Susan Blackmore recently announced [1] that evidence regarding the higher birth rates among religious believers has convinced her that religion is not a virus.
Data from 82 countries showed almost a straight line plot of the number of children against the frequency of religious worship, with those who worship more than once a week averaging 2.5 children and those who never worship only 1.7 – again below replacement rate.
Blackmore has thus renounced her previous view that religions are maladaptive:
All this suggests that religious memes are adaptive rather than viral from the point of view of human genes, but could they still be viral from our individual or societal point of view? Apparently not, given data suggesting that religious people are happier and possibly even healthier than secularists. . . . So it seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as “viruses of the mind” may have had its day . . . unless we twist the concept of a “virus” to include something helpful and adaptive to its host as well as something harmful, it simply does not apply.
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