Testing the Big Gods Hypothesis with global historical data: a review and ‘retake’

Abstract

The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles. The ‘Big Gods Hypothesis’ offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of Big Gods and big societies, the relationship between the two is disputed, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To address these issues, we analyze data in the Seshat Global History Databank that coded 309 past societies for variables capturing beliefs in moralizing supernatural punisment and social complexity. The longitudinal (time-resolved) nature of Seshat data enables us to test evolutionary hypotheses about processes generating social change and distinguish between competing causal scenarios. We find that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment only appear after the largest increases in social complexity and that a formal analysis designed to test for causal relationships failed to detect a statistically significant effect of moralizing supernatural punishment on social complexity.

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding

“…Henrich et al, 2005; Jacoby et al, Preprint; Polak et al, 2018) or analysis of cross-cultural databases of recordings, artifacts, ethnographies, or questionnaires (cf. Lomax, 1968; Mehr et al, 2019; Savage, 2019c; Savage et al, 2015; Whitehouse et al, preprint; Wood et al, Preprint).…”

Why do great and little traditions coexist in the world’s doctrinal religions?

“…To what extent can purer versions of great and little traditions persist in isolation and under what conditions does one type of tradition tend to require the other? Such questions demand not only further experimental and correlational studies of the kind presented here but also statistical analysis of ethnographic data (e.g., Atkinson & Whitehouse, 2011), historical evidence (e.g., Whitehouse et al, 2021), and formal models to explore the precise evolutionary dynamics of interdependent traditions. Nevertheless, our initial findings provide preliminary support for the broad and portentous theoretical claim that great and little traditions sustain forms of cooperation at different societal levels.…”

“…One version of this idea, supported by evidence from world history, is that the first large scale religious organizations emphasized forms of cooperation based on hawkishness and extreme deference expressed in highly coercive forms of top-down domination (often expressive violently through the arbitrary exercise of power by divinized rulers and cruel practices such as human sacrifice) but that beyond a certain threshold of complexity, more ethical religions associated with the Axial Age evolved, emphasizing fairness and reciprocity and laying foundations for the great traditions of today's world religions (Mullins et al, 2018;Whitehouse et al, 2019). While there is much ongoing debate about whether, how, and when great traditions contributed to the rise of sociopolitical complexity (e.g., Whitehouse et al, 2021), many have tended to assume that religious beliefs proliferating outside organized doctrinal traditions, whether ancient or modern, are mere by-products of our evolved psychology, whose cooperative functions and moral salience are either minimal (Boyer, 2019) or largely unknown (McKay & Whitehouse, 2015). Such "cognitively optimal" religious beliefs (Whitehouse, 2004)-ranging from intuitive forms of mind-body dualism (e.g., Bering, 2006;Bloom, 2004;Hood, 2009) and promiscuous teleology (Evans & Lane, 2011;Kelemen, 1999) to minimally counterintuitive constructs such as weeping statues and flying witches (Boyer, 2001;Slone, 2005)-have been described as "wild", owing to their tendency to recur and spread like weeds in the interstices of more highly cultivated great traditions (Boyer, 2019).…”

Retraction Note: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

“…Nevertheless, we accept that we should have labelled moralizing gods as 'absent' or 'inferred absent' rather than 'unknown' in portions of our dataset before the dates of the first appearance, rather than converting 'NAs' to zeros during the phase of analysis. Since this Letter was published, we have thoroughly refined our data and analyses, and have found that our original conclusions are still strongly supported 2,3 . However, the differences between our revised analyses and the original Letter are substantial enough to warrant a Retraction of the original Letter.…”