Big Gods, socio-cultural evolution and the non-obvious merits of a sociological interpretation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the recent, renewed interest in the cultural evolution of religion has been driven by findings in experimental and cognitive psychology, and, as a result of disciplinary boundaries, sociologists have engaged very little with this new data and theory. In order to bring sociology formally back into this discussion, we provide in this paper five sociological sources for the birth and diffusion of ‘Big God’ ideation (with monotheism serving as a paradigmatic case). Agentically, we suggest that Big God beliefs assuaged existential anxiety, aided in elite legitimation and were useful for religious entrepreneurs hoping to establish new institutional fields. Structurally, we suggest that Big God beliefs may have been an epiphenomenal attempt by people to symbolically represent the centralization of political authority and the intensified use of new technologies. We conclude with a general theory of the cultural evolution of Big Gods that integrates these agentic and structural explanations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it