"Every major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals"
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Wilson is doing a neat bit of intellectual vandalism here: he drags religion off the altar and drops it into the petri dish. Calling “every major religion” a “winner” in a “Darwinian struggle” reframes faith as an evolved strategy, not a revealed truth. The provocation isn’t subtle. If religions are winners, they won by outcompeting other cultural organisms - recruiting, reproducing, policing boundaries, and absorbing territory in the most literal sense: people, time, attention, law.
The sting sits in the second clause: “none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.” Wilson isn’t saying religions never preach compassion; he’s saying compassion has historically been selective, often bounded by the group line. Tolerance, in this model, is not the engine of growth but a luxury good: something you can afford once you’re dominant, secure, or forced into pluralism by modern states. The subtext is aimed at comforting liberal narratives that treat religion as naturally converging toward mutual respect. Wilson suggests the opposite: the competitive pressures reward exclusivity, strong identity signals, and mechanisms that discourage defection.
Context matters: Wilson spent a career arguing that human behavior can be read through evolutionary logics (sociobiology, gene-culture coevolution). In that frame, religions act like cultural replicators with survival traits: compelling origin stories, moral enforcement, costly rituals that prove commitment. His intent is less to sneer than to demystify - and to warn. If religion’s historical success is linked to intolerance, then “interfaith harmony” isn’t a default setting; it’s a political achievement that has to be built against the grain of what once made these systems spread.
The sting sits in the second clause: “none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.” Wilson isn’t saying religions never preach compassion; he’s saying compassion has historically been selective, often bounded by the group line. Tolerance, in this model, is not the engine of growth but a luxury good: something you can afford once you’re dominant, secure, or forced into pluralism by modern states. The subtext is aimed at comforting liberal narratives that treat religion as naturally converging toward mutual respect. Wilson suggests the opposite: the competitive pressures reward exclusivity, strong identity signals, and mechanisms that discourage defection.
Context matters: Wilson spent a career arguing that human behavior can be read through evolutionary logics (sociobiology, gene-culture coevolution). In that frame, religions act like cultural replicators with survival traits: compelling origin stories, moral enforcement, costly rituals that prove commitment. His intent is less to sneer than to demystify - and to warn. If religion’s historical success is linked to intolerance, then “interfaith harmony” isn’t a default setting; it’s a political achievement that has to be built against the grain of what once made these systems spread.
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