I like Ara’s way of studying scientific problems very much, weaving together various disciplines from evolutionary modelling to experimental psychology or social anthropology, and I also like the way he tries to solve the questions he raises. However, I am less enthusiastic about the puzzles he chooses to focus on, i.e.:1. ‘How did human societies scale up from comparatively small, mobile groups of foragers to massively large societies, even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation?’2. ‘And how did organized religions with Big Gods – the great polytheistic and monotheistic faiths – culturally spread to colonize most minds in the world?’Regarding question 1, people working in social sciences, in economics, in anthropology or in sociology, might not feel that this is a puzzle and, on the contrary, might contend that they have already put forward a bunch of answers, most of them along the lines of building efficient institutions, relying on efficient monitoring, reputation management, or low-cost punishment (North, 1990, Ostrom, 1990, Hechter 1992, Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2002; Greif, 1998). These solutions show that you can achieve cooperation without trust and altruism as long as you find the correct way to incentivize and monitor cooperative behaviors. In this perspective, social scientists don’t feel they need religion to explain cooperation, neither in contemporary Sweden, nor in medieval China, nor in ancient Rome.As for question 2, Ara emphasizes that we need to explain why there are so few religions today, in contrast to the great number of primitive religions. But is it really a puzzle?
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