Tuesday, September 25, 2012

How Culture Drove Human Evolution | Conversation | Edge

How Culture Drove Human Evolution | Conversation | Edge: The emergence of high-moralizing gods is an important example of this. In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral. They're not concerned with your sexual behavior or your social behavior. Often you'll make bargains with them, but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing. They're concerned about exactly the kinds of things that are going to be a problem for running a large-scale society, like how you treat other members of your religious group or your ethnic group.