I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: we could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?
Interpretation
The quote questions the role of religion in human development and its potential absence in non-mammalian intelligences.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote reflects on the nature of religion as a possibly unnecessary construct that arises during the early developmental stages of humanity. He proposes that as humanity evolved, religion emerged as a random by-product of reproduction, and this leads to intriguing questions about the existence of religion in other intelligent life forms that may not share our biological lineage, particularly those that are non-mammalian.
In practice
In a discussion on the evolution of societies, this quote can highlight the potential role of religion.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
My only regret about money is that I don't have more to give away.
I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.
To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken the moral and mental vision and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.
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