WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Since Dunbar is emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, his book is "firmly grounded in our current understanding of evolutionary theory". Those who sign up to religions, he points out, "can incur serious costs in terms of self-imposed pain, celibacy and even self-sacrifice". This raises obvious moral issues, but it also makes little evolutionary sense for creatures struggling to survive and reproduce. So do religions offer some countervailing benefits to individuals or communities? Or are they "the maladaptive byproduct of traits or cognitive processes that evolved for other perfectly respectable biological purposes", like the lower back pain we have to put up with in return for the advantages of walking upright?

Here, Dunbar surveys the key evolutionary explanations for religions, the evidence that they make people healthier and happier and their role in building a sense of cohesion (which apparently means that religious communities tend to be larger and longer-lasting than their secular equivalents). He also makes use of "nearly two decades of research... on the nature of sociality and the mechanisms of community bonding in primates and humans".

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