The Evolution of God positive review in "The Atlantic", saying that the book "...gave me hope that we can avoid both the barrenness of a world without God and the horrible fusion of fundamentalism and weapons of mass destruction." "Newsweek" religion editor, Lisa Miller, described "The Evolution of God" as a reframing of the faith vs. reason debate. Drawing a contrast to such authors as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Miller gives an overall positive review of the book's approach to the examination of the concept of God. In a review for "The New York Times", Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom
The Evolution of God of God. Among other things, Wright discusses the role of evolutionary biology in the development of religion. Geneticist Dean Hamer hypothesized that some people have a specific gene that makes them prone to religious belief, which he calls the God gene, and that over time natural selection has favored these people because their spirituality leads to optimism. Wright, however, thinks the tendency towards religious belief is not an adaptive trait influenced by natural selection, but rather a spandrel - a trait that happens to be supported by adaptations originally selected for other purposes. Wright states that the human brain approaches