The following essay is part of my recently-published book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World (Prometheus Books). I am not sure I agree with everything that I wrote in this passage—my views keep evolving—but I hope you find it interesting anyway.
There is no such thing as religion.
Many writers, as I did in the original edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution, assume that religion is a unified set of evolved behaviors. (I have corrected this mistake in my revised encyclopedia.) It is now clear to me that religion is not a single thing; it is a set of memes (pieces of information) that have taken up residence in human minds. These memes use human minds, words, and actions as a way of propagating themselves. The human brain is the hardware, and religious memes the software. We have reified these memes and the physical attributes that they use into a single concept. I hereinafter use the term “religion” to refer to this collection of memes.
Therefore when we say that religion is universal among humans, we mean that every human has the mental components that can or do harbor and propagate religious memes, and that some of those memes can be found in every culture and every individual. We cannot say that natural selection has or has not favored religion as a whole. Natural and sexual selection clearly controlled the origin of the brain processes of which the religion memes make use. And social evolution has promoted religion in most cultures at most times, often to the benefit of powerful individuals who use it to dominate others. But we cannot say, as I once said, that religion per se is an ineradicable part of the human mind.
Only humans appear to have religion. Intelligent nonhuman animals appear to live only in the present. They seem unaware that they will die, or take much notice when other members of their species die. The human awareness of death, an awareness we carry with us from adolescence onward, is not necessarily superior to the blessed ignorance of most nonhuman animals.
Exceptions may include elephants, who appear to mourn and to remember the deaths of specific individuals, and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. A vivid example appeared in the November, 2009 National Geographic. The chimpanzees at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon all knew one another. And they all knew an old female, who died in her late forties, which is an advanced age for a chimp. As the human caretakers carried her away on a stretcher, the other chimpanzees lined up along a fence and did things that, to a human observer, appeared to be expressions of grief. Several researchers, including Jane Goodall, have observed chimpanzees appearing to dance as they watched a waterfall, as if they were exulting in its beauty. While even Jane Goodall cannot know what was going on inside of the minds of the chimps, her interpretation—that this was proto-religious awareness on the part of the chimps—is credible.
The main reason that fully-developed religion is unique to humans is that humans have such large brains. The size of the human brain relative to the size of the body, compared to that of other primates, is out of the ball park. Relative brain sizes of primates exceed that of the average mammal, which exceeds that of the average vertebrate. More than any other species, humans seem to have excess brain capacity. One of its outlets is religion.
This would not necessarily be the case in other intelligent species. Science fiction has created a universe full of intelligent but essentially non-religious species. For the inhabitants of Middle Earth, created by the Christian writer J. R. R. Tolkein, religion is not distinct from everyday life. Intelligence does not require religion, but in our case the increase in brain size over evolutionary time has resulted in the capacity for religion.
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