Very interesting article. I think the key is that humans, unlike other animals, have fallen under the sway of memes (in the sense defined by Richard Dawkins in Chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene). Memes (in this sense) are anything you can teach to another or learn from another: language, dance, how to make something, how to organize something, how to tie a knot, how to make music, philosophy, and the like.
Memes are subject to the same Darwinian logic as lifeforms: reproduction is when a meme is transferred from one person to another by learning/teaching, and though that transfer is in general faithful, some variation may occur, and occasionally there's a mutation (when someone gets an idea of how to do something better and passes along the improvement).
And of course, no one can learn everything available to be taught — the list of skills I personally lack is formidable (just the list of languages I cannot speak, read, or write is staggering). Thus a natural selection ensues: some methods and memes are passed along, others fail to survive.
Thus meme evolution is the necessary outcome, and in the struggle to survive, memes develop cultural analogues of aspects of lifeforms. Clusters of memes arise (like multicellular animal) — a particular religion, for example, which includes and consists of a variety of memes. And things like an immune system evolve, which meme clusters use to protect their existence (in religion, there are punishments for apostates both in the present life and hereafter).
The problem is that memes evolve to protect themselves, not their human hosts. Other things being equal, a meme that benefits the host may well prosper (cf. language), but parasitic memes, that prosper at the expense of the hosts, also arise (just as parasites arise among lifeforms).
These conflicts and struggles among memes greatly affect their human hosts, who control memes only to a small degree. Other animals do not face the issue. Susan Blackmore wrote an interesting paper on the adverse consequences of hosting memes: https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/dangerous-memes-or-what-the-pandorans-let-loose/
For more on the topic, see Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&an=Susan+Blackmore&tn=The+Meme+Machine&kn=&isbn=) or Matt Ridley's The Evolution of Everything (www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everything-How-Ideas-Emerge/dp/0062296019/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0).
