A world without religions: could human evolution fulfil John Lennon's dream?

Could humans have done without religion in their development? Apparently not. Whatever the genesis of religious consciousness (whether it was caused by “brain viruses”, as Richard Dawkinsbelieves , or whether it is a “side effect of cultural evolution”), our minds are so organised that belief in the supernatural, in some kind of omens, in fortune-telling, in spirits, in invisible agents is almost inevitable. Alexander Markov, Doctor of Biological Sciences , talks about this in episode 12 of the CounterEvolution podcast.

CounterEvolution is a podcast about alternative scenarios of human development. It seems that something has gone wrong with humanity. We know a lot, we know how to do a lot, but we continue to exterminate each other and don’t understand the most basic things about each other. Two presenters: biologist Alexander Markov and scientific journalist and editor-in-chief of T-invariant Olga Orlova decided to discuss how modern humans acquired certain properties and what they would be like today if they had developed differently or lost some of their original abilities.

The topic of the twelfth episode is religions.

The first episodeis about cold, the second episode isabout heat, the third episode isabout the sense of smell, the fourth episode isabout war, the fifth episodeis about youth and aging, the sixth episodeis about innate conscience, the seventh episodeis about reproduction, the eighth episodeis about mutations, the ninth episodeis about genetic inheritance of socially significant traits, and the tenth episode isabout the pros and cons of monogamy. And the eleventh is about depression.