Small-scale foraging societies lack omniscient moralizing gods, refuting gene-only accounts

Evidence

A key challenge to this hypothesis is that small-scale societies, and especially foragers, don’t tend to have moralizing or omniscient gods. This runs exactly counter to the predictions of this gene-only hypothesis. The peculiar distribution of Big Gods and supernatural punishment around the world is not consistent either with the idea that these beliefs are universal. Might it be that supernatural punishment was naturally selected, and then culturally elaborated in larger groups where freeriding is more acute? This sounds plausible, but what’s problematic to this latter account is that the deities of many small-scale societies tend to be neither fully omniscient nor morally concerned. Going deeper into the evidence, interventionist gods, when they appear in the supernatural pantheon of a culture, are not just concerned about cooperation and honesty—they vary considerably on what behaviors they care about: they show concern about cheating and selfishness, while also intervening in case of violations of food taboos, laziness, and incest, and some even care about the behavior of animals in public! This is puzzling if supernatural punishment was designed as a genetic adaptation to solve the problem of cooperation. Why then, do moralizing gods also care about other behaviors that the groups care about, that are not about cooperation per se? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s Big God mechanism claim: the cultural-evolutionary distribution of omniscient moralizing gods tracks anonymity, not genetic universality.
• QUESTION: Why do moralizing gods police food taboos, laziness, incest, and even animal behavior? The presence of non-cooperation norms complicates a purely prosociality-driven account worth tracing.