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“Throughout the years, there’s been an increasing awareness of how human social complexity is remarkably unprecedented in the animal kingdom,” said lead author Benjamin Purzycki, an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia. “So we’ve got to come up with some satisfactory way of explaining how it’s all possible that we can have remarkably complex societies interact with each other but have quite a fair amount of in-group cooperation and coordination as well.”

Scientists have increasingly found a connection between the type of religion these societies have and their ability to expand, Purzycki said. It's part of a growing field of research called evolutionary research studies, which looks in part at the way human societies and human belief systems have co-evolved, and how religious beliefs can bring adaptive advantages. 

“For quite a few decades, cultural anthropologists have repeatedly observed in a variety of ways that there’s this relationship between the kinds of deities or religious systems that cultures have, and their degree of social complexity,” he said.

Many studies have tried to probe this possible relationship but suffered from a variety of shortcomings, Dominic D.P. Johnson of the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the paper, wrote in a commentary.

“Empirical evidence that supernatural beliefs promote cooperation is mounting, but has tended to rely on qualitative, society-level or proxy measures of beliefs,” Johnson wrote. “Study participants have also typically been university students in developed nations, thus omitting the small-scale societies most relevant to the evolutionary problem at hand: how human groups achieved cooperation and made the transition from small to large societies in the first place.”


More at: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gods-punishment-society-spread-20160210-story.html

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