Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is a 2001 book by cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer, in which the author discusses the evolutionary psychology of religion and evolutionary origin of religions. Summary Boyer describes the genesis of religious concepts as a phenomenon of the mind's cognitive inference systems, comparable to pareidolia and perceptions of religious imagery in natural phenomena resulting from face perception processes within the human brain. Boyer supports this naturalistic origin of religion with evidence from many specialized disciplines including biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and information processing. Religion Explained frames religious practices and beliefs in terms of recent cognitive neuroscience research in the modularity of mind. This theory involves cognitive "modules" ("devices" or "subroutines") underlying inference systems and intuitions. For instance, Boyer suggests culturally-widespread beliefs in "supernatural agents" (e.g., gods, ancestors, spirits, and witches) result from agent detection: the intuitive modular process of assuming intervention by conscious agents, regardless of whether they are present. "When we see branches moving in a tree or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is." Boyer cites the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic Zande story about a termite-infested roof collapsing. For the anthropologist, the house caved in because of the termites. For the Zande, it was quite clear that witchcraft was involved. However, the Zande were also aware that the termites were the proximate cause of the incident. But what they wanted to know was why it happened at that particular time, when particular people were gathered in the house. Within Boyer's hypothesis, religion is a "parasite" (or "spandrel") offshoot from cognitive modules, comparable to the way the reading process is parasitic upon language modules. As I have pointed out repeatedly the building of religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious concepts or not. Religious morality uses moral intuitions, religious notions of supernatural agents recruit our intuitions about agency in general, and so on. This is why I said that religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities. Our capacities to play music, paint pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also parasitic in this sense. This means that we can explain how people