In 2019, Whitehouse et al. ignited a relative firestorm of controversy around the Big Gods Hypothesis of social complexification. The Big Gods Hypothesis holds that belief in moralizing big gods allowed, or perhaps even drove the significant increases in the scale and complexity of human societies that we see in many places throughout the past…
Twilight of the moralizing gods: Lessons for a better academic world
The moralizing gods saga has ended, or at least its first chapter. Two years ago, Nature published (Whitehouse et al 2019) a widely publicized paper that claimed to demonstrate that moralizing gods, who care more about relationships between humans than relationships between humans and gods, developed following major social complexification events, and not prior to…
Moralizing gods update: Seshat still searching for something that isn’t there
Last week, Turchin et al posted a reply to critiques of their Nature paper that argued that social complexity precedes moralizing gods. This goes against the big gods hypothesis that the presence of moralizing gods in human social networks allowed the growth of larger and more complex communities. Instead, Turchin et al argue that larger…
The moralizing gods debacle takes a turn for the worse
Savage et al. (2019) have posted their response to Beheim et al.’s (2019) critique of their Nature paper (Whitehouse et al. 2019a) which argues that moralizing gods appear as a consequence of social complexification, rather than as its precursor, which the Big Gods hypothesis requires. I discussed the original controversy here and here. The Seshat…
The jury is still out on moralizing gods, but the initial response by Whitehouse and Francois is not encouraging
The latest salvo in the saga of the moralizing gods comes from Whitehouse and Francois. Following two critiques of their recent Nature paper on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of large, complex societies, one by Beheim et al. and one by Slingerland et al., they have posted a preliminary response on co-author…
ArcheoThoughts 