Religious thought. (Cover story)

The article discusses the origin of religious thought and the idea that belief in the supernatural may have been a result of the basic components of human cognition. Topics include an overview of the hypothesis by evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin that religious thinking is a side effect of survival, why humans instinctually construct narratives to make sense of disconnected events, and a concept called theory of mind which is the imagination of what others think.