on the evolution of “moralizing gods” was found immoral
Passing through the Editor’s desk, this headline from Nature appeared on June 7:
Retraction Note: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history
It made a splash on March 20: a paper that showed a connection between the evolutionary rise of complex societies and the invention of “moralizing gods” who punish non-cooperators. The “letter to Nature” paper was peer reviewed and written by 13 academics, with all the fanfare of the world’s leading science journal. Three of the lead authors, Harvey Whitehouse, Pieter François, and Patrick E. Savage, are from the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at Oxford University.
Well, you can forget about it. The paper has been retracted. Fifteen other scientists complained to Nature that the authors had played fast and loose with their data. They ended their detailed rebuttal,
Together, these reanalyses cast serious doubt on the main conclusions in Whitehouse, et al. that moralizing gods
appear only after rapid increases in social complexity globally. Given the problems with preservation of evidence for religious beliefs in the historical record, we conclude that the reported megasociety threshold is an artefact of the decision to recode 61% of cases from missing data to known values, all indicating that moralizing gods are absent.
Thus shamed publicly, the authors of the evolution-of-religion paper are sheepishly trying to salvage something from the disaster in futureware.
Smarting from the loss of prestige by publishing in the world’s leading science journal, the group reworked their ‘data’ and sent new drafts as preprints in off-label journals." CEHFollowing the publication of this Letter, Beheim and colleagues submitted a Matters Arising in which they argued that our primary results were called into question by our treatment of missing data. In our research, we attempted to test the ‘big gods’ hypothesis even-handedly using the best available evidence, and we made our data and code available during the review process and after publication, in line with best practice in open science. Nevertheless, we accept that we should have labelled moralizing gods as ‘absent’ or ‘inferred absent’ rather than ‘unknown’ in portions of our dataset before the dates of the first appearance, rather than converting ‘NAs’ to zeros during the phase of analysis. Since this Letter was published, we have thoroughly refined our data and analyses, and have found that our original conclusions are still strongly supported. However, the differences between our revised analyses and the original Letter are substantial enough to warrant a Retraction of the original Letter. We apologize to the scientific community for the unintended confusion.