ones that jointly activate inference systems for agency, predation,
death, morality, social exchange, etc. Only a small range of concepts
are such that they reach this aggregate relevance, which is why reli-
gion has common features the world over.
COSMIC GOSSIP
One thing that modern humans did and still do vastly more than any
other species is exchange information of all kinds and qualities, not
just about what is the case but also about what should be or could be; [325]
not just about their emotions and knowledge but also about their
plans, memories and conjectures. The proper milieu in which humans
live is that of information, especially information provided by other
humans. It is their ecological niche.
This truly special behavior creates a huge domain of information
that has been passed on over centuries and millennia, with millions of
messages lost, forgotten, misheard or ignored, while others were
passed on, slightly distorted or sometimes preserved, and others still
were invented from scratch. If we consider this whole domain of infor-
mation over time, we have a gigantic "soup" of representations and
messages. The messages are constantly changing because the contexts
change.
However, we also find that there are lumps in this soup of mes-
sages—that is, bits of information that seem to appear in rather similar
form at different times and in different places. They are not strictly
identical but we find a small number of templates that seem to orga-
nize them. Religious concepts and behaviors are like that. To under-
stand why we find these recurrent themes, we do not have to imagine
that they are particularly good or useful or that the human mind needs
them in any particular way. There is a simpler explanation. They are
such that acquiring them activates some mental systems, produces
some inferences in the mind, a little more than other possible con-
cepts. This is enough to create a huge difference over time, because
people are more likely to acquire and transmit these concepts than
others. If they do not transmit them, such concepts are more likely to
be rediscovered somewhere else, some other time, than are other pos-
sible concepts. This is why, although we have little tangible evidence
for popular concepts of past human groups, one can with some confi-
dence construct the following scenario:
WHYBELIEF?