No More Learning

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. Instead of mimicking the sounds phonetically, each child recognizes each word as a member of a finite vocabulary and selects the same word, although very probably pronounced in a different accent, when passing it on to the next child. Written language is also self-normalizing because the squiggles on paper, no matter how much they may differ in detail, are all drawn from a finite alphabet of (say) twenty- six letters.
The fact that memes can sometimes display very high fidelity, due to self-normalizing processes of this kind, is enough to answer some of the commonest objections that are raised to the meme/gene analogy. In any case, the main purpose of meme theory, at this early stage of its development, is not to supply a comprehensive theory of culture, on a par with Watson-Crick genetics. My original purpose in advocating memes, indeed, was to counter the im- pression that the gene was the only Darwinian game in town - an impression that The Selfish Gene was otherwise at risk of convey- ing. Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd emphasize the point in the title of their valuable and thoughtful book Not by Genes Alone, although they give reasons for not adopting the word 'meme' itself, preferring 'cultural variants'. Stephen Shennan's Genes, Memes and Human History was partly inspired by an earlier excellent book by Boyd and Richerson, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Other book-length treatments of memes include Robert Aunger's The Electric Meme, Kate Distin's The Selfish Meme, and Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie.
But it is Susan Blackmore, in The Meme Machine, who has pushed memetic theory further than anyone. She repeatedly visual- izes a world full of brains (or other receptacles or conduits, such as computers or radio frequency bands) and memes jostling to occupy them. As with genes in a gene pool, the memes that prevail will be the ones that are good at getting themselves copied. This may be because they have direct appeal, as, presumably, the immortality meme has for some people. Or it may be because they flourish in the presence of other memes that have already become numerous in the meme pool. This gives rise to meme complexes or
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'memeplexes'. As usual with memes, we gain understanding by going back to the genetic origin of the analogy.
For didactic purposes, I treated genes as though they were isolated units, acting independently. But of course they are not in- dependent of one another, and this fact shows itself in two ways. First, genes are linearly strung along chromosomes, and so tend to travel through generations in the company of particular other genes that occupy neighbouring chromosomal loci. We doctors call that kind of linkage linkage, and I shall say no more about it because memes don't have chromosomes, alleles or sexual recombination. The other respect in which genes are not independent is very different from genetic linkage, and here there is a good memetic analogy. It concerns embryology which - the fact is often mis- understood - is completely distinct from genetics. Bodies are not jigsawed together as mosaics of phenotypic pieces, each one con- tributed by a different gene. There is no one-to-one mapping between genes and units of anatomy or behaviour. Genes 'collaborate' with hundreds of other genes in programming the developmental processes that culminate in a body, in the same kind of way as the words of a recipe collaborate in a cookery process that culminates in a dish. It is not the case that each word of the recipe corresponds to a different morsel of the dish.
Genes, then, co-operate in cartels to build bodies, and that is one of the important principles of embryology. It is tempting to say that natural selection favours cartels of genes in a kind of group selection between alternative cartels. That is confusion. What really happens is that the other genes of the gene pool constitute a major part of the environment in which each gene is selected versus its alleles. Because each is selected to be successful in the presence of the others - which are also being selected in a similar way - cartels of co-operating genes emerge. We have here something more like a free market than a planned economy. There is a butcher and a baker, but perhaps a gap in the market for a candlestick maker. The invisible hand of natural selection fills the gap. That is differ- ent from having a central planner who favours the troika of butcher + baker + candlestick maker. The idea of co-operating cartels assembled by the invisible hand will turn out to be central to our understanding of religious memes and how they work.
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Different kinds of gene cartel emerge in different gene pools. Carnivore gene pools have genes that program prey-detecting sense organs, prey-catching claws, carnassial teeth, meat-digesting enzymes and many other genes, all fine-tuned to co-operate with each other. At the same time, in herbivore gene pools, different sets of mutually compatible genes are favoured for their co-operation with each other. We are familiar with the idea that a gene is favoured for the compatibility of its phenotype with the external environment of the species: desert, woodland or whatever it is. The point I am now making is that it is also favoured for its compati- bility with the other genes of its particular gene pool. A carnivore gene would not survive in a herbivore gene pool, and vice versa. In the long gene's-eye-view, the gene pool of the species - the set of genes that are shuffled and reshuffled by sexual reproduction - con- stitutes the genetic environment in which each gene is selected for its capacity to co-operate. Although meme pools are less regimented and structured than gene pools, we can still speak of a meme pool as an important part of the 'environment' of each meme in the memeplex.
