God-fearing Apes

Intriguing story over at Salon about the evolutionary basis of religiosity. Anthropolgist Barbara King gets grouchy about everyone's favorite atheist, Richard Dawkins, and gets the whole concept of memes laughably wrong (hint: calling something a "mind virus" is not an insult, just a description). But her stories about gorilla empathy and chimp imagination are wonderful. The gist of her argument is that mental capacities that led to religiosity in early humans also allowed for the survival of our ancestors over the less symbolic Neanderthals. Intriguing stuff.