude that

executions most likely contributed substantially to the increase

in religiosity, but that other selection pressures also

played a role.