Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward: A Response to Critics

Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states? During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological…

What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world…

We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings—overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants—in the last 10,000 years. Genetic…

This article engages with Mark Moffett’s proposed definition of society, which emphasizes shared group identification over social interaction, and argues for a different, problem-driven approach to definition in evolutionary social science. Rather than treating definitions as primary, I situate them within the broader research agenda aimed at explaining the Great Holocene Transformation—the dramatic expansion of human societies in scale and complexity over the past 10,000 years. My central analytical focus is on cooperation: the capacity of individuals to coordinate actions toward collective goals despite incentives to free-ride. Accordingly, society is defined here as a collective of individuals engaged in sustained cooperation, with interest group proposed as a more flexible and analytically useful term. Within this framework, polities represent a key subtype of interest groups, characterized by their role as independent political units whose persistence depends on maintaining cooperative cohesion, particularly among elites. Other commonly cited features of societies—such as group identification, territoriality, and intergenerational continuity—are treated as secondary mechanisms that support cooperation rather than defining properties. Ultimately, I argue that flexible, operational definitions are most valuable at intermediate stages of scientific inquiry, where they facilitate the construction and empirical testing of theoretical models.

How do large-scale human societies maintain functional integration? Over the last 12,000 years, polities grew over six orders of magnitude in population, far exceeding the scale at which the interpersonal mechanisms that promote cooperation in small-scale societies can operate. Here we test the hypothesis that cooperation and functional integration in large-scale societies is promoted by social (and, specifically, institutional) complexity. We model large-scale societies as territorial social networks subject to energetic, cognitive, and competitive constraints. We demonstrate that agricultural intensification generates increasing population density, raising the per capita rate of social interaction beyond what small-scale mechanisms can sustain and requiring institutional rules to substitute for interpersonal knowledge. The model predicts that territory and social complexity scale with polity population with exponents of 5/6 and 1/6. Tests against data describing hundreds of polities spanning the Holocene support these predictions, providing quantitative evidence that social complexity is a central integrative mechanism enabling large-scale human cooperation.

Soil fertility depletion presents a negative feedback mechanism that could have impacted early adopters of agriculture. We consider whether such feedback can lead to population cycles among early agriculturalists, such as the boom-and-bust patterns suggested by an increasing amount of evidence for Neolithic Europe. Using general mathematical arguments, we show that this is unlikely, due to the interplay of two factors. First, there is an important mathematical difference between biotic (i.e., logistic) and abiotic resource replenishment; soil nutrients are better modeled by the abiotic case, which leads to more stable dynamics. Second, under realistic conditions, the resource replenishment process operates on fast time scales compared to attainable population growth rates, reinforcing the tendency towards stable dynamics. Both these factors are relevant for early agricultural societies and imply that nutrient depletion is likely not the main contributing factor to boom-and-bust cycles observed in the archaeological record.