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<\/a>Let\u2019s say you\u2019re reading this on your laptop in a coffeeshop. Complete strangers picked grew and picked coffee beans, milked cows, and trucked those products to market. Another stranger exchanged your latte for arbitrary tokens \u2013 either bits of colored paper or mere digital 0s and 1s. And at some point workmen installed electrical lines and cable for the wifi. We\u2019re talking about cooperation<\/i>: people playing the roles they\u2019re supposed to, making complicated sacrifices, all in order for civilization to keep trundling along. How did we homo sapiens<\/i> get so cooperative? Many scholars think \u201cbig god\u201d religions<\/a> \u2013 whose deities care about morality \u2013 played a role, but a controversial new paper in Nature<\/i><\/a> suggests that big gods come after<\/i>, not before, complex civilization. Other scholars have taken issue<\/a> with the Nature<\/i> paper\u2019s methods and conclusions. Come with me into the whirling center of a scientific controversy.<\/p>\nThe Nature<\/i> paper, \u201cComplex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,<\/a>\u201d was published in April to significant media acclaim. \u201cBig Religion May Have Gotten too Much Credit for the Evolution of Modern Society<\/a>,\u201d claimed Scientific American<\/i>. The website Science Daily<\/i> reported that \u201cComplex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around<\/a>.\u201d What was the data behind this electrifying finding?<\/p>\n The paper\u2019s lead author, Harvey Whitehouse, heads up Oxford University\u2019s Center for the Study of Social Cohesion<\/a>. With an international team of collaborators, he\u2019s been working to build a comprehensive database of world history and culture for researchers to test hypotheses related to cultural evolution. The database, Seshat: Global History Databank<\/a>, uses ethnographic and historical literature sources to code variables related to social complexity, religion, and other topics for geographic and cultural zones across the world and throughout history. Research assistants comb through the literature, find the appropriate data, and fill in the appropriate variables.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For example, research assistants coded the 19th-century Ashanti Empire in present-day Ghana as relatively high in complexity<\/a> due to the attested presence of high population and extensive governmental hierarchy (prior to British colonization, anyway). A few thousand miles away and several millennia back, The Classic Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt was coded<\/a> as having highly routinized religion with a moralizing high god. This coding was on the basis of records showing that Classic Old Kingdom priests offered sacrifices in the temple three times a day, and that the goddess Ma\u2019at<\/a> was keenly interested in whether her people behaved according to the precepts of cosmic order and balance.<\/p>\n Research assistants (RAs) \u2013 who aren\u2019t yet fully trained, PhD-level researchers, but usually undergraduates or master\u2019s students \u2013 are supposed to consult with subject-area experts when coding variables. This expert advice can clear up conflicts or ambiguity in the written records \u2013 a key role, since ethnographic and historical records commonly disagree with one another. What\u2019s more, the Seshat databank is supposed to allow for annotation of multiple perspectives on any given issue when experts don\u2019t agree \u2013 for example, whether imperial Ashanti society had instruments of credit and debit. Expert vetting is intended to ensure that RAs don\u2019t misread sources and populate the databank with unreliable data.<\/p>\n As the databank gets filled in with fine-grained information on complexity and religion, researchers are supposed to be able to use all that data to test hypotheses about how societies develop and change over time. For example, do cultures with more complex governments also tend to have complicated religious systems? If so, which comes first?<\/p>\n A key hypothesis in the field of cultural evolution \u2013 the \u201cbig gods hypothesis\u201d \u2013 predicts that omniscient, morally concerned deities help make large-scale cooperation possible<\/a> by encouraging people to behave properly<\/a> and obey norms<\/a>, even when many social and economic interactions are anonymous and ephemeral.<\/p>\n In small-scale societies, trust runs on reputation and reciprocity. People behave well largely because they know they\u2019ll see each other again. If they cheat or hurt one another, they know others will hear about it, and their reputation will suffer. It\u2019s a bit like living in a small town: everyone knows your business. But in large-scale cultures, this \u201cgrapevine\u201d approach to morality doesn\u2019t work. Maybe \u2013 the theory goes \u2013 belief in all-knowing gods who care whether people behave ethically is what allowed large-scale societies, like empires and kingdoms, to form.