Abstract
Scholars have debated naturalistic theories of religion for thousands of years, but only recently have scientists begun to test predictions empirically. Existing databases contain few variables on religion, and are subject to Galton’s Problem because they do not sufficiently account for the non-independence of cultures or systematically differentiate the traditional states of cultures from their contemporary states. Here we present Pulotu: the first quantitative cross-cultural database purpose-built to test evolutionary hypotheses of supernatural beliefs and practices. The Pulotu database documents the remarkable diversity of the Austronesian family of cultures, which originated in Taiwan, spread west to Madagascar and east to Easter Island–a region covering over half the world’s longitude. The focus of Austronesian beliefs range from localised ancestral spirits to powerful creator gods. A wide range of practices also exist, such as headhunting, elaborate tattooing, and the construction of impressive monuments. Pulotu is freely available, currently contains 116 cultures, and has 80 variables describing supernatural beliefs and practices, as well as social and physical environments. One major advantage of Pulotu is that it has separate sections on the traditional states of cultures, the post-contact history of cultures, and the contemporary states of cultures. A second major advantage is that cultures are linked to a language-based family tree, enabling the use phylogenetic methods, which can be used to address Galton’s Problem by accounting for common ancestry, to infer deep prehistory, and to model patterns of trait evolution over time. We illustrate the power of phylogenetic methods by performing an ancestral state reconstruction on the Pulotu variable “headhunting", finding evidence that headhunting was practiced in proto-Austronesian culture. Quantitative cross-cultural databases explicitly linking cultures to a phylogeny have the potential to revolutionise the field of comparative religious studies in the same way that genetic databases have revolutionised the field of evolutionary biology.
Highlights
Scholars have long attempted to explain religion from a naturalistic perspective [1]
A wide range of evolutionary theories of religion have been proposed and debated [4,5,6,7,8]. These debates include whether religions are adaptations or by-products [5,9], which if any features of religions, such as “Big Gods”, “Costly Rituals”, and “Religious Elites”, provide benefits to individuals and groups [10,11,12], and whether functional features are recent or arose deep in the hominin lifeway [13]
Proponents of one position or another have often based their arguments on hand-picked case studies selected from qualitative ethnographic records [3], or problematic quantitative datasets with limited variables on supernatural belief and practice [14]
Summary
Scholars have long attempted to explain religion from a naturalistic perspective [1]. In the cases of Bali and Java, major influence by Hinduism and Islam respectively occurred in historic time, and the earliest ethnographic records allow little to be inferred about the traditional religions of these cultures [54] Excluding these cultures minimises the effects of diffusion and more accurately represents the diversity of traditional Austronesian supernatural beliefs and practices. A major advantage of the Pulotu database is that cultures are linked to a dated Austronesian language tree, enabling the use of phylogenetic comparative methods These methods can be used to control for Galton’s Problem and investigate a wide range of questions that traditional statistical methods cannot [29]. Together these examples illustrate how using phylogenetic methods with Pulotu can provide powerful insights into the processes of religious and cultural evolution
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