No More Learning

Horrifying in retrospect, that is: at the time, my child brain accepted it in the spirit intended by the preacher. He told us a story of a squad of soldiers, drilling beside a railway line. At a critical moment the drill sergeant's attention was distracted, and he failed to give the order to halt. The soldiers were
THL ROOTS OF RELIGION 175
so well schooled to obey orders without question that they carried on marching, right into the path of an oncoming train. Now, of course, I don't believe the story and I hope the preacher didn't either. But I believed it when I was nine, because I heard it from an adult in authority over me. And whether he believed it or not, the preacher wished us children to admire and model ourselves on the soldiers' slavish and unquestioning obedience to an order, however preposterous, from an authority figure. Speaking for myself, I think we did admire it. As an adult I find it almost impossible to credit that my childhood self wondered whether I would have had the courage to do my duty by marching under the train. But that, for what it is worth, is how I remember my feelings. The sermon obviously made a deep impression on me, for I have remembered it and passed it on to you.
To be fair, I don't think the preacher thought he was serving up a religious message. It was probably more military than religious, in the spirit of Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade', which he may well have quoted:
'Forward the Light Brigade! ' Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldiers knew Some one had blundered: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.
(One of the earliest and scratchiest recordings of the human voice ever made is of Lord Tennyson himself reading this poem, and the impression of hollow declaiming down a long, dark tunnel from the depths of the past seems eerily appropriate. ) From the high command's point of view it would be madness to allow each individual soldier discretion over whether or not to obey orders. Nations whose infantrymen act on their own initiative rather than following orders will tend to lose wars. From the nation's point of view, this remains a good rule of thumb even if it sometimes leads
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to individual disasters. Soldiers are drilled to become as much like automata, or computers, as possible.
Computers do what they are told. They slavishly obey any instructions given in their own programming language. This is how they do useful things like word processing and spreadsheet calcu- lations. But, as an inevitable by-product, they are equally robotic in obeying bad instructions. They have no way of telling whether an instruction will have a good effect or a bad. They simply obey, as soldiers are supposed to. It is their unquestioning obedience that makes computers useful, and exactly the same thing makes them inescapably vulnerable to infection by software viruses and worms. A maliciously designed program that says, 'Copy me and send me to every address that you find on this hard disk' will simply be obeyed, and then obeyed again by the other computers down the line to which it is sent, in exponential expansion. It is difficult, per- haps impossible, to design a computer which is usefully obedient and at the same time immune to infection.
If I have done my softening-up work well, you will already have completed my argument about child brains and religion. Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents, and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of dis- tinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that 'Don't paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo' is good advice but 'You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail' is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy. Both come from a respected source and are delivered with a solemn earnestness that commands respect and demands obedience. The same goes for propositions about the world, about the cosmos, about morality and about human nature. And, very likely, when the child grows up and has children of her own, she will naturally pass the whole lot on to her own children - nonsense as well as sense - using the same infectious gravitas of manner.
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On this model we should expect that, in different geographical regions, different arbitrary beliefs, none of which have any factual basis, will be handed down, to be believed with the same conviction as useful pieces of traditional wisdom such as the belief that manure is good for the crops. We should also expect that superstitions and other non-factual beliefs will locally evolve - change over gener- ations - either by random drift or by some sort of analogue of Darwinian selection, eventually showing a pattern of significant divergence from common ancestry. Languages drift apart from a common progenitor given sufficient time in geographical separation (I shall return to this point in a moment). The same seems to be true of baseless and arbitrary beliefs and injunctions, handed down the generations - beliefs that were perhaps given a fair wind by the useful programmability of the child brain.
Religious leaders are well aware of the vulnerability of the child brain, and the importance of getting the indoctrination in early. The Jesuit boast, 'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man,' is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed. In more recent times, James Dobson, founder of today's infamous 'Focus on the Family' movement,* is equally acquainted with the principle: 'Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience - what they see, hear, think, and believe - will
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determine the future course for the nation. '
But remember, my specific suggestion about the useful gullibility
of the child mind is only an example of the kind of thing that might be the analogue of moths navigating by the moon or the stars. The ethologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthro- pologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, in In Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general idea of religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions - many by-products, I should say, for the anthropologists especially are concerned to emphasize the diversity of the world's religions as well as what they have in common. The findings of anthropologists seem weird to us only because they are unfamiliar. All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them. Boyer did research on the Fang people of Cameroon, who believe . . .
