various members of a group. To account for this is to explain
the statistical fact that a similar condition affects a number of
organisms, as in epidemics. Different people have inferred
similar representations from publicly accessible representa-
tions: other people's behavior, gestures, utterances, man-made
objects, etc. The diffusion of particular representations in a
group, as well as similarities across groups, can be predicted if
we have a good description of what mental resources people
bring to understanding what others offer as cultural material—
in particular, what inferential processes they apply to that
material. [47]To explain religion is to explain a particular kind of mental epi-
demic whereby people develop (on the basis of variable information)
rather similar forms of religious concepts and norms. I used the exam-
ple of animal concepts to show how our minds build inferences in such
a way that concepts within a group can be very similar and the con-
cepts of different groups, despite differences, can be shaped by the
same templates. This applies to religious notions too. There are tem-
plates for religious concepts. That is, there are some "recipes" con-
tained in my mind, and yours, and that of any other normal human
being, that build religious concepts by producing inferences on the
basis of some information provided by other people and by experi-
ence. In the same way as for animal concepts, religious concepts may
converge (be roughly similar) even though the particular information
from which they were built is in fact very different from one individual
to another.
Religion is cultural. People get it from other people, as they get
food preferences, musical tastes, politeness and a dress sense. We often
tend to think that if something is cultural then it is hugely variable. But
then it turns out that food preferences and other such cultural things
are not so variable after all. Food preferences revolve around certain
recurrent flavors, musical tastes in various cultures vary within strict
constraints, and so do politeness codes and standards of elegance.
For anthropologists, the fact that something is cultural is the very
reasonit does not vary that much. Not everything is equally likely to
be transmitted, because the templates in the mind filter information
from other people and build predictable structures out of that infor-
mation.
WHATISTHEORIGIN?