A memeplex is a set of memes which, while not necessarily being good survivors on their own, are good survivors in the presence of other members of the memeplex. In the previous section I doubted that the details of language evolution are favoured by any kind of natural selection. I guessed that language evolution is instead governed by random drift. It is just conceivable that certain vowels or consonants carry better than others through mountainous terrain, and therefore might become characteristic of, say Swiss, Tibetan and Andean dialects, while other sounds are suitable for whispering in dense forests and are therefore characteristic of Pygmy and Amazonian languages. But the one example I cited of language being naturally selected - the theory that the Great Vowel Shift might have a functional explanation - is not of this type. Rather, it has to do with memes fitting in with mutually compatible memeplexes. One vowel shifted first, for reasons unknown - per- haps fashionable imitation of an admired or powerful individual, as is alleged to be the origin of the Spanish lisp. Never mind how the Great Vowel Shift started: according to this theory, once the first vowel had changed, other vowels had to shift in its train, to reduce
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ambiguity, and so on in cascade. In this second stage of the process, memes were selected against the background of already existing meme pools, building up a new memeplex of mutually compatible memes.
We are finally equipped to turn to the memetic theory of religion. Some religious ideas, like some genes, might survive because of absolute merit. These memes would survive in any meme pool, regardless of the other memes that surround them. (I must repeat the vitally important point that 'merit' in this sense means only 'ability to survive in the pool'. It carries no value judgement apart from that. ) Some religious ideas survive because they are compatible with other memes that are already numerous in the meme pool - as part of a memeplex. The following is a partial list of religious memes that might plausibly have survival value in the meme pool, either because of absolute 'merit' or because of com- patibility with an existing memeplex:
? You will survive your own death.
? If you die a martyr, you will go to an especially wonderful part of paradise where you will enjoy seventy-two virgins (spare a thought for the unfortunate virgins).
? Heretics, blasphemers and apostates should be killed (or otherwise punished, for example by ostracism from their families).
? Belief in God is a supreme virtue. If you find your belief waver- ing, work hard at restoring it, and beg God to help your unbelief. (In my discussion of Pascal's Wager I mentioned the odd assumption that the one thing God really wants of us is belief. At the time I treated it as an oddity. Now we have an explanation for it. )
? Faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. The more your beliefs defy the evidence, the more virtuous you are. Virtuoso believers who can manage to believe something really weird, unsupported and insupportable, in the teeth of evidence and reason, are especially highly rewarded.
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THE GOD DELUSION
?
?
?
Everybody, even those who do not hold religious beliefs, must respect them with a higher level of automatic and unquestioned respect than that accorded to other kinds of belief (we met this in Chapter 1).
There are some weird things (such as the Trinity, transubstanti- ation, incarnation) that we are not meant to understand. Don't even try to understand one of these, for the attempt might destroy it. Learn how to gain fulfilment in calling it a mystery.
Beautiful music, art and scriptures are themselves self- replicating tokens of religious ideas. *
Some of the above list probably have absolute survival value and would flourish in any memeplex. But, as with genes, some memes survive only against the right background of other memes, leading to the build-up of alternative memeplexes. Two different religions might be seen as two alternative memeplexes. Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one. The ideas of one religion are not 'better' than those of the other in any absolute sense, any more than carnivorous genes are 'better' than herbivorous ones. Religious memes of this kind don't necessarily have any absolute aptitude for survival; nevertheless, they are good in the sense that they flourish in the presence of other memes of their own religion, but not in the presence of memes of the other religion. On this model, Roman Catholicism and Islam, say, were not necessarily designed by individual people, but evolved separately as alternative collections of memes that flourish in the presence of other members of the same memeplex.