* I was amused when I saw 'Focus on your own damn family' on a car bumper sticker in Colorado, but it now seems to me less funny. Maybe some children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents (see Chapter 9).
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. . . that witches have an extra internal animal-like organ that flies away at night and ruins other people's crops or poisons their blood. It is also said that these witches some- times assemble for huge banquets, where they devour their victims and plan future attacks. Many will tell you that a friend of a friend actually saw witches flying over the village at night, sitting on a banana leaf and throwing magical darts at various unsuspecting victims.
Boyer continues with a personal anecdote:
I was mentioning these and other exotica over dinner in a Cambridge college when one of our guests, a prominent Cambridge theologian, turned to me and said: 'That is what makes anthropology so fascinating and so difficult too. You have to explain how people can believe such nonsense. '' Which left me dumbfounded. The conversation had moved on before I could find a pertinent response - to do with kettles and pots.
Assuming that the Cambridge theologian was a mainstream Christian, he probably believed some combination of the following:
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In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.
The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.
The fatherless man himself came alive after being dead and buried three days.
Forty days later, the fatherless man went up to the top of a hill and then disappeared bodily into the sky.
If you murmur thoughts privately in your head, the fatherless man, and his 'father' (who is also himself) will hear your thoughts and may act upon them. He is simultaneously able to hear the thoughts of everybody else in the world.
T 11 E R O O T S O F R K L 1 (. 1 O N 179
? If you do something bad, or something good, the same fatherless man sees all, even if nobody else does. You may be rewarded or punished accordingly, including after your death.
? The fatherless man's virgin mother never died but 'ascended' bodily into heaven.
? Bread and wine, if blessed by a priest (who must have testicles), 'become' the body and blood of the fatherless man.
What would an objective anthropologist, coming fresh to this set of beliefs while on fieldwork in Cambridge, make of them?
PSYCHOLOGICALLY PRIMED FOR RELIGION
The idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the
80 important and developing field of evolutionary psychology.
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or 'modules') for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for deal- ing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for form- ing coalitions, and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moths' celestial navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I suggested for childhood gullibility. The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the 'religion is a by-product' view, points out that children have a natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he suggests, and especially children, are natural born dualists.
A dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between matter and mind. A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a manifestation of matter - material in a brain or perhaps a computer
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- and cannot exist apart from matter. A dualist believes the mind is some kind of disembodied spirit that inhabits the body and there- fore conceivably could leave the body and exist somewhere else. Dualists readily interpret mental illness as 'possession by devils', those devils being spirits whose residence in the body is temporary, such that they might be 'cast out'. Dualists personify inanimate physical objects at the slightest opportunity, seeing spirits and demons even in waterfalls and clouds.
F. Anstey's 1882 novel Vice Versa makes sense to a dualist, but strictly should be incomprehensible to a dyed-in-the-wool monist like me. Mr Bultitude and his son mysteriously find that they have swapped bodies. The father, much to the son's glee, is obliged to go to school in the son's body; while the son, in the father's body, almost ruins the father's business through his immature decisions. A similar plotline was used by P. G. Wodehouse in Laughing Gas, where the Earl of Havershot and a child movie star go under the anaesthetic at the same moment in neighbouring dentist's chairs, and wake up in each other's bodies. Once again, the plot makes sense only to a dualist. There has to be something corresponding to Lord Havershot which is no part of his body, otherwise how could he wake up in the body of a child actor?
Like most scientists, I am not a dualist, but I am nevertheless easily capable of enjoying Vice Versa and Laughing Gas. Paul Bloom would say this is because, even though I have learned to be an intellectual monist, I am a human animal and therefore evolved as an instinctive dualist. The idea that there is a me perched somewhere behind my eyes and capable, at least in fiction, of migrating into somebody else's head, is deeply ingrained in me and in every other human being, whatever our intellectual pretensions to monism. Bloom supports his contention with exper- imental evidence that children are even more likely to be dualists than adults are, especially extremely young children. This suggests that a tendency to dualism is built into the brain and, according to Bloom, provides a natural predisposition to embrace religious ideas.
