Farewell, old syllabus!

Abstract

The title of this editorial was the subject line of an email one of us, Sosis, recently received from Benjamin Purzycki, a former graduate student, and now associate professor of religion at Aarhus University. The message contained a photo scan of a syllabus that Sosis had used for a graduate course entitled "Evolution of Religion." The syllabus was from 2008. After many years without teaching responsibilities-the blessing of scholarly life at the Max Planck Institute-Purzycki is returning to a regular teaching routine. Evidently, however, he won't need the guidance of syllabi from his graduate school coursework. He is right of course; evolutionary religious studies is a progressive science and an 11-year old syllabus is hopelessly dated. But before tossing the syllabus into the dustbin, we thought it might be worthwhile to use this relic as a touchstone for reflection. What were we, as teachers in an emerging academic field, teaching our students in 2008? What were we debating and discovering? How have these debates progressed? Before addressing these questions, a little context seems appropriate. After all, in 2008 Gmail was still in its testing phase and the iPhone was celebrating its first birthday; in other words, the world has changed quite a bit since then. For the evolutionary study of religion, 2008 was a heady time. The previous year Armin Geertz, Joseph Bulbulia, and Richard Sosis co-organized a week-long conference in Hawaii that brought together many of the leading scholars engaged in researching the origins and evolution of religion. This conference, the International Conference on the Evolution of Religion (ICER), did not inaugurate the evolutionary science of religion, but it did mark the field's arrival as a serious area of inquiry (Sosis & Bulbulia, 2008). The number of prominent scientists and religious studies scholars who attended the conference suggested to all observers that this young area of study had a very promising future and the following year-the year of the syllabus-the conference proceedings were published as The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques (Bulbulia et al., 2008). Following ICER, Patrick McNamara, Wesley Wildman, and Sosis began to discuss the need to develop a new journal for our fledgling field. For the three of us, the cofounders of what eventually became Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2008 might best be described as "the year of rejection letters." It was in that year that we received the first of many rejection letters as we tried to convince publisher after publisher to take a chance on this curious topic-the biocultural study of religionand the equally curious collection of diverse scholars that constituted our field. This was the setting. So, what were we talking about in 2008 that has since dropped off our radar? What was the long-forgotten rage of that time? The syllabus points to two topics. First, we evidently used to spend a lot of time pointlessly debating about whether religion is an adaptation or a byproduct. For those who were with us in 2...