<\/p>\n But the Nature<\/i> paper by Whitehouse et al. claims that this effect ran the other way around \u2013 complex societies evolved first, and moral high gods came afterward. The authors combined 51 variables of society size, hierarchical organization, and related measures into a single measure of social complexity. They then tested 12 geographic regions across the world that contained data for social complexity both before and after the first records of moralizing high gods, using time periods of one century. According to their analyses, social complexity increased faster before<\/i> the appearance of moral high gods than after. In 10 of the 12 regions, evidence for moral high gods appeared in the Seshat database within a single century of the regions\u2019 having exceeded a complexity threshold of .6 (on a scale from 0 to 1). The authors call this level of complexity a \u201cmegasociety,\u201d comprising a million or more inhabitants. They therefore interpreted their findings to indicate that big gods are a consequence, not a cause, of social complexity and high-intensity cooperation.<\/p>\n Others weren\u2019t so convinced. Bret Beheim, an ecological anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology<\/a>, led a re-analysis of the Seshat data and, with a team comprising researchers around the world, produced a preprint paper that takes issue<\/a> with some of the original paper\u2019s findings. To add to the excitement, a separate critique of the Nature<\/i> paper, written by historians with reservations about the data collection and coding methods in Seshat, is also\u00a0forthcoming in the Journal of Cognitive Historiography<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll focus on the preprint paper by Beheim and colleagues. What\u2019s at stake is a complicated and sticky ball of wax, but the basics are relatively straightforward.\u00a0<\/span>One issue that Beheim and his co-authors raise is that many of the data points in the Seshat databank aren\u2019t independent. Each geographic region or polity contains data putatively broken up into century-long intervals, so that you can see whether or not Greek civilization \u2013 for example \u2013 had a certain level of complexity in 700 BCE, 600 BCE, or 500 BCE. But for many of these century-long data points, previous data is simply filled in from the previous century, without any indication that a separate source was consulted or a unique measurement taken. This means that the Seshat databank is more coarse-grained than it initially appears to be, making it difficult to carry out certain kinds of statistical analysis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n More importantly, though, is the problem of missing information. In the specific dataset used for Whitehouse et al.\u2019s Nature<\/i> paper, each century-long interval for every geographic region had a binary value for the presence or absence of moral high gods (or their equivalent, \u201cbroad supernatural punishment<\/a>\u201d). The idea is that researchers should be able to get a longitudinal picture \u2013 one extended over time \u2013 of precisely when moralistic religious beliefs made their first appearance in any given region. But in examining the dataset and analyses, Beheim et al. found that most of the negative data points for big gods \u2013 data points showing the known absence<\/i> of big gods for a given century \u2013 were in fact originally marked as \u201cNA,\u201d or \u201cdata not available.\u201d What this means is that Whitehouse and his co-authors decided to code missing data for big gods as positive<\/i> evidence of the absence of big gods. Beheim et al. write:<\/p>\n in total, 61% (n<\/i> =490) of all outcome observations, and 98% of alleged cases of \u2018moralizing gods absent,\u2019 were originally unknown values in Seshat. The resulting correlation between \u2018having any outcome data at all\u2019 (not \u2018NA\u2019) and recording \u2018moralizing gods present\u2019 is r <\/i>= 0.97, suggesting that the study is essentially an analysis of the missingness<\/a> patterns in Seshat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Societies with no available values for big gods in the original<\/i> dataset tended to be very small, to be illiterate, and to have low levels of social complexity. But as Beheim et al. point out, this means that re-coding those values simply as \u201cknown absent\u201d biases the study in favor of Whitehouse et al.\u2019s conclusion. When Beheim et al. re-ran analyses with missing values simply coded as missing, their results suggested that big gods are likely to show up in a society before <\/i>social complexity starts increasing.