ducing convincing messages from the counterintu-
itive agents. These people will probably be consid-
ered as having some special internal quality that
makes them different from the rest of the group.
They will also end up taking on a special role in rit-
ual performances. If you live in a large group with
literate specialists, these will probably at some point
start changing all these concepts to provide a
[328] slightly different, more abstract, less contextual, less
local version. It is also very likely that they will
form a manner of corporation or guild with atten-
dant political goals. But their version of concepts is
not really optimal, so that it will always be com-
bined in most people's minds with spontaneous
inferences that are not compatible with the literate
doctrine.
This brief history of world religion is not really history at all. There is
no single line of descent whereby people would have started with a
variety of counterintuitive concepts and then gradually refined them,
ending up with what we now call religion. The selection process was
constant, because the human production of messages is constant and
therefore each single version of each god- or spirit-concept is slightly
different from all others. But the variants, after many cycles of commu-
nication, seem to come back to the various themes I mentioned here.
This is because all human minds carry the systems that produce the
small selective advantage I described here. Among these systems are a
set of intuitive ontological expectations, a propensity to direct attention
to what is counterintuitive, a tendency to recall it if it is inferentially
rich, a system for detecting and overdetecting agency, a set of social
mind systems that make the notion of well-informed agents particularly
relevant, a set of moral intuitions that seem to have no clear justifica-
tion in our own concepts, a set of social categories that pose the same
problem. We are no longer surprised that religious concepts and
RELIGION EXPLAINED