Abstract
The religious phenomenon is a complex one in many respects. In recent
years an increasing number of theories on the origin and evolution of religion have
been put forward. Each one of these theories rests on a Darwinian framework but
there is a lot of disagreement about which bits of the framework account best for the
evolution of religion. Is religion primarily a by-product of some adaptation? Is it
itself an adaptation, and if it is, does it benefi ciate individuals or groups? In this
chapter, I review a number of theories that link religion to cooperation and show that
these theories, contrary to what is often suggested in the literature, are not mutually
exclusive. As I present each theory, I delineate an integrative framework that allows
distinguishing the explanandum of each theory. Once this is done, it becomes clear
that some theories provide good explanations for the origin of religion but not so
good explanations for its maintenance and vice versa. Similarly some explanations
are good explanations for the evolution of religious individual level traits but not so
good explanations for traits hard to defi ne at the individual level. I suggest that to
fully understand the religious phenomenon, integrating in a systematic way the different theories and the data is a more successful approach.