<\/p>\n Beheim and his colleagues were also concerned that the tight relationship between social complexity and religious type could bias the data in favor of later appearances for big gods. Specifically, they showed that, in most of the societies analyzed for the Nature<\/i> paper, big gods appeared almost precisely<\/i> when writing first appeared. This is a problem because the Seshat databank depends on written records for its data. If a society hadn\u2019t developed literacy by a given time, then by definition there wouldn\u2019t be any records about their religion. The fact that the first appearance of big gods in the Seshat databank so often coincides with the precise historical moment when a society first developed written records raises the distinct possibility that many societies had big gods prior to achieving literacy, but simply couldn\u2019t record those beliefs.<\/p>\n In fact, ethnographic research suggests that many small-scale societies do have gods and spirits who care about humans\u2019 behavior. One meta-analysis<\/a> of more than 40 ethnographies covering 18 hunter-gatherer (foraging) societies found that every single group believed that gods or spirits punish humans for antisocial or harmful actions. The idea that moralizing gods are a unique feature of complex societies is therefore questionable. At the very least, the ethnographic record hints that many societies have moralizing gods for some<\/i> time before becoming literate.<\/p>\n The smallest possible time window in the original study was one century, remember. What if we move the first appearance of moralizing high gods back in time only one century, to correct for this potential \u201cforward bias\u201d of the Seshat data? Beheim and his colleagues showed that this correction reverses Whitehouse et al.\u2019s finding: the results indicate that big gods come before, not after, steep rises in social complexity.<\/p>\n This correction doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that Whitehouse et al.\u2019s findings are no good at all. Rather, they simply illustrate that the entirety of the original paper\u2019s conclusions depend on a very narrow time window. As I mentioned above, Whitehouse et al. found that, in most societies, big gods appeared within a single century of a society\u2019s achieving high levels of complexity. This is a slim margin of error. You have to be very sure that the indicated century really is exactly <\/i>when big gods actually appeared in order to draw firm conclusions. But Beheim and colleagues argue \u2013 I think convincingly \u2013 that we\u2019re not actually that sure.<\/p>\n There are also some questions about the reliability of the Seshat data. Specifically, some of the subject matter experts \u2013 the quality-control researchers who are intended to be providing feedback and vetting for research assistants\u2019 work \u2013 appear to disagree with the managers of the Seshat databank regarding how much work they actually contributed. Beheim et al. write:<\/p>\n one of Seshat\u2019s more prolific scholars (Dr. Vesna Wallace), originally credited with having vetted the religion and ritual variables for 49 polities in 7 NGAs, in fact reports having played no role whatsoever in supervising coding or vetting any portion of the site.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Cognitive Historiography<\/i> paper goes into more detail:<\/p>\n Prof. Wallace, has, when contacted by a member of our team, expressed surprise at any mention of her as expert vetter on the Seshat site, noting that she had no part in any aspect of coding, vetting or recommendation of sources, and that most of the NGAs where she is listed are entirely outside her area of expertise.\u2026According to Wallace, her involvement with the Seshat project was limited to attending a basic informational session and then having a private conversation with one of the Nature authors about one or two basic issues in Indian and Mongolian Buddhism<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If this claim is true, it raises questions about how much vetting is actually going on in the Seshat databank. This matters because, as we\u2019ve seen, even tiny differences in data values can make a world of difference when testing complex hypotheses.\u00a0The data need to be rock-solid; if they\u2019re not, results will always come with a big asterisk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Despite their critiques, Beheim et al. and Edward Slingerland et al. \u2013 the authors of the Cognitive Historiography<\/i> rebuttal \u2013 both emphasize the value of Whitehouse and his colleagues\u2019 project: the creation of a large, cross-cultural database for testing historical and cultural-evolutionary hypotheses. The world needs exactly this kind of resource, which is precisely why it\u2019s so important to get it right.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that Edward Slingerland<\/a>, a professor of religious studies at the University of British Columbia \u2013 Vancouver, is spearheading the construction of a separate database, the Database of Religious History<\/a>, which uses different methods and quality controls to produce historical, cross-cultural data about religious variables across known societies. The upshot is that there are two alternative databases under construction, supported by the efforts of hundreds of experts and research staff. In principle, researchers will soon be able to test hypotheses using the two databases and compare results, allowing for more fine-grained analyses of predictions and results. In the meantime, there may be some rivalries between the two teams. While blood might occasionally run hot, the history of science shows that discovery and advancement often benefit from healthy rivalries between experts.