Beliefs about the fate of humanity and the soul after death may structure behaviours of religious groups. Here we test theories from religious studies: that belief in an imminent apocalypse co-evolved with and facilitated revolutionary violence, whereas belief in reincarnation caused people to acquiesce to existing social orders and withdraw from political activism. We test these hypotheses by building a cultural phylogeny of historical Islamic sects and schools from the seventh to twentieth centuries and use phylogenetic comparative methods to show that these two types of belief display distinct relationships with intergroup violence. There is substantial evidence that apocalyptic beliefs co-evolved with revolutionary violence, whereas reincarnation beliefs were evolutionarily stable in peaceful groups. In both cases, violence precedes the emergence of beliefs, which suggests that conditions that generate revolutionary violence changed beliefs rather than beliefs generating violence. We also found that apocalyptic beliefs are associated with accelerated group extinction, although causal relationships cannot be determined.

关于人类命运和死后灵魂的信念可能会影响宗教团体的行为。在这里，我们检验了宗教研究的理论：对即将到来的世界末日的信仰与革命暴力共同演变并促进了革命暴力，而对轮回的信仰导致人们默许现有的社会秩序并退出政治激进主义。我们通过建立 7 世纪至 20 世纪历史伊斯兰教派和学校的文化系统发育来检验这些假设，并使用系统发育比较方法来表明这两种信仰与群体间暴力表现出截然不同的关系。有大量证据表明，世界末日信仰与革命暴力共同进化，而轮回信仰在和平群体中进化稳定。在这两种情况下，暴力先于信仰的出现，这表明产生革命暴力的条件改变了信仰，而不是产生暴力的信仰。我们还发现，世界末日信仰与加速的群体灭绝有关，尽管无法确定因果关系。