Prosocial religions helped groups scale up, especially in intense borderland conflict

Evidence

Turchin’s analysis predicts that, historically, prosocial religions played a key role in the scaling up of groups, particularly in borderland areas where conflict was most intense, an idea that remains untested. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 479

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s Big God framework — conflict-intensity environments selecting for group-beneficial religion maps onto Norenzayan’s omniscient-gaze mechanism and on evolutionary models of intergroup competition.
• QUESTION: The ‘untested’ status of the borderland-conflict claim is worth chasing — this could anchor a testable extension of the reader’s fumi-e analysis.