There was an article already already some time ago “The Mutant Says in His Heart <There Is No God>: the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load”.
Industrialisation leads to relaxed selection and thus the accumulation of fitness-damaging genetic mutations. We argue that religion is a selected trait that would be highly sensitive to mutational load. We further argue that a specific form of religiousness was selected for in complex societies up until industrialisation based around the collective worship of moral gods. With the relaxation of selection, we predict the degeneration of this form of religion and diverse deviations from it. These deviations, however, would correlate with the same indicators because they would all be underpinned by mutational load. We test this hypothesis using two very different deviations: atheism and paranormal belief.
My first point is – where does the strange idea originate that only fools do not believe in God?
My first association from the bible was “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Ps 14:1) But there is more: Job 12:7 but also Rom 3:11 (citing Ps 14) and maybe also Eph 4:18. On the other hand (Mt 1,3) thinking is not a condition of belief – making the assertion of the psalm more the exception the rule.
Which leads to the second strange point: Is there really a higher mutational load? No – it is just a speculation.
There's an even bigger problem with Dutton et al.'s claims. Many studies show that atheists are more intelligent, on average, than religious believers … . Edward Dutton published a paper on this himself.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2019/03/16/are-atheists-genetically-damaged/
Although Dutton et al. argue that atheism is an "aberration," others have argued that atheism might be adaptive in certain environments. For example, atheism tends to be associated with certain individual characteristics such as preference for logical reasoning and scepticism over intuition, along with less sociality and higher individualism.
