Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

Humans invest in fantastic stories -- mythologies.
Recent evolutionary theories suggest that cultural selection may favour moralising stories that motivate prosocial behaviours.
A key challenge is to explain the emergence of mythologies that lack explicit moral exemplars or directives. Here, we resolve this puzzle with an evolutionary model in which arbitrary mythologies transform a collection of egoistic individuals into a cooperative.
Importantly, in finite populations, reflecting relative to contemporary population sizes of hunter-gatherers, the model is robust to the cognitive costs in adopting fictions.
This approach resolves a fundamental problem across the human sciences by explaining the evolution of otherwise puzzling amoral, nonsensical, and fictional narratives as exquisitely functional coordination devices.