Coding, causality, and statistical craft: the emergence and evolutionary drivers of moralistic supernatural punishment remain unresolved

Abstract

The target article from Turchin et al. assesses the relationship between social complexity and moralistic supernatural punishment. In our evaluation of their project, we argue that each step of its workflow -- from data production and theory to modeling and reporting -- makes it impossible to test the hypothesis that its authors claim they are testing. We focus our discussion on three important classes of issues: problems of data, analysis, and causal inference.