Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia

Abstract

Supernatural belief presents an explanatory challenge to evolutionary theoristsit is both costly and prevalent. One influential functional explanation claims that the imagined threat of supernatural punishment can suppress selfishness and enhance cooperation. Specifically, morally concerned supreme deities or 'moralizing high gods' have been argued to reduce free-riding in large social groups, enabling believers to build the kind of complex societies that define modern humanity. Previous cross-cultural studies claiming to support the MHG hypothesis rely on correlational analyses only and do not correct for the statistical non-independence of sampled cultures. Here we use a Bayesian phylogenetic approach with a sample of 96 Austronesian cultures to test the MHG hypothesis as well as an alternative supernatural punishment hypothesis that allows punishment by a broad range of moralizing agents. We find evidence that broad supernatural punishment drives political complexity, whereas MHGs follow political complexity. We suggest that the concept of MHGs diffused as part of a suite of traits arising from cultural exchange between complex societies. Our results show the power of phylogenetic methods to address long-standing debates about the origins and functions of religion in human society.

Moralizing gods and armed conflict

“…As such, geographic proximity to a society with a moralizing god provides a source of exogenous variation in the likelihood of emergence of a moralizing god. This idea is supported by Watts et al's (2015) finding that the Austronesian expansion, which began around 5000 B.C., helped diffuse moralizing gods through cultural exchanges between societies. Cultural exchanges are, in turn, more likely to occur between neighboring societies.…”

Cultural macroevolution matters

“…Using this approach and data from the Pulotu database (14, 49), we recently tested a series of hypotheses about the role of religion in the emergence of social complexity (14,50,51). The Pulotu database contains quantitative variables documenting the traditional religious beliefs and practices as well as the social organization of 106 Austronesian cultures.…”

“…We ran two series of analyses to test the Supernatural Punishment Hypothesis (50). In the first, we tested the effect of Broad Supernatural Punishment on the evolution of political complexity.…”

Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

“…For example, after controlling for key correlates, analyses of cross-cultural data sets show that larger and more politically complex societies tend to have more supernatural punishment and moralistic deities 5,15 , and historical analyses in one geographic region show that precursors to supernatural punishment beliefs precede social complexity 16 . However, this data derives from qualitative ethnographies of entire societies; a more focused, direct and systematic cross-cultural assessment of what individuals think their gods care about, and whether or not people explicitly or implicitly view their gods as concerned with norms of interpersonal social behaviour (termed here as 'morality' 17,18 ; see Supplementary Information section S4.2) has only recently begun [18][19][20] .…”