Gods’ moral involvement grows with group size culturally

Evidence

Thus, in foraging societies, where supernatural punishment should be clearly visible if it was a genetic adaptation, many of the gods seem to be amoral beings. In contrast, in evolutionarily recent, large, anonymous social groups, not ancestral hunter-gatherers, there is widespread supernatural monitoring by Big Gods. This pattern we have discussed earlier—increasing moral involvement of gods as groups gain in size is precisely what one would expect from the cultural evolutionary scenario, but not if supernatural punishment was genetically evolved in the Pleistocene. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 446

Categorization

• XREF: This is the causal spine of the reader’s thesis — social scale drives Big God emergence — linking directly to Norenzayan’s Big God mechanism as the cultural-evolutionary alternative to genetic accounts.