Illustration by Colin Purrington While updating the Web site for
this week’s program about Charles Darwin, I remembered the above
image, which I had come across on Flickr a while ago. It’s
intended to show the evolutionary development of world
religions; it seems that the author, an evolutionary biology
professor, was unable to find a similar graphic anywhere and
decided to draft his own. If you click through to the Flickr
page, you’ll see that the various symbols in the diagram are
labeled to indicate which religion they refer to. You’ll also
see an interesting discussion in the comments section — ranging
from the placement of the relatively young Bahá’í faith, to
whether Yoga should be included as a religion, to what the point
of this diagram might be in the first place. As one commenter
notes: “the world of ideas, ideologies and religions is a bit
more complex than a genealogical tree.” So what is the point of
attempting to represent the complexity of world religions such a
simplified way? The author write