This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.

This article examines the relationships between family structure, type of mate-selection system, and romantic love as a basis for mate-selection. Analysis indicates that autonomous mate selection is more common in societies with nuclear family structure and neolocal residence patterns. Romantic love as a basis for mate selection is also more common with nuclear family organization, but it is negatively associated with neolocal residence patterns.

This study examines the role of schooling in socialization processes and cultural complexity, seeking to understand whether schooling is correlated with these variables and/or affects them. The author concludes that school serves as a socializer for young children, a skill developer for older children, and a homogenizing force on societal child-rearing practices.

In this study, the authors empirically assess the relationship between precolonial centralization and the implementation of modernization programs by African governments. Their findings indicate that current African countries tend to have better provisioning of public goods (including better access to education, healthcare, and infrastructure) when their ethnic groups' precolonial institutions were more centralized.

This study examines the relationship between disequilibrium in child-rearing and societal complexity (particularly social complexity rather than technical complexity). The author suggests that child-rearing plays a role in forming cultural dimensions.

This article examines the relationship between religiousness, child socialization, and cultural complexity. Empirical analysis suggests that there is a positive association between cultural complexity and religiousness, especially ritual. Religiousness was also associated with schooling, one of the child-rearing variables examined. A theoretical discussion concerning religion and intellect is also included.

This study examines the relationship between disequilibrium and cognitive development using measurements of child-rearing, presence of high gods, and games of strategy.

The authors of this study examine the relationships between historical exposure to Islamic kingdoms and current economic, medical, and educational development in Africa. They predict that ethnic groups that were previously ruled by Islamic states or chiefdoms will have worse outcomes today, theorizing that these worse outcomes would be not as a result of an inherent characteristic of Islam or Islamic kingdoms themselves but rather decreased investment by colonial states or missions. Their results lend some support to their hypotheses, and particularly to the predictions that Christian missions and colonial states would not be able to penetrate areas under Islamic influence as easily as other regions.

Using HRAF's ethnographic reports from 11 immigrant groups to North America (1959-1989), the author asks: what social structural factors account for these patterns of language loss and retention? While focusing on the second and third generations, this study assesses the impact of residence, religion, school, festivals, homeland, marriage, and labor on language retention. The author suggests that residential closeness and the continued practice of religious rituals from the country of origin are the main factors influencing mother tongue maintenance into the third generation, while participation in community festivals is a marginal predictor.

This article employs cross-national and cross-cultural methods to investigate whether pathogen stress is a direct determinant of authoritarianism. The study controls on other factors such as famine, warfare, and malnutrition and evaluates alternative causal models.