Religion is a Product of Evolution

Based on the article, this is basically a study of nothing. There was really nothing new added to the body of knowledge by it.

The model being studied is so abstracted from any concrete details that it's completely meaningless with respect to the specific subject that's ostensibly being investigated. He sets up a typical, very-thoroughly-understood two-population model - at first, no different from a simplistic predator-prey population dynamics model. As is already very well known, one population dies out - and we even know the parameters that control which one dies out.

Then he throws in an arbitrary "attractor", in which the believers are (for a completely unexplained reason) more attractive as mates - which really does little more than trivially adjust one of those well-understood parameters. Lo and behold, the believers flourish.

The outcome of the model was a foregone conclusion before he started.

Now, to be fair, I didn't read the actual research, just the linked article, and I've been burned by that before. But I can't even work up enough interest in this to bother to read the paper. Somebody else want to tell me if the journalist screwed this up, too?

I'll add that, in the third and fourth paragraphs, where he synopsizes the two camps into which the scientific "theories on religion" can be classified, he grotesquely simplifies those ideas, too. Each of those two "camps" has at least two factions within them, and he's totally missed a significant third alternative, which denies that there's a significant evolutionary component to religious belief at all.

Last year, PZ Meyers, a professor of biology at U Minn, gave a talk to the Minnesota Atheists group that outlined some of the theories. If you're interested, here's a video of the first part. I think there's a link to the rest on the page somewhere.