The ecology of religious beliefs.
Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.
Initiative for Biological Complexity, Department of the Interior Southeast Climate Science Center, and Department of Biology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130; c.a.botero@email.wustl.edu.
Carlos A
CA
Botero
Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695;
Beth
B
Gardner
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Department of Geography and Program in Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3E8;
Kathryn R
KR
Kirby
School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6140, New Zealand;
Joseph
J
Bulbulia
Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523;
Michael C
MC
Gavin
School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1142, New Zealand; School of Philosophy, Research School of the Social Sciences, Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, Australia; and Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for History and the Sciences, 07745 Jena, Germany.
Russell D
RD
Gray
D004463:Ecology; D006801:Humans; D012067:Religion
cultural evolution; ecological risk; environmental effects; religion; supernatural beliefs