Daniel Dennett (okay, not a scientist, but still) and others predict that as people's access to information becomes more democratic and widespread, the appeal of traditional religions and fundamentalisms will evaporate. These folks obviously know nothing about religions or how they work...

Stephen Pinker said:

Yet, as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past 50 years), particularly in the west, has shown the overall trend is downward."

??? As Eric Hobsbawm said, "The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history." [1]

oh, I didn't see that Pinker prefaced this comment by making an exception for the 20th century. My bad.