Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods

Abstract

The solid line indicates when writing and moralizing gods are first recorded in the same century, and the dashed lines show when writing appeared 100 years before moralizing gods and when moralizing gods appeared 100 years before writing.NGAs are colored by whether social complexity data are available both before and after the appearance of moralizing gods or not. Only NGAs with social complexity data available both before and after the appearance of moralizing gods were included in the analysis (and only these NGAs are shown in Table 1). It must be noted that while writing first appears at 2500 BCE in the Kachi Plain, it is absent for the subsequent two polities in the dataset, and does not reappear until 300 BCE -the same time as the first appearance of moralizing gods. Extended Data Figure 2 | Boxplots (center line, median; box limits, upper and lower quartiles; whiskers, 1.5x interquartile range) & distributions (data points) of "social complexity" score for N = 801 observations, by 'moralizing gods' outcome status. Before statistical analyses were performed in Whitehouse, et al., all "unknown" cases were treated as moralizing gods "absent" without explicit description in the manuscript.

Total SciComm: A Strategy for Communicating Open Science

“…However, there was no concrete evidence to suggest that the debate will arrive at a final conclusion. Until 7 July 2020 (which was when this paper was under review), Nature published two articles concerning the retraction of "Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history": a Matter Arising article from Bret Beheim and his colleagues [31] and the retraction notice [16].…”

“…The Matter Arising article from Beheim et al [31] is the peer-reviewed version of the first criticism [19] toward the moralizing gods paper. Meanwhile, the retraction notice, which was written by the Seshat team, concluded that there are issues with the data treatment.…”

Moralistic Gods and Social Complexity: A Brief History of the Problem

“…For example, some maintain that "ancestral religions did not have a clear moral dimension" (Norenzayan 2013: 127) or that the world's traditional deities are somehow "weak" and/or "whimsical" (Chudek, Muthukrishna, and Henrich 2015). Others, however, challenge such positions and point to abundant evidence of moralistic supernatural punishment beliefs or traditions with "moral dimensions" in traditional societies (Beheim et al 2021;Bendixen et al 2021;Johnson 2014;2015;Lovins 2015;Purzycki 2011;Purzycki and Sosis forthcoming;Purzycki et al in press;Raffield, Price, and Collard 2019;Singh, Kaptchuk, and Henrich 2021).…”

Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies

“…Two critical questions interwoven throughout these discussions are: How does the content of beliefs about and appeals to gods vary across groups and what accounts for this variation? While these questions have deep roots in the history of anthropological thought (e.g., Evans-Pritchard, 1965;Lang, 1909;Swanson, 1960;Tylor, 1920), the bulk of contemporary research mostly examines gods or religious traditions that are explicitly interested in human morality (Baumard et al, 2015;Beheim et al, 2021;Botero et al, 2014;Peoples and Marlowe, 2012;Roes and Raymond, 2003;Skoggard et al, 2020;Snarey, 1996;Watts et al, 2015). These studies primarily rely on-often the same-society-level data, usually from coded ethnographies and reports from travelers and missionaries (see Purzycki and Watts, 2018).…”