ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to develop a more comprehensive and robust approach to understanding religious evolution. The central force driving natural selection is environmental changes that lead to intensified competition among conspecifics over resources, a competition that favors those phenotypic variations in members of a population that increase fitness or the probability of survival and reproduction. Darwinian natural selection is a process that acts on the genetic variation in living populations of organisms whereby individual phenotypes are selected by environments in which life forms seek to survive and reproduce. The human capacity for religion evolved under Darwinian selection pressures working on the phenotypes and underlying genotypes of humans' hominin ancestors. Darwinian selection has hard-wired a surprisingly large set of behavioral capacities, action tendencies, and need-states in all humans; and when viewed collectively, these can been seen as a powerful set of selection pressures on sociocultural formations.
