Abstract
This study examines the theoretical significance of ‘population thinking,’ the fundamental epistemology of modern biology, for the cognitive study of the evolution of religion and culture. ‘Population thinking’ is a way of understanding the characteristics of a target group through the frequency and distribution of different variations within a population. This contrasts with the everyday intuition and common sense that recognize the characteristics, differences, and diversity of a target based on ‘typological thinking’. However, the virtue of science lies in explaining the world more systematically, beyond intuition and common sense. Today, population thinking greatly influences various attempts to explain religion and culture from an evolutionary cognitive perspective, including meme theory, epidemiology of representations, gene-culture coevolution theory, and cognitive science of religion. Our intuition and common sense often lead us to recall the unique and essential characteristics of specific religions and cultures. However, in reality, all religions and cultures are the result of the diverse thoughts and behaviors of individuals within a population and their interactions.. Therefore, it is necessary to actively adopt population thinking, which focuses on the statistical frequency and distribution of variations, to further advance the scientific investigation of religion and culture.