Religion: costs, signals, and the Neolithic transition

Abstract

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.