Reposted by Paul Smaldino
Religious celibacy driven by marriage and wealth inheritance across cultures. brideprice=monks, dowry=nuns. New paper by Gabriel Saffa, Sara Serbaji and yours truly www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Religious celibacy is linked to marriage and wealth transmission practices across different world religions - Nature Communications
Lifelong religious celibacy has been linked to sibling competition over parental wealth. Here, the authors show that celibacy is linked to marriage patterns, and its prevalence among men and women is ...
![Many thousands of years ago the inhabitants of the earth were all of one race and spoke but one language. Suddenly a fungus of enormous size made its appearance and continued to grow larger and higher every day and was looked upon by the people as a shelter from the sun and rain which had been sent them by the gods; but at last it grew to such a size that their crops, on which they depended entirely for food, suffered by being deprived of the blessings of the sun, rain, and dew, and they began to wish that they had stopped it's (sic) growth before. Sacrifices were offered to the gods who were prayed to remove the fungus from the face of the earth, but their prayers were without effect, and as time went on it became necessary for the preservation of life to cut it down whether the gods resented such action or not. So it was felled, cut up, and everybody eat [sic] of it with the result that they all fell into a kind of stupor and began to speak every man a different language, and the confusion was so great that they scattered over the face of the earth, and it was in this way that the many languages now spoken in the world originated.
—An Iban origin story from Borneo by Howell (1908, p. 78).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ev6inhrqmqlij7tor6wppg7u/bafkreig7dx2kr6xg6rqjpksjywmtko6mukkbw7ztrl5dvsl5eomnd2a34q)
