The Dark Side of Religion

Ritual human sacrifice played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom. This is the central finding of a study published today in Nature. Researchers from the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and Victoria University, wanted to test the link between how unequal or hierarchical a culture was – called social stratification – and human sacrifice.

“Religion has traditionally been seen as a key driver of morality and cooperation, but our study finds religious rituals also had a more sinister role in the evolution of modern societies,” says lead author of the study Joseph Watts from the University of Auckland.

The research team used computational methods derived from evolutionary biology to analyse historical data from 93 ‘Austronesian’ cultures. The practice of human sacrifice was widespread throughout Austronesia: 40 out of 93 cultures included in the study practised some form of ritualistic human killings. The term 'Austronesian' refers to a large family of languages, whose country of origin is Taiwan and whose distribution extends over much of the Indian and parts of the Pacific Ocean. Austronesian cultures form a sort of natural laboratory for intercultural studies, since they have a huge range of religions, languages, society sizes and shapes, and are located in different climatic and geographical regions.

Victims were typically of low social status

The methods of ritual killings in these cultures were diverse and sometimes extremely cruel. The reason for the killing was, for example, the burial of a leader, the inauguration of a new boat or house or the punishment for the violation of traditions or taboos. Victims were typically of low social status, such as slaves, while instigators were usually of high social status, such as priests and chiefs.

The study divided the 93 different cultures into three main groups of high, moderate or low social stratification. It found cultures with the highest level of stratification were most likely to practice human sacrifice (67%, or 18 out of 27). Of cultures with moderate stratification, 37% used human sacrifice (17 out of 46) and the most egalitarian societies were least likely to practice human sacrifice (25%, or five out of 20).

“By using human sacrifice to punish taboo violations, demoralise the underclass and instil fear of social elites, power elites were able to maintain and build social control,” Joseph Watts says.

Russell Gray, Director of the Department of Linguistic and co-author of the study, notes that “human sacrifice provided a particularly effective means of social control because it provided a supernatural justification for punishment. Rulers, such as priests and chiefs, were often believed to be descended from gods and ritual human sacrifice was the ultimate demonstration of their power.”

Ritualistic killings shored up social hierarchies

A unique feature of the research was that the use of computational evolutionary methods enabled the team to reconstruct the sequence of changes in human sacrifice and social status over the course of Pacific history. This allowed the team to test whether sacrifice preceded or followed changes in social status.

Co-author Quentin Atkinson says: “What we found was that sacrifice was the driving force, making societies more likely to adopt high social status and less likely to revert to egalitarian social status structure.

Lakatos on History and Philosophy of Science

Imre Lakatos spends considerable time examining alternative theories about the nature of science before introducing us to his own. He does this to stress the importance of the relationship between philosophy of science and reconstruction of the history of science. He contends that without a history of science, there is nothing to philosophize about and without a philosophy of science, there is no way to tell what information should be included in the history of science. He stress the idea that philosophy of science provides the demarcation between those elements that are internal for the science and those that are external to it. For Lakatos, the philosophy of science not only provides the demarcation rules, but also the rules for normatively evaluating the internal elements of a science when reconstructing episodes of theory change.

The internal history of a science is the history of the development of the science with reference to "good" or "bad" practices within the science. It is supposed to show the reasons why one scientific program replaced another in terms of which was doing better science. In other words, it is concerned with the practice of science as a purely scientific enterprise.

                                                           Imre Lakatos

The external history of a science is the history of all of the factors outside the scientific practices which may have influenced the development of a science. The external history explains the role of non-scientific forces on the history of a science. In other words, it is concerned with the factors that do not have a place in the normative philosophy of science guiding the rational reconstruction of the internal history. There are some philosophies of science that reject the separation of internal and external elements of science arguing that science is merely another element inextricably woven into a larger social history. For those theories that accept this distinction, the external history is supposed to account for the factors that may have influenced the development of the science in a non-scientific way.

For exampel, consider the case of a theory being replaced because another theory is shown to be better. This would fall within the internal history of the science. At one point the two theories are competing and the philosophy of science can tell us how one was proven superior to the other within the science. Contrast this with a case in which two theories are competing and one wins out, not based on the "scientific merits," but rather because all of the advocates of the former theory are killed when terrorists attack their convention. This is event would fall in the external history of the science because it relates to the non-rational factors relating to theory change.

Lakatos on Inductivism

Lakatos points out that for inductivists, there are really only two types of propositions within a science factual statements about empirical observations and generalizations that are inductively supported by factual statements. He adds that inductivist reconstructions of the internal history of a science rely upon their ability to show how changes in the set of factual statements created changes in the accepted generalizations. It proceeds by reconstructing a history in which different (more accurate or novel) observations give rise to newer and better generalizations, thereby creating progress in science. Carnap is an example of an inductivist.

Inductivism is compatible with a wide range of theories concerning the external history of science. It concerns itself with the movement from factual statements to generalizations and changes in the accepted generalizations leaving the external history to a separate, independent theory.

Lakatos on Conventionalism

Conventionalism is a view of science in which the end product is a conventionally accepted schema for organizing information about the world. If one accepts conventionalism, then she drops the notion of proven true as referring to some objective standard of truth. Instead, she opts for a version of truth where something is true, so long as it is consistent with the conventionally accepted theoretical framework for organizing our knowledge.

Conventionalism does not offer a rational reconstruction of the external history of the science because the establishment of the convention need not stem from rational principles. However, once a convention is adopted, it is possible to provide a rational reconstruction of the changes within the science by relating them to the accepted standards of the science.

Lakatos on Falsificationism

Lakatos characterizes falsificationism as a response to inductivism and Duhemian Conventionalism. For the falsificationist, a theory is only scientific if it makes predictions that could conflict with observations. Popper is a falsificationist. The major problems faced by the falsificationist arise in evaluating observational statements and their subsequent role in theory testing. We will discuss this more when we discuss Hanson, Putnam, and Suppe.

Falsificationism reconstructs the history of science as a series of "crucial experiments" in which competing theories make differing predictions about some phenomena and one wins out owing to its predictive success.

Lakatos on Research Programs

In generating hs own philosophy of science, that of research programs, Lakatos borrows from both falsificationism and conventionalism. Lakatos introduces the research program as the unit of study in the history of science. A research program is a conventionalism accepted set of facts and concepts coupled with a positive heuristic. A positive heuristic is a set of principles that guide the theoretical development of the program. Under his model, science makes progress so long as the positive heuristic is capable of developing new theoretical principles in advance of the empirical research that they explain. This is the falsificationist aspect of his view -- if a program is always playing catch-up to the predictions and observations of a competing program, then we should expect the former program to be replaced by the latter.

He asserts that science does not proceed as the falsificationist believes (i.e. a series of critical experiments), but rather, by a war of attrition where one theory wins out only after a long series of explanatory successes that simply cannot be matched by its opponent. This is the conventionalist aspect of his view. He asserts that the decision to abandon one program in favor of another is not a simple matter of falsificationist evidence, but rather represents a choice concerning the relative prospective merits of the two programs. He contends that it is not irrational to adhere to a theory despite its failure to keep pace with its competitors, so long as one remains honest about the public success and/or failures of the competing theories. He accepts that it may be rational to accept the failures of a new program as paying one's dues during the early stages of development with the expectation that revision will lead to a newer, better program.