Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on March 20, 2019 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Religion, Society

An international research team, including a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex large-scale societies. Big gods are defined as moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions. Contrary to prevailing theories, the team found that beliefs in big gods are a consequence, not a cause, of the evolution of complex societies. The results are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Credit: Patrick Neufelder

For their statistical analyses the researchers used the Seshat: Global History Databank, the most comprehensive, and constantly growing collection of historical and prehistorical data. Currently Seshat contains about 300,000 records on social complexity, religion, and other characteristics of 500 past societies, spanning 10,000 years of human history.

"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.

One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.

Locations of the 30 sampled regions labelled according to precolonial evidence of moralizing gods. The area of each circle is proportional to social complexity of the earliest polity with moralizing gods to occupy the region or the latest precolonial polity for regions without precolonial moralizing gods. The numbers indicate the date of earliest evidence of such beliefs in thousands of years ago. The circles are colored by type of moralizing gods [Credit: (c) Harvey Whitehouse et al. 2019]

Such rituals create a collective identity and feelings of belonging that act as social glue, making people to behave more cooperatively. "Our results suggest that collective identities are more important to facilitate cooperation in societies than religious beliefs," says Harvey Whitehouse.

Until recently it has been impossible to distinguish between cause and effect in social theories and history, as standardized quantitative data from throughout world history were missing. To address this problem, data and social scientist Peter Turchin, together with Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter François from the University of Oxford, founded Seshat in 2011. The multidisciplinary project integrates the expertise of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, social scientists as well as data scientists into a state-of-the-art, open-access database. Dozens of experts throughout the world helped to assemble detailed data on social complexity and religious beliefs and practices from hundreds of independent political units ("polities"), beginning with Neolithic Anatolians (today Turkey) in 9600 BCE.

The complexity of a society can be estimated by social characteristics such as population, territory, and sophistication of government institutions and information systems. Religious data include the presence of beliefs in supernatural enforcement of reciprocity, fairness, and loyalty, and the frequency and standardization of religious rituals.

Social complexity tends to increase more rapidly before the appearance of moralising gods, not after [Credit: Harvey Whitehouse et al. 2019]

"Seshat allows researchers to analyze hundreds of variables relating to social complexity, religion, warfare, agriculture and other features of human culture and society that vary over time and space," explains Pieter François. "Now that the database is ready for analysis, we are poised to test a long list of theories about human history." This includes competing theories of how and why humans evolved to cooperate in large-scale societies of millions and more people.

"Seshat is an unprecedented collaboration between anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and evolutionary scientists", says Patrick Savage, corresponding author of the article. "It shows how big data can revolutionize the study of human history."

Source: Complexity Science Hub Vienna [March 20, 2019]

How do religious ideologies spread?

By: Thomas Schmitt Attorney on July 28, 2018 / comment : 0 Anthropology, Christianity, Oceania, Religion

Over the last 2000 years Christianity has grown from a tiny religious sect to the largest family of religions in the world. How did Christianity become so successful? Did Christianity spread through grass-roots movements or political elites? And what can the spread of Christianity tell us about how widespread social change happens?

The chiefs Waikato and Hongi Hika with missionary Thomas Kendall, Oil on canvas by James Barry, 1820 [Credit: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington]

A paper published in Nature Human Behaviour uses new computational cross-cultural methods to help answer these questions. The research tested how political hierarchies, social inequality, and population size affected the spread of Christianity in 70 Austronesian societies.

Austronesian societies shared a common ancestral language and are located across Southeast Asia, East Africa and the South Pacific. Historically, they ranged from very small egalitarian family-based communities to large politically complex societies such as Hawaii. Conversion typically happened in the 18th and 19th centuries, and while some societies took less than a year to convert, others took up to 205 years. The range of social structures and conversion histories makes Austronesian societies ideal for theories about how cultural change happens.

The results of the study show that cultures with political leadership structures were often the fastest to convert to Christianity. This supports a "top-down" process of conversion whereby chiefs and elite leaders, themselves converted by missionaries, were highly influential in spreading Christian doctrine among their people.

In contrast, social inequality was not related to conversion times. This challenges one of the most widely-cited reasons for Christianity's popularity, that it spread from the "bottom-up" by empowering lower classes and promising to improve the lives of the less privileged in the afterlife.

The research also found that Christianity spread most quickly among small populations. This helps clarify the importance of population size in processes of cultural change.

"While people often think of big societies as sources of innovation, our findings show that bigger societies can also be slow to pick up on new ideas," says lead author Dr. Joseph Watts who undertook the research at the University of Auckland's School of Psychology and at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. "In a small population, it becomes more likely that beliefs will be transmitted relatively quickly, particularly if they are being driven by leaders and other powerful figures."

Dr. Watts says the findings provide significant insight into large-scale human behaviour and the process of cultural change, a fascinating aspect of human life. "If you look at our contemporary world, some things spread incredibly quickly while others take a very long time so here we provide evidence of why that might be."

University of Auckland Professor Quentin Atkinson, a researcher in this study, says that finding new answers about how beliefs have spread in the past gives us insight into how they might spread in the future. "This research can help us understand how both the size and the structure of populations influence the diffusion and adoption of new institutions, ideologies or technologies."

Source: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History [July 28, 2018]