<\/p>\n Speaking of which: Patrick Savage, a professor of musicology and expert in cross-cultural studies at Keio University in Japan and one of the Nature<\/i> paper\u2019s co-authors, understandably disagrees with Beheim et al.\u2019s conclusions. In a blog post at Nature<\/i><\/a>, he responds that 6 of the 12 societies analyzed in the original paper gained big gods only through military conquest. For example, ancient Pakistan gained belief in a big, moralizing god only because the Achaemenid Persians conquered it, bringing Zoroastrianism<\/a> along with them.<\/p>\n Savage points out that it\u2019s unreasonable to assume that the data in this case might be forward biased, since there\u2019s no way for Zoroastrianism to have somehow been somewhere 100 years before it was there. Running analyses on the remaining 6 societies, Savage finds that correcting for forward bias leaves the original paper\u2019s conclusions unchanged. Similarly, other authors of the Nature<\/i> paper have challenged critiques\u00a0on the blog of co-author Peter Turchin<\/a>. They say they\u2019re preparing a comprehensive response to the critiques for peer review.<\/p>\n All parties generally agree that there\u2019s some <\/i>correlation between the complexity of a society and the type of religion it upholds. Whether the big gods come first or later, they probably at least help sustain high levels of disinterested cooperation. As Whitehouse and colleagues put it,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n even if moralizing gods do not cause the evolution of complex societies, they may represent a cultural adaptation that is necessary to maintain cooperation in such societies once they have exceeded a certain size, perhaps owing to the need to subject diverse populations in multi-ethnic empires to a common higher-level power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even while disagreeing heartily with Whitehouse et al.\u2019s major conclusions, Beheim and his colleagues concur that the relationship between big gods and social complexity probably isn\u2019t straightforward and linear. Rather, moral high gods and social complexity probably co-evolve in a feedback loop between culture and cognition<\/a>. And while many small-scale societies do have gods and spirits that care about human morality, the type<\/i> of moral behaviors and the scope<\/i> of moral questions seems to change with increases in social complexity. Namely, in big societies, big gods care more about impersonal fairness<\/a>, and are more likely to defer their punishments or rewards to an afterlife. So rather than talking about the evolution of moralizing gods, we should be talking about specific kinds<\/i> of moralizing gods and types of religion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n All societies depend on cooperation. But what counts as cooperation varies from setting to setting. In complex, large-scale civilizations, cooperation often requires trusting anonymous strangers and accepting delayed gratification. The big gods that scholars such as Whitehouse are interested in are ultimately those that care about these things. By contrast, the gods of smaller-scale societies often care about observing proper taboos, as well as about not harming other members of the tribe. In all societies, religion and ritual have to do with morality. But slow, difficult scientific work is needed to uncover what types of moralities fit with which types of societies \u2013 and which types of gods.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Do “big gods” \u2013 supernatural beings who care about human morality and fairness \u2013 help large, complex societies to evolve? A new paper in Nature suggests that it’s the other way around. But the paper’s findings have unleashed a storm of controversy and critiques. What can we conclude?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":677,"featured_media":3338,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1596,1438,801],"tags":[2141,1460,1520,2144,650,429,5,2135,2147,1427,2138],"class_list":["post-3329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cognitive-science-of-religion","category-evolutionofreligion","category-scientific-study-of-religion-2","tag-beheim","tag-big-gods","tag-cultural-evolution","tag-database-of-religious-history","tag-morality","tag-nature","tag-religion","tag-seshat","tag-social-complexity","tag-supernatural-punishment","tag-whitehouse"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Seshat Databank<\/b><\/h4>\n
Big Gods: Cause or Consequence of Complexity?<\/b><\/h4>\n
Controversy<\/b><\/h4>\n
Building a Cross-Cultural, Historical Database is Hard<\/h4>\n
Ongoing Conversation<\/b><\/h4>\n
Rebuttals to the Rebuttal<\/b><\/h4>\n
The Upshot<\/b><\/h4>\n