Bloom also suggests that we are innately predisposed to be creationists. Natural selection 'makes no intuitive sense'. Children are especially likely to assign purpose to everything, as the
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psychologist Deborah Keleman tells us in her article 'Are children
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"intuitive theists"? '
that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy'. The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
Native dualism and native teleology predispose us, given the right conditions, to religion, just as my moths' light-compass reaction predisposed them to inadvertent 'suicide'. Our innate
dualism prepares us to believe in a 'soul' which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the
death of the body. We can also easily imagine the existence of a deity as pure spirit, not an emergent property of complex matter but existing independently of matter. Even more obviously, childish teleology sets us up for religion. If everything has a purpose, whose purpose is it? God's, of course.
But what is the counterpart of the usefulness of the moths' light compass? Why might natural selection have favoured dualism and teleology in the brains of our ancestors and their children? So far, my account of the 'innate dualists' theory has simply posited that humans are natural born dualists and teleologists. But what would the Darwinian advantage be? Predicting the behaviour of entities in our world is important for our survival, and we would expect natural selection to have shaped our brains to do it efficiently and fast. Might dualism and teleology serve us in this capacity? We may understand this hypothesis better in the light of what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called the intentional stance.
Dennett has offered a helpful three-way classification of the
'stances' that we adopt in trying to understand and hence predict
82 the behaviour of entities such as animals, machines or each other.
They are the physical stance, the design stance and the intentional stance. The physical stance always works in principle, because everything ultimately obeys the laws of physics. But working things out using the physical stance can be very slow. By the time we have sat down to calculate all the interactions of a complicated object's moving parts, our prediction of its behaviour will probably be too late. For an object that really is designed, like a washing machine or a crossbow, the design stance is an economical short cut. We can
Clouds are 'for raining'. Pointy rocks are 'so
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guess how the object will behave by going over the head of physics and appealing directly to design. As Dennett says,
Almost anyone can predict when an alarm clock will sound on the basis of the most casual inspection of its exterior. One does not know or care to know whether it is spring wound, battery driven, sunlight powered, made of brass wheels and jewel bearings or silicon chips - one just assumes that it is designed so that the alarm will sound when it is set to sound.
Living things are not designed, but Darwinian natural selection licenses a version of the design stance for them. We get a short cut to understanding the heart if we assume that it is 'designed' to pump blood. Karl von Frisch was led to investigate colour vision in bees (in the face of orthodox opinion that they were colour-blind) because he assumed that the bright colours of flowers were 'designed' to attract them. The quotation marks are designed to scare off mendacious creationists who might otherwise claim the great Austrian zoologist as one of their own. Needless to say, he was perfectly capable of translating the design stance into proper Darwinian terms.
The intentional stance is another short cut, and it goes one better than the design stance. An entity is assumed not merely to be designed for a purpose but to be, or contain, an agent with intentions that guide its actions. When you see a tiger, you had better not delay your prediction of its probable behaviour. Never mind the physics of its molecules, and never mind the design of its limbs, claws and teeth. That cat intends to eat you, and it will deploy its limbs, claws and teeth in flexible and resourceful ways to carry out its intention. The quickest way to second-guess its behaviour is to forget physics and physiology and cut to the intentional chase. Note that, just as the design stance works even for things that were not actually designed as well as things that were, so the intentional stance works for things that don't have deliberate conscious intentions as well as things that do.
It seems to me entirely plausible that the intentional stance has survival value as a brain mechanism that speeds up decision-
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making in dangerous circumstances, and in crucial social situations. It is less immediately clear that dualism is a necessary concomitant of the intentional stance. I shan't pursue the matter here, but I think a case could be developed that some kind of theory of other minds, which could fairly be described as dualistic, is likely to underlie the intentional stance - especially in complicated social situations, and even more especially where higher-order intentionality comes into play.
Dennett speaks of third-order intentionality (the man believed that the woman knew he wanted her), fourth-order (the woman realized that the man believed that the woman knew he wanted her) and even fifth-order intentionality (the shaman guessed that the woman realized that the man believed that the woman knew he wanted her). Very high orders of intentionality are probably con- fined to fiction, as satirized in Michael Frayn's hilarious novel The Tin Men: 'Watching Nunopoulos, Rick knew that he was almost certain that Anna felt a passionate contempt for Fiddlingchild's failure to understand her feelings about Fiddlingchild, and she knew too that Nina knew she knew about Nunopoulos's know- ledge . . . ' But the fact that we can laugh at such contortions of other-mind inference in fiction is probably telling us something important about the way our minds have been naturally selected to work in the real world.
