syntactical interpretations

the New York Times does some soul-searching, and instead of gleaning insight i hone in on one sentence:

"[Scott Atran's] magic-box demonstration helped set [him] on a career studying why humans might have evolved to be religious, something few people were doing back in the ’80s. " 


sure, people were religious in the 80's but it was mostly toward cocaine and madonna

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?em&ex=1173416400&en=cbf3c613e00ba21b&ei=5087%0A