The scale at which humans cooperate expanded greatly over the last 10,000 years—from hundreds of people to hundreds of millions. One popular theory that explains this dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of human societies is known as the Big Gods hypothesis. The basic idea,

Last week the Seshat project ran a workshop on “Testing the Axial Age” in Oxford, UK. The workshop brought together a small group of scholars from different fields – historians, religious studies experts, archaeologists, and anthropologists. The goal was to discuss what ex

It’s Easter, and instead of continuing with my series on the New Caliphate, which is quite gloomy, I thought I would take a break from it and write something more appropriate for the holiday. I’ll post the next installment in the series after the holidays. Corpus Christi p

  I recently finished reading Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. It’s an important book, which is also a lot of fun to read. However, it will be heartily disliked by at least two groups: the neo-atheists and evolutionary psychologists. &

Comments on Part I tended to take a rather negative view of the argument advanced by Baumard et al. Thus, Gene Anderson questioned whether Confucianism is even a religion. It was certainly a moralistic teaching, but how important a role did supernatural agents play in it is very much

As I said in my previous blog, the Catholic areas in Belfast tend to be symbolically demarcated primarily with murals, while the Protestant ones are festooned with flags. The distinction is not absolute, and you can see the Irish Tricolor (green-white-orange) in two photographs in the

As I more-or-less expected, my trip to Toulouse, Moscow, and St. Petersburg was too intense (and the internet connection too iffy) for me to be able to blog. Lots of new ideas, impressions, and topics to blog about, however. One of these is a walk I took in Moscow last week, next day

A week or two ago I was sitting in a doctor’s office, when I realized that I forgot to bring any readings with me. As I was idly rifling through the usual stack, my roving eye was suddenly arrested by a cover of a two-year old National Geographic, which proclaimed THE BIRTH OF RELIGIO

Imagine …   You are an heir of a Noble House. Your enemies, who include the emperor and a powerful noble, have assassinated your father and destroyed your House. You have escaped, but you have no loyal retainers, no troops, no allies, and no money. You want revenge! But you also want

The late (and unlamented, at least by the scientific community) William Proxmire was a US Senator from Wisconsin, who made a name for himself as an uncompromising fighter against wasteful government spending. Except when it was directed to the dairy industry. (source: pd lankovsky) Pr