In its lower orders at least, the intentional stance, like the design stance, saves time that might be vital to survival. Consequently, natural selection shaped brains to deploy the intentional stance as a short cut. We are biologically programmed to impute intentions to entities whose behaviour matters to us. Once again, Paul Bloom quotes experimental evidence that children are especially likely to adopt the intentional stance. When small babies see an object apparently following another object (for example, on a computer screen), they assume that they are witnessing an active chase by an intentional agent, and they demonstrate the fact by registering surprise when the putative agent fails to pursue the chase.
The design stance and the intentional stance are useful brain mechanisms, important for speeding up the second-guessing of entities that really matter for survival, such as predators or potential mates. But, like other brain mechanisms, these stances can
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misfire. Children, and primitive peoples, impute intentions to the weather, to waves and currents, to falling rocks. All of us are prone to do the same thing with machines, especially when they let us down. Many will remember with affection the day Basil Fawlty's car broke down during his vital mission to save Gourmet Night from disaster. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, then got out of the car, seized a tree branch and thrashed it to within an inch of its life. Most of us have been there, at least momentarily, with a computer if not with a car. Justin Barrett coined the acronym HADD, for hyperactive agent detection device. We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent. I catch myself momentarily harbouring savage resentment against some blameless inanimate such as my bicycle chain. There was a poignant recent report of a man who tripped over his untied shoelace in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, fell down the stairs, and smashed three priceless Qing Dynasty vases: 'He landed in the middle of the vases and they splintered into a million pieces. He was still sitting there stunned when staff appeared. Everyone stood around in silence, as if in shock. The man kept pointing to his
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shoelace, saying, "There it is; that's the culprit. " '
Other by-product explanations of religion have been proposed
by Hinde, Shermer, Boyer, Atran, Bloom, Dennett, Keleman and others. One especially intriguing possibility mentioned by Dennett is that the irrationality of religion is a by-product of a particular built-in irrationality mechanism in the brain: our tendency, which presumably has genetic advantages, to fall in love.
The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beauti- fully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary. Look at it this way. From the point of view of a man, say, it is unlikely that any one woman of his acquaintance is a hundred times more lovable than her nearest competitor, yet that is how he is likely to describe her when 'in love'. Rather than the fanatically monogamous devotion to which we are susceptible, some sort of 'polyamory' is on the face of it more rational. (Polyamory is the belief that one can simultaneously love several members of the opposite sex, just as one can love more than one wine, composer,
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book or sport. ) We happily accept that we can love more than one child, parent, sibling, teacher, friend or pet. When you think of it like that, isn't the total exclusiveness that we expect of spousal love positively weird? Yet it is what we expect, and it is what we set out to achieve. There must be a reason.
Helen Fisher and others have shown that being in love is accom- panied by unique brain states, including the presence of neurally active chemicals (in effect, natural drugs) that are highly specific and characteristic of the state. Evolutionary psychologists agree with her that the irrational coup de foudre could be a mechanism to ensure loyalty to one co-parent, lasting for long enough to rear a child together. From a Darwinian point of view it is, no doubt, important to choose a good partner, for all sorts of reasons. But, once having made a choice - even a poor one - and conceived a child, it is more important to stick with that one choice through thick and thin, at least until the child is weaned.
Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love? Certainly, religious faith has something of the same character as falling in love (and both have many of the attributes of being high on an addictive drug*). The neuropsychiatrist John Smythies cautions that there are significant differences between the brain areas activated by the two kinds of mania. Nevertheless, he notes some similarities too:
One facet of the many faces of religion is intense love focused on one supernatural person, i. e. God, plus reverence for icons of that person. Human life is driven largely by our selfish genes and by the processes of reinforcement. Much positive reinforcement derives from religion: warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected in a dangerous world, loss of fear of death, help from the hills in response to prayer in difficult times, etc. Likewise, romantic love for another real person (usually of the other sex) exhibits the same intense concentration on the other and related positive reinforcements. These feelings can be triggered by icons of the other, such as letters, photographs, and even, as in Victorian times, locks
* See my expose of the dangerous narcotic Gerin Oil: R. Dawkins, 'Gerin Oil', Free Inquiry 24: 1, 2003, 9-11.
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of hair. The state of being in love has many physiological
84 accompaniments, such as sighing like a furnace.
