期刊
NATURE
卷 568, 期 7751, 页码 226-+出版社
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4
关键词
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资金
- ESRC Large Grant entitled 'Ritual, Community, and Conflict' [REF RES-060-25-0085]
- John Templeton Foundation grant
- Tricoastal Foundation grant
- Advanced Grant ('Ritual Modes: Divergent modes of ritual, social cohesion, prosociality, and conflict') from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [694986]
- Templeton World Charity Foundation entitled 'Cognitive and Cultural Foundations of Religion and Morality' [TWCF0164]
- Keio Research Institute at SFC Startup Grant
- Keio Gijuku Academic Development Fund Individual Grant
- European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [644055]
- Starter Grant ('The Cultural Evolution AMP
- Ecology of Institutions') from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [716212]
- ESRC [ES/I005455/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- European Research Council (ERC) [716212] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles(1-8). The 'moralizing gods' hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies(9-13). Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of moralizing gods and social complexity(3,6,7,9-18), the relationship between the two is disputed(9-13,19-24), and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To overcome these limitations, here we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow-rather than precede-large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions(9,12,16,18), powerful moralizing 'big gods' and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of 'megasocieties' with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations(25,26) generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity.
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