Why Do Religious Cultures Evolve Slowly? the Cultural Evolution of Cooperative Calling and the Historical Study of Religions

Collective representations are the result of an immense cooperation, which stretches out not only into space but into time as well; to make them, a multitude of minds have associated, united and combined their ideas and sentiments: for them, long generations have accumulated their experience and their knowledge. A special intellectual activity is therefore concentrated in them, which is in!nitely richer and complexer than that of the individual. (Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, [1912] 1965: 29)