I made the comparison between falling in love and religion in 1993, when I noted that the symptoms of an individual infected by religion 'may be startlingly reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love. This is an extremely potent force in the brain, and it is not surprising that some viruses have evolved to exploit it' ('viruses' here is a metaphor for religions: my article was called 'Viruses of the mind'). St Teresa of Avila's famously orgasmic vision is too notorious to need quoting again. More seriously, and on a less crudely sensual plane, the philosopher Anthony Kenny provides moving testimony to the pure delight that awaits those who manage to believe in the mystery of the transubstantiation. After describing his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, empowered by laying on of hands to celebrate mass, he goes on that he vividly recalls
the exaltation of the first months during which I had the power to say Mass. Normally a slow and sluggish riser, I would leap early out of bed, fully awake and full of excite- ment at the thought of the momentous act I was privileged to perform . . .
It was touching the body of Christ, the closeness of the priest to Jesus, which most enthralled me. I would gaze on the Host after the words of consecration, soft-eyed like a lover looking into the eyes of his beloved . . . Those early days as a priest remain in my memory as days of ful- filment and tremulous happiness; something precious, and yet too fragile to last, like a romantic love-affair brought up short by the reality of an ill-assorted marriage.
The equivalent of the moth's light-compass reaction is the apparently irrational but useful habit of falling in love with one, and only one, member of the opposite sex. The misfiring by- product - equivalent to flying into the candle flame - is falling in love with Yahweh (or with the Virgin Mary, or with a wafer, or with Allah) and performing irrational acts motivated by such love.
The biologist Lewis Wolpert, in Six Impossible Things Before
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Breakfast, makes a suggestion that can be seen as a generalization of the idea of constructive irrationality. His point is that irrationally strong conviction is a guard against fickleness of mind: 'if beliefs that saved lives were not held strongly, it would have been dis- advantageous in early human evolution. It would be a severe disadvantage, for example, when hunting or making tools, to keep changing one's mind. ' The implication of Wolpert's argument is that, at least under some circumstances, it is better to persist in an irrational belief than to vacillate, even if new evidence or ratio- cination favours a change. It is easy to see the 'falling in love' argument as a special case, and it is correspondingly easy to see Wolpert's 'irrational persistence' as yet another useful psychological predisposition that could explain important aspects of irrational religious behaviour: yet another by-product.
In his book Social Evolution, Robert Trivers enlarged on his 1976 evolutionary theory of self-deception. Self-deception is
hiding the truth from the conscious mind the better to hide it from others. In our own species we recognize that shifty eyes, sweaty palms and croaky voices may indicate the stress that accompanies conscious knowledge of attempted deception. By becoming unconscious of its deception, the deceiver hides these signs from the observer. He or she can lie without the nervousness that accompanies deception.
The anthropologist Lionel Tiger says something similar in Optimism: The Biology of Hope. The connection to the sort of con- structive irrationality we have just been discussing is seen in Trivers's paragraph about 'perceptual defense':
There is a tendency for humans consciously to see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individual's personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.
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The relevance of this to the wishful thinking of religion should need no spelling out.
The general theory of religion as an accidental by-product - a misfiring of something useful - is the one I wish to advocate. The details are various, complicated and disputable. For the sake of illustration, I shall continue to use my 'gullible child' theory as representative of 'by-product' theories in general. This theory - that the child brain is, for good reasons, vulnerable to infection by mental 'viruses' - will strike some readers as incomplete. Vulnerable the mind may be, but why should it be infected by this virus rather than that? Are some viruses especially proficient at infecting vulnerable minds? Why does 'infection' manifest itself as religion rather than as . . . well, what? Part of what I want to say is that it doesn't matter what particular style of nonsense infects the child brain. Once infected, the child will grow up and infect the next generation with the same nonsense, whatever it happens to be.
An anthropological survey such as Frazer's Golden Bough impresses us with the diversity of irrational human beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution. Yet Frazer discerns certain general principles, for example 'homoeopathic magic', whereby spells and incantations borrow some symbolic aspect of the real- world object they are intended to influence. An instance with tragic consequences is the belief that powdered rhinoceros horn has aphrodisiac properties. Fatuous as it is, the legend stems from the horn's supposed resemblance to a virile penis. The fact that 'homoeopathic magic' is so widespread suggests that the nonsense that infects vulnerable brains is not entirely random, arbitrary nonsense.
