Moralizing Gods Database Analysis
Moralizing gods database analysis is a cross-cultural quantitative method that codes the presence of moralizing or 'big' supernatural enforcers and measures of social complexity across many historical polities over time, then models their relationship. The exemplary infrastructure is the Seshat: Global History Databank, introduced by Peter Turchin and colleagues in 2015, which records hundreds of polities on standardized variables - population, territory, hierarchy, infrastructure, information systems, and religious features - with explicit sources and uncertainty codes. A high-profile 2019 Nature paper using Seshat data argued that complex societies tend to precede moralizing gods; that paper was retracted in 2021 over its treatment of missing data. The method is therefore best understood not as a settled finding but as a databank-driven analytical pipeline whose results depend critically on coding decisions, missing-data handling, and modeling of temporal and phylogenetic dependence.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Turchin, P., Brennan, R., Currie, T., et al. (2015). Seshat: The Global History Databank. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 6(1), 77-107. · DOI 10.21237/C7clio6127917
- Whitehouse, H., et al. (2019). Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Nature, 568(7751), 226-229. [RETRACTED 2021]. · DOI 10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4
- Whitehouse, H., et al. (2021). Retraction Note: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Nature, 595, E9. · DOI 10.1038/s41586-021-03656-3
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.