Religion--an evolutionary adaptation.

When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, he was concerned that evolution by natural selection would be seen—as it was then and still is—as standing opposed to religion. However, the proposition to be defended here is that he was mistaken about this point and that religion itself can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation that has arisen to meet a peculiarly human need—to maintain those important aspects of human behavior, where variation is found among different human groups, sufficiently constant over a sufficiently large number of individuals and over a sufficiently large span of time that natural selection can act upon them.