It is tempting to pursue the biological analogy to the point of wondering whether something corresponding to natural selection is at work. Are some ideas more spreadable than others, because of
intrinsic appeal or merit, or compatibility with existing psycho- logical dispositions, and could this account for the nature and properties of actual religions as we see them, in something like the
way we use natural selection to account for living organisms? It is important to understand that 'merit' here means only ability to
THE ROOTS OF R E LIG10N 189
survive and spread. It doesn't mean deserving of a positive value judgement - something of which we might be humanly proud.
Even on an evolutionary model, there doesn't have to be any natural selection. Biologists acknowledge that a gene may spread through a population not because it is a good gene but simply because it is a lucky one. We call this genetic drift. How important it is vis-a-vis natural selection has been controversial. But it is now widely accepted in the form of the so-called neutral theory of molecular genetics. If a gene mutates to a different version of itself which has an identical effect, the difference is neutral, and selection cannot favour one or the other. Nevertheless, by what statisticians call sampling error over generations, the new mutant form can eventually replace the original form in the gene pool. This is a true evolutionary change at the molecular level (even if no change is observed in the world of whole organisms). It is a neutral evolutionary change that owes nothing to selective advantage.
The cultural equivalent of genetic drift is a persuasive option, one that we cannot neglect when thinking about the evolution of religion. Language evolves in a quasi-biological way and the direction its evolution takes looks undirected, pretty much like random drift. It is handed down by a cultural analogue of genetics, changing slowly over the centuries, until eventually various strands have diverged to the point of mutual unintelligibility. It is possible that some of the evolution of language is guided by a kind of natu- ral selection, but that argument doesn't seem very persuasive. I'll explain below that some such idea has been proposed for major trends in language, such as the Great Vowel Shift which took place in English from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. But such a functional hypothesis is not necessary to explain most of what we observe. It seems probable that language normally evolves by the cultural equivalent of random genetic drift. In different parts of Europe, Latin drifted to become Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romansche and the various dialects of these languages. It is, to say the least, not obvious that these evolutionary shifts reflect local advantages or 'selection pressures'.
I surmise that religions, like languages, evolve with sufficient randomness, from beginnings that are sufficiently arbitrary, to generate the bewildering - and sometimes dangerous - richness of
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diversity that we observe. At the same time, it is possible that a form of natural selection, coupled with the fundamental uniformity of human psychology, sees to it that the diverse religions share significant features in common. Many religions, for example, teach the objectively implausible but subjectively appealing doctrine that our personalities survive our bodily death. The idea of immortality itself survives and spreads because it caters to wishful thinking. And wishful thinking counts, because human psychology has a near- universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire ('Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought', as Henry IV Part II said to his son*).
There seems to be no doubt that many of the attributes of religion are well fitted to helping the religion's own survival, and the survival of the attributes concerned, in the stew of human culture. The question now arises of whether the good fit is achieved by 'intelligent design' or by natural selection. The answer is prob- ably both. On the side of design, religious leaders are fully capable of verbalizing the tricks that aid the survival of religion. Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with
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contempt all that emanates from God. ' Again: 'Whoever wants to
be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason. ' And again: 'Reason should be destroyed in all Christians. ' Luther would have had no difficulty in intelligently designing unintelligent aspects of a religion to help it survive. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he, or anyone else, did design it. It could also have evolved by a (non- genetic) form of natural selection, with Luther not its designer but a shrewd observer of its efficacy.
Even though conventional Darwinian selection of genes might have favoured psychological predispositions that produce religion as a by-product, it is unlikely to have shaped the details. I have already hinted that, if we are going to apply some form of selection theory to those details, we should look not to genes but to their cultural equivalents. Are religions such stuff as memes are made on?
Not my joke: 1066 and All That.
T H E R O O T S O F R E L \ G I O N 191
TREAD SOFTLY, BECAUSE YOU TREAD ON MY MEMES
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
OSCAR WILDE
This chapter began with the observation that, because Darwinian natural selection abhors waste, any ubiquitous feature of a species - such as religion - must have conferred some advantage or it wouldn't have survived. But I hinted that the advantage doesn't have to redound to the survival or reproductive success of the individual. As we saw, advantage to the genes of the cold virus suf- ficiently explains the ubiquity of that miserable complaint among our species. * And it doesn't even have to be genes that benefit. Any replicator will do. Genes are only the most obvious examples of replicators. Other candidates are computer viruses, and memes - units of cultural inheritance and the topic of this section. If we are to understand memes, we have first to look a little more carefully at exactly how natural selection works.
