Every single one of my direct ancestors lived long enough to procreate. I'm a winner! Things are gunna change, I can feel it!

The way I get from is to ought is through if. Given that gravity “is,” I “ought” not to go sky-diving without a parachute “if” I want to live to tell about it. Some ifs are so nearly universal that they can be fairly assumed, especially at the group, or species level. Sure, there are some suicidal individuals, but rarely, if ever, deliberately suicidal species.

At the group level, our species is dependent on cultural correctives to counterbalance the evolutionary mismatch caused by our invention of civilization. So if we want our species to survive, we ought to find ways to update our cultural counterbalances (rather than pretend we don’t need them) because evolutionary mismatch is what sends most species to extinctionville. We escaped the fate of the Neanderthals only because our cultural skills were, at the time, more nimble, but they are now becoming petrified by reification or abandonded out of hubris.

False premise; the speaker assumes that a Neo-Darwinist would consider population increase at any cost desirable.
At the same time the Sacks is asserting the the truth of Neo-Darwinism by showing the effectiveness of reproductive success in the prolifetation of Abrahamic religions.
In effect Sacks is saying nothing at all, or the context is (most likely) ironic.

I see what you are saying there, because religious ideas spread there must be some benefit to it. The difference between this model and evolution of the species is that people can embrace multiple and even conflicting ideas, where an organism can only be one kind.

Most scientists and intelectual elites tend to be atheist or agnostic because they can select specific ideas to form a non contradictory worldview. Religion usually has no place in it, but that is not to say you can't learn from it.

You should only be religious if you want to be in the majority of non critical thinkers who hold ideas but neither create new ones nor refine old ones.

Christianity is not a monotheistic religion and Abraham's progeny, if such person ever existed, would be maybe 10 million in a world o 8 billion. Absolute nonsense.

All humans are related to one man and one woman. They lived 150-200 thousand years ago in Africa. They lived 50 thousand years apart so no they were not married.

neo-Darwinism? Is that a thing?...Seems to me that anyone that that made it this far, which would be everyone, has demonstrated as much "evolutionary fitness" as everybody else who made it this far.

They are correct, in environmental of ignorance, scarceness of resources and continuous wars the memes (cultural replicators) that command discipline and generate stable and efficient societies will prosper, and the successful religions generated stable and efficient societies.
And they were so successful that they generated surplus of production and large scale peaces (the number of borders and border conflicts started to decline). This changed the environment and gave chance for other memes to multiply.
Manipulate religion is de-facto a way to power and success, this has no connection with believing, but with manipulating other peoples belief. So yes, a false religious leader was in the past and still is one of the top predator of the cultural ideas.

Denis Noble in Dance to the Tune of Life suggests that neo-Darwinism isn't true and the field of biology is currently undergoing a paradigm shift.

...unless you want that particular kind of success.

Prove that, and win the last Nobel Prize.