Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data: a review and “retake”

IF 3.6 3区 哲学 0 RELIGION Religion Brain & Behavior Pub Date : 2022-06-29 DOI:10.1080/2153599X.2022.2074085
H. Whitehouse, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, D. Hoyer, K. C. Feeney, Enrico Cioni, Rosa S. Purcell, Jennifer Larson, J. Baines, B. Haar, A. Covey, P. Turchin
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引用次数: 8

Abstract

ABSTRACT This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deities drove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history. The Letter was retracted by the authors in response to a critique by Beheim et al. (2021). Correction of errors in the coding and analysis of missing data to address this critique does not, however, significantly change the main findings of the original Nature Letter. We report the results of a major reanalysis of Seshat data following expansion of the codebook and database and substantial improvements to our data management methods. We also employ a more direct statistical methodology to test theories of evolutionary causality. Together, these results show a compellingly convergent picture, confirming the headline finding of the original Letter in Nature, which shows that the largest increases in social complexity do indeed precede Big Gods in world history and that Big Gods did not contribute to the evolution of sociopolitical complexity as predicted by the Big Gods hypothesis.
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用全球历史数据检验大神假说:回顾与“重夺”
这篇Retake文章是对发表在《自然》(Whitehouse et al., 2019)上的一封信的更正和扩展版,该信旨在测试大神假说,该假说提出,对道德惩罚神的信仰推动了世界历史上社会政治复杂性的演变。在Beheim等人(2021)的批评下,作者撤回了这封信。然而,为了解决这一批评而纠正编码错误和分析缺失数据的错误并没有显著改变原始《自然快报》的主要发现。我们报告了在扩展代码本和数据库以及对我们的数据管理方法进行实质性改进之后对Seshat数据进行重大重新分析的结果。我们还采用更直接的统计方法来检验进化因果关系的理论。综上所述,这些结果显示了一幅令人信服的趋同图景,证实了《自然》原信的标题发现,即在世界历史上,社会复杂性的最大增长确实先于“大神”出现,而“大神”并没有像“大神”假说所预测的那样,对社会政治复杂性的演变做出贡献。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.00
自引率
13.60%
发文量
93
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