In its most general form, natural selection must choose between alternative replicators. A replicator is a piece of coded information that makes exact copies of itself, along with occasional inexact copies or 'mutations'. The point about this is the Darwinian one. Those varieties of replicator that happen to be good at getting copied become more numerous at the expense of alternative replicators that are bad at getting copied. That, at its most rudi- mentary, is natural selection. The archetypal replicator is a gene, a stretch of DNA that is duplicated, nearly always with extreme accuracy, through an indefinite number of generations. The central question for meme theory is whether there are units of cultural imitation which behave as true replicators, like genes. I am not say- ing that memes necessarily are close analogues of genes, only that the more like genes they are, the better will meme theory work; and the purpose of this section is to ask whether meme theory might work for the special case of religion.
* Especially my nation, according to national stereotyping legend: 'Void I'anglais avec son sang froid habituel' (Here is the Englishman with his habitual bloody cold). This comes from Fractured French by F. S. Pearson, along with other gems such as 'coup de grace' (lawnmower).
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In the world of genes, the occasional flaws in replication (mutations) see to it that the gene pool contains alternative variants of any given gene - 'alleles' - which may therefore be seen as com- peting with each other. Competing for what? For the particular chromosomal slot or 'locus' that belongs to that set of alleles. And how do they compete? Not by direct molecule-to-molecule combat but by proxy. The proxies are their 'phenotypic traits' - things like leg length or fur colour: manifestations of genes fleshed out as anatomy, physiology, biochemistry or behaviour. A gene's fate is normally bound up with the bodies in which it successively sits. To the extent that it influences those bodies, it affects its own chances of surviving in the gene pool. As the generations go by, genes increase or decrease in frequency in the gene pool by virtue of their phenotypic proxies.
Might the same be true of memes? One respect in which they are not like genes is that there is nothing obviously corresponding to chromosomes or loci or alleles or sexual recombination. The meme pool is less structured and less organized than the gene pool. Nevertheless, it is not obviously silly to speak of a meme pool, in which particular memes might have a 'frequency' which can change as a consequence of competitive interactions with alternative memes.
Some people have objected to memetic explanations, on various grounds that usually stem from the fact that memes are not entirely like genes. The exact physical nature of a gene is now known (it is a sequence of DNA) whereas that of memes is not, and different memeticists confuse one another by switching from one physical medium to another. Do memes exist only in brains? Or is every paper copy and electronic copy of, say, a particular limerick also entitled to be called a meme? Then again, genes replicate with very high fidelity, whereas, if memes replicate at all, don't they do so with low accuracy?
These alleged problems of memes are exaggerated. The most important objection is the allegation that memes are copied with insufficiently high fidelity to function as Darwinian replicators. The suspicion is that if the 'mutation rate' in every generation is high, the meme will mutate itself out of existence before Darwinian selection can have an impact on its frequency in the meme pool. But
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the problem is illusory. Think of a master carpenter, or a prehistoric flint-knapper, demonstrating a particular skill to a young apprentice. If the apprentice faithfully reproduced every hand movement of the master, you would indeed expect to see the meme mutate out of all recognition in a few 'generations' of master/apprentice transmission. But of course the apprentice does not faithfully reproduce every hand movement. It would be ridicu- lous to do so. Instead, he notes the goal that the master is trying to achieve, and imitates that. Drive in the nail until the head is flush, using as many hammer blows as it takes, which may not be the same number as the master used. It is such rules that can pass unmutated down an indefinite number of imitation 'generations';
no matter that the details of their execution may vary from individual to individual, and from case to case. Stitches in knitting, knots in ropes or fishing nets, origami folding patterns, useful tricks in carpentry or pottery: all can be reduced to discrete elements that really do have the opportunity to pass down an indefinite number of imitation generations without alteration. The details may wander idiosyncratically, but the essence passes down unmutated, and that is all that is needed for the analogy of memes with genes to work.
