Moralizing Gods and the Arms-Race Hypothesis of Human Society Growth

Abstract

Following evolutionary ideas, it is argued that human societies grew in size while competing with other societies over preferred habitats. Larger human societies are more successful in competition, but they also experience more pressures to fission. Morality unites a society by limiting infringements upon the rights of other society members. This leads to the prediction that a belief in 'moralizing Gods' is more often found in larger societies. A previous analysis of data from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample and the Ethnographic Atlas support these predictions. However, in this paper the statistics of the tests are largely ignored. The primary aim of this paper is to illustrate that evolutionary logic helps understanding of human social behavior.