Jon asked:

How did religion evolve? Is it a product of natural selection?

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Good question. There are many theories which try to explain why there is religion. Freud presented
one in The Future of an Illusionwhere he understands it as a kind of universal psychosis. Emile
Durkheim, the great sociologist in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Lifetried to understand it as
performing the function of uniting a community. Karl Marx understood is as "the opiate of the
masses." He argued that the ruling class provides it to the working class to keep them subservient. I
think that, at least in part, religion developed as an attempt to explain natural phenomena
(earthquakes, thunder, etc.) a kind of primitive science. The easiest explanation for anything is always
that "someone did it." (That is the origin of conspiracy theories.) Of course, the rise of science has
tended to pull the explanatory rug out from under religion since what science can explain, religion
doesn't have to. It is because of that there is an important conflict between religion and science, that
some (mistakenly, in my opinion) tend to downplay.

I tend to doubt that religion is the result of natural selection because with some exceptions, because
what is naturally selected has survival value.

Kenneth Stern