Can honest signaling theory clarify religion’s role in the evolution of social inequality?

Abstract

ABSTRACTVivid coloration, pungent odors, strident alarms, and crippling stings have co-evolved in many lineages as mechanisms that conspicuously identify menacing creatures. Biologists call this mode of communication aposematic signaling, from the Greek apo “away” and sema “sign.” Despite the prevalence of aposematic signaling across a broad range of biological taxa, its scope and role in human cultural evolution remains unclear. Evidence from a large database of Pacific cultures (Pulotu: https://pulotu.econ.mpg.de/) reveals that ritualized human sacrifice co-evolved with social stratification to extend and stabilize social inequality. We hypothesize that the practice of ritual killing illustrates aposematic signaling in human cultural evolution: (1) killing honestly displayed the power of social elites to harm people; (2) ritual-mythological settings displace culpability for ritual killing from elites to the gods. Aposematic signaling makes sense of otherwise puzzling practices of ritual killing in the evolutionary transition to urban societies. Here we describe fruitful horizons for inquiry that the Blatant Aposematic Signaling model opens for historians of religion.