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David Horton is over at The Huffington Post expounding on a theory that is his ... the theory he has ... his theory ... the theory belonging to him.

He began to form his theory when he read a comment on a blog that he theorized about:

The blogger had taught a group of medical students that MRSA came about because of evolution in response to the selection pressures of antibiotic use, when a member of the group stood up and said 'That's a lie!' I asked her how she thought MRSA happened - 'It is a punishment from god'.

Quite apart from the worry that there may be medical doctors out there who think the proper treatment of disease is sackcloth and ashes rather than a strategy of antibiotic use to counter bacterial evolution, the stupidity of raising such objections in a medical school setting got Horton theorizing:

Intuitively it seems that the evangelicals are getting stupider and stupider, and evolutionary theory can certainly explain why this is happening. If you started off with a group of, say, 1000 people, who were suddenly converted to some new religion. If the group had the usual bell-shaped curve of intelligence (and I realize that this is a big if, but stay with me) then evolution within the group would begin almost immediately. The smarter members of the group would very soon realize that what they were being told about golden tablets or beings from another world was completely crazy, and they would leave. The average IQ of the group would then fall.

In turn, most of the remaining members would be subject to falling for even dumber things, causing the most intelligent old members to leave and attracting only the dumbest of new members, creating a feedback loop.

I can't agree that his theory applies to all religions but it does seem to explain some significant subgroup of them, doesn't it?
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