behaviors have persisted for millennia, probably much longer, and dis-
play similar themes the world over. These concepts just happen to be
optimal in the sense that they activate a variety of systems in a way that
makes their transmission possible.
A FRUSTRATION OF INVISIBLE HANDS
When the story of religion is told this way, it seems to amount to an
extraordinary conspiracy. Religious concepts and norms and the emo-
tions attached to them seem designed t o ex c i te th e h u ma n mi n d, l in g er [329]
in memory, trigger multiple inferences in the preciseway that will get
people to hold them true and communicate them. Whoever designed
religion, or designs each religion, seems to have uncanny prescience
of what will be successful with human minds.
But there is of course no designer, and no conspiracy either. Reli-
gious concepts work that way, they realize the miracle of being exactly
what people will transmit, simply because other variants were created
and forgotten or abandoned all along. The magic that seems to pro-
duce such perfect concepts for human minds is merely the effect of
repeated selective events. A complex organ, the human mind produces
a multitude of mini-scenarios, evanescent links between thoughts and
new concepts that quickly degrade. This maelstrom of elusive thought
is certainly not what we are aware of, because in a sense the only
thoughts that we entertain consciously have already passed a number
of cognitive hurdles. But even explicit thoughts that we entertain are
not all equally likely to produce similar thoughts in other people; far
from it. You must remember that in the domain of inference-produc-
tionmany will be called and few will be chosen. One of my Fang friends
thought that spirits were two-dimensional and always stood sideways
when facing human beings lest they be detected. But this ingenious
notion was perhaps too complex. Most people quickly forgot it or dis-
torted it. Other inferences have more staying power.
I have explained religion in terms of systems that are in all human
minds and that do all sorts of precious and interesting work but that
were not really designed to produce religious concepts of behaviors.
There is no religious instinct, no specificinclination in the mind, no
particular disposition for these concepts, no special religion center in
the brain, and religious persons are not different from nonreligious
WHYBELIEF?