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 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…

Complex societies and moralizing gods: Is cultural evolution Darwinian or Lamarckian?

Whitehouse et al. ignited a bit of a controversy with their recent Nature paper which concludes that “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history”. Their argument is that “belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies”. They use a very large database to suggest that moralizing…