My hypothesis

[Nihilist Virus]

Religion is like a parasitic organism and its ideal environment is an ignorant society. It is dying in our information age.

Two or more religions can form a daughter religion and over time a religion will reproduce itself with variation in a population according to selective pressures (known scientific facts).

This model predicts that many religions should appear spontaneously in ancient history (no selective pressures) despite low population and that religion should go extinct in the near future despite high population.

So essentially, the population of evolution deniers is dwindling according to principles of evolution.

I'm not sure about the 'near future' bit, but your analogy has merit. If you consider religions a subclass of ideologies, the same reasoning applies to ideologies in general.

It's the nature of a meme (in the Dawkinsian sense) to 'try to survive', and what you're describing is a selection pressure. Religions/ideologies better adapted to the changes in social environment will persist. For extinction to occur, the environmental change must be so devastating that no permutation can survive in it. I'm not sure the information age will suffice to do so; especially since it seems to have ever-more-effective fake news as a by-product. New religious movements appear all the time, it seems. Transhumanism could be considered a religious movement. Maybe the 'new normal' will be shopping cart religiosity, people picking the set of beliefs that best suit them instead of sticking with the set they picked up from their parents.

On the other hand, it's hard to see a new winning religious ideology emerging and acquiring the devoted following of a significant percentage of the world's population: religious humanism follows the evidence and so is proof against being demolished by ready access to information; but that's part of what makes it too boring to really catch on. Parody religions are fun, but don't fill cravings for real meaning. I imagine the predominant 'religion' of the future will be a sort of default 'casual humanism': sort of a general attitude acquired by cultural osmosis. But we should be aware that other ideologies will always be struggling to emerge. It's human nature, and maybe one will hit on a 'golden combination' of teachings that will enable it to spread significantly, even in the information age.

A religion must contain some kind of supernatural belief. Most religions contain one or more deities, miracles/magic, and an essence of the self that persists through death.

If the list of oughts and ought nots of secular humanism constitute a religion, then what about law? Is law also a religion?

By my reckoning, the majority of people with a PhD have no beliefs in deities, miracles/magic, or an essence of the self that persists through death. Therefore such people are without religion regardless of what they believe.

If the standard of education reaches the point where a high school education becomes equivalent to today's PhD, and if you combine this with the trend that we already see of people leaving religion, then the extinction is inevitable.

All we really need is for Islamic nations to modernize because in their current state there is virtually no selective pressure on Islam.