The role of genetic naturalselection in the story is to provide the brain, with its predilectionsand biases - the hardware platform and low-level system softwarewhich form the background to memetic selection. Given this back-ground, memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me tooffer a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particularreligions. In the early stages of a religion's evolution, before itbecomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of theiruniversal appeal to human psychology. This is where the memetheory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomesorganized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions,are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes - cartels ofmutually compatible memes. This doesn't rule out the additionalrole of deliberate manipulation by priests and others

The God Delusion On page 198 Monday, November 5, 2012 @ 1:54pm