Where Do Gods Come From?

Religiosity-belief in supernatural beings-is culturally universal, thus quite likely part of universal human nature. How can evolutionary psychology explain it? I survey one extant theory of religiosity as an evolutionary byproduct of a cognitive bias, variously known as the animistic bias or the agency-detector mechanism, and present a new theory that proposes religiosity may be a tertiary adaptation that was selected because of its effect on secondary adaptations such as subjective well-being and the sense of meaning and purpose in life, which in turn facilitated primary adaptations to maximize survival and reproductive success. Although more studies are necessary to adjudicate between these two explanations, both theories suggest that religiosity is deeply evolutionarily familiar. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be less religious than less intelligent individuals.