ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. In the wake of Durkheim and Robert Bellah, the book outlines the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two. In the case of religion, it demonstrates how useful a Darwinian approach can be in understanding why religion would emerge in the first place. But in trying to explain the subsequent institutionalization of behavioral propensities installed by Darwinian natural selection and the further evolution of the institutional systems over the last 300,000 years. The chapter focuses on religion because, first, it is one of the oldest human institutional systems and clearly it has a biological basis—even more so than does the human institutional system: the nuclear family—and second, because it continues to evolve in a highly dynamic way.
