TY - JOUR
T1 - Religion
T2 - costs, signals, and the Neolithic transition
AU - Sterelny, Kim
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2020/7/2
Y1 - 2020/7/2
N2 - This paper extends the picture developed in Religion Re-Explained (Sterelny, 2018) to groups in transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian social environments, “big men” societies and their archaeological equivalents. It begins by giving a more nuanced account of the relationship between signals, rituals, and costs, showing that the costly signaling model of religion is best seen as a family of models. These vary in the extent to which they scale from smaller to larger social worlds. Some are scale-independent; others can be scaled up, but only by overcoming increasingly difficult signal broadcast problems; one is an intrinsically small scale intimate social world model. These issues of scalability are then integrated with transformations in the character and function of ritual and belief, as ritual becomes an instrument for competitive interactions within and across groups, and an expression of unequal status and power, while also retaining in important ways earlier roles of mediating social cohesion. Changes in ritual were both a mechanism and an expression of the shift to a less equal social world.
AB - This paper extends the picture developed in Religion Re-Explained (Sterelny, 2018) to groups in transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian social environments, “big men” societies and their archaeological equivalents. It begins by giving a more nuanced account of the relationship between signals, rituals, and costs, showing that the costly signaling model of religion is best seen as a family of models. These vary in the extent to which they scale from smaller to larger social worlds. Some are scale-independent; others can be scaled up, but only by overcoming increasingly difficult signal broadcast problems; one is an intrinsically small scale intimate social world model. These issues of scalability are then integrated with transformations in the character and function of ritual and belief, as ritual becomes an instrument for competitive interactions within and across groups, and an expression of unequal status and power, while also retaining in important ways earlier roles of mediating social cohesion. Changes in ritual were both a mechanism and an expression of the shift to a less equal social world.
KW - Costly signaling model of religion
KW - Neolithic transition
KW - costly signaling
KW - honest signaling
KW - ritual
KW - transegalitarian societies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85077390172&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/2153599X.2019.1678513
DO - 10.1080/2153599X.2019.1678513
M3 - Article
SN - 2153-599X
VL - 10
SP - 303
EP - 320
JO - Religion, Brain and Behavior
JF - Religion, Brain and Behavior
IS - 3
ER -