In my foreword to Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine I developed the example of an origami procedure for making a model Chinese junk. It is quite a complicated recipe, involving thirty-two folding (or similar) operations. The end result (the Chinese junk itself) is a pleasing object, as are at least three intermediate stages in the 'embryology', namely the 'catamaran', the 'box with two lids' and the 'picture frame'. The whole performance does indeed remind me of the foldings and invaginations that the membranes of an embryo undergo as it morphs itself from blastula to gastrula to neurula. I learned to make the Chinese junk as a boy from my father who, at about the same age, had acquired the skill at his boarding school. A craze for making Chinese junks, initiated by the school matron, had spread through the school in his time like a measles epidemic, then died away, also like a measles epidemic. Twenty-six years later, when that matron was long gone, I went to the same school. I reintroduced the craze and it again spread, like another measles epidemic, and then again died away. The fact that
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such a teachable skill can spread like an epidemic tells us something important about the high fidelity of memetic transmission. We may be sure that the junks made by my father's generation of schoolboys in the 1920s were in no general respect different from those made by my generation in the 1950s.
We could investigate the phenomenon more systematically by the following experiment: a variant of the childhood game of Chinese Whispers (American children call it Telephone). Take two hundred people who have never made a Chinese junk before, and line them up in twenty teams of ten people each. Gather the heads of the twenty teams around a table and teach them, by demon- stration, how to make a Chinese junk. Now send each one off to find the second person in his own team, and teach that person alone, again by demonstration, to make a Chinese junk. Each second 'generation' person then teaches the third person in her own team, and so on until the tenth member of every team has been reached. Keep all the junks made along the way, and label them by their team and 'generation' number for subsequent inspection.
I haven't done the experiment yet (I'd like to), but I have a strong prediction of what the result will be. My prediction is that not all of the twenty teams will succeed in passing the skill intact down the line to their tenth members, but that a significant number of them will. In some of the teams there will be mistakes: perhaps a weak link in the chain will forget some vital step in the procedure, and everyone downstream of the mistake will then obviously fail. Perhaps team 4 gets as far as the 'catamaran' but falters thereafter. Perhaps the eighth member of team 13 produces a 'mutant' some- where between the 'box with two lids' and the 'picture frame' and the ninth and tenth members of his team then copy the mutated version.
Now, of those teams in which the skill is transferred successfully to the tenth generation, I make a further prediction. If you rank the junks in order of 'generation' you will not see a systematic deterioration of quality with generation number. If, on the other hand, you were to run an experiment identical in all respects except that the skill transferred was not origami but copying a drawing of a junk, there would definitely be a systematic deterioration in the accuracy with which the generation 1 pattern 'survived' to generation 10.
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In the drawing version of the experiment, all the generation 10 drawings would bear some slight resemblance to the generation 1 drawing. And within each team, the resemblance would more or less steadily deteriorate as you proceed down the generations. In the origami version of the experiment, by contrast, the mistakes would be all-or-none: they'd be 'digital' mutations. Either a team
would make no mistakes and the generation 10 junk would be no worse, and no better, on average than that produced by generation 5 or generation 1; or there would be a 'mutation' in some particular generation and all downstream efforts would be complete failures, often faithfully reproducing the mutation.
What is the crucial difference between the two skills? It is that the origami skill consists of a series of discrete actions, none of which is difficult to perform in itself. Mostly the operations are things like 'Fold both sides into the middle. ' A particular team member may execute the step ineptly, but it will be clear to the next team member down the line what he is trying to do. The origami steps are 'self-normalizing'. It is this that makes them 'digital'. It is like my master carpenter, whose intention to flatten the nail head in the wood is obvious to his apprentice, regardless of the details of the hammer blows. Either you get a given step of the origami recipe right or you don't. The drawing skill, by contrast, is an analogue skill. Everybody can have a go, but some people copy a drawing more accurately than others, and nobody copies it per- fectly. The accuracy of the copy depends, too, on the amount of time and care devoted to it, and these are continuously variable quantities. Some team members, moreover, will embellish and 'improve', rather than strictly copy, the preceding model.
Words - at least when they are understood - are self-normalizing in the same kind of way as origami operations. In the original game of Chinese Whispers (Telephone) the first child is told a story, or a sentence, and is asked to pass it on to the next child, and so on. If the sentence is less than about seven words, in the native language of all the children, there is a good chance that it will survive, un- mutated, down ten generations. If it is in an unknown foreign language, so that the children are forced to imitate phonetically rather than word by word, the message does not survive. The pattern of decay down the generations is then the same as for a drawing,
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and it will become garbled. When the message makes sense in the children's own language, and doesn't contain any unfamiliar words like 'phenotype' or 'allele', it survives.