Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity

Abstract

In this special issue of Religion, Brain & Behavior, the Seshat team presents the analysis results from more than a decade of database construction focused on establishing the role of moralizing religion in the evolution of socio-political complexity. The special issue contains two research articles reporting the results of extensive statistical analysis of data supported by 210 pages of detailed Analytical Narratives and 219 pages of tables explaining the Seshat team’s coding decisions based on these narratives. Chronologically the first paper in the sequence, “Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: a review and ‘retake’” (Whitehouse et al., 2023), is a revised and improved version of a Letter originally published in Nature showing that moralizing gods did not drive the evolution of socio-political complexity as proposed by the Big Gods hypothesis (Whitehouse et al., 2019). The paper was retracted due to errors in the coding and analysis of missing data, even though the errors were correctable and did not significantly change the paper’s headline findings (Whitehouse et al., 2021). The creation of a ‘Retake’ format at Religion, Brain & Behavior (Bulbulia et al., 2021) provided a suitable platform for the corrected analysis to be published and, further, to undertake a major reanalysis using additional data based on improved methods of data management and statistical analysis. Overall, this Retake provides further support for the original Nature paper, confirming that the largest increases in sociopolitical complexity did indeed precede the earliest documented appearance of Big Gods in world history and showing that Big Gods did not contribute to the evolution of sociopolitical complexity as predicted by the Big Gods hypothesis. The Retake is followed by a Target Article (Turchin et al., 2023), showing that the intensity of warfare and agriculture were major drivers in the evolution of both socio-political complexity and moralizing religion. The correlation between social complexity and moralizing religion, thus, resulted from shared evolutionary drivers, rather than from direct causal relationships between these two variables. These conclusions resulted from a major advance on the methods of the Nature paper and Retake, most notably by going beyond the typical binary measures previously used to capture the presence or absence of moralizing religion and replacing these with a series of graduated measures of ‘moralizing supernatural punishment’ enabling researchers to quantify the variables of interest. This approach also allowed the Seshat team to estimate the contributions of a series of other variables, in addition to socio-political complexity, in driving the evolution of moralizing religion. The other variables included warfare, animal husbandry, and agricultural productivity. The Target Article is then followed by a series of commentaries addressing issues of theory, data, and analysis. The main theoretical question at stake in the ensuing discussions concerns whether more elaborated measures of moralizing religion might have produced different arguments. This debate, afforded by the article-plus-commentaries format, allowed many issues of empirical and statistical importance to be brought to the fore and discussed, allowing points of disagreement to be sharpened and solutions to be explored. Taken together, the findings established by this special issue are that moralizing religion did not drive the evolution of socio-political complexity, nor was there a reverse causality loop (complexity