Organized religions are organized by people: by priests and bishops, rabbis, imams and ayatollahs. But, to reiterate the point I made with respect to Martin Luther, that doesn't mean they were conceived and designed by people. Even where religions have been
* Different schools and genres of art can be analysed as alternative memeplexes, as artists copy ideas and motifs from earlier artists, and new motifs survive only if they mesh with others. Indeed, the whole academic discipline of History of Art, with its sophisticated tracing of iconographies and symbolisms, could be seen as an elaborate study in memeplexity. Details will have been favoured or disfavoured by the presence of existing members of the meme pool, and these will often include religious memes.
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exploited and manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals, the strong possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion has been largely shaped by unconscious evolution. Not by genetic natural selection, which is too slow to account for the rapid evolution and divergence of religions. The role of genetic natural selection in the story is to provide the brain, with its predilections and biases - the hardware platform and low-level system software which form the background to memetic selection. Given this back- ground, memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me to offer a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular religions. In the early stages of a religion's evolution, before it becomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of their universal appeal to human psychology. This is where the meme theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes organized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions,
are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes - cartels of mutually compatible memes. This doesn't rule out the additional role of deliberate manipulation by priests and others. Religions probably are, at least in part, intelligently designed, as are schools and fashions in art.
One religion that was intelligently designed, almost in its entirety, is Scientology, but I suspect that it is exceptional. Another candidate for a purely designed religion is Mormonism. Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English. Mormonism, how- ever, has evolved since it was fabricated in the nineteenth century and has now become one of the respectable mainstream religions of America - indeed, it claims to be the fastest-growing one, and there is talk of fielding a presidential candidate.
Most religions evolve. Whatever theory of religious evolution we adopt, it has to be capable of explaining the astonishing speed with which the process of religious evolution, given the right conditions, can take off. A case study follows.
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CARGO CULTS
In The Life of Brian, one of the many things the Monty Python team got right was the extreme rapidity with which a new religious cult can get started. It can spring up almost overnight and then become incorporated into a culture, where it plays a disquietingly dominant role. The 'cargo cults' of Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea provide the most famous real life example. The entire his- tory of some of these cults, from initiation to expiry, is wrapped up within living memory. Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed.
My main authority for the cargo cults is David Attenborough's Quest in Paradise, which he very kindly presented to me. The pattern is the same for all of them, from the earliest cults in the nineteenth century to the more famous ones that grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War. It seems that in every case the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and missionaries. They were perhaps the victims of (Arthur C. ) Clarke's Third Law, which I quoted in Chapter 2: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'
The islanders noticed that the white people who enjoyed these wonders never made them themselves. When articles needed repair- ing they were sent away, and new ones kept arriving as 'cargo' in ships or, later, planes. No white man was ever seen to make or repair anything, nor indeed did they do anything that could be recognized as useful work of any kind (sitting behind a desk shuffling papers was obviously some kind of religious devotion). Evidently, then, the 'cargo' must be of supernatural origin. As if in corroboration of this, the white men did do certain things that could only have been ritual ceremonies:
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They build tall masts with wires attached to them; they sit listening to small boxes that glow with light and emit curious noises and strangled voices; they persuade the local people to dress up in identical clothes, and march them up and down - and it would hardly be possible to devise a more useless occupation than that. And then the native realizes that he has stumbled on the answer to the mystery. It is these incomprehensible actions that are the rituals employed by the white man to persuade the gods to send the cargo. If the native wants the cargo, then he too must do these things.
It is striking that similar cargo cults sprang up independently on islands that were widely separated both geographically and culturally. David Attenborough tells us that
Anthropologists have noted two separate outbreaks in New Caledonia, four in the Solomons, four in Fiji, seven in the New Hebrides, and over fifty in New Guinea, most of them being quite independent and unconnected with one another. The majority of these religions claim that one particular messiah will bring the cargo when the day of the apocalypse arrives.
The independent flowering of so many independent but similar cults suggests some unifying features of human psychology in general.
One famous cult on the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides (known as Vanuatu since 1980) is still extant. It is centred on a messianic figure called John Frum. References to John Frum in official government records go back only as far as 1940 but, even for so recent a myth, it is not known for certain whether he ever existed as a real man. One legend described him as a little man with a high-pitched voice and bleached hair, wearing a coat with shining buttons. He made strange prophecies, and he went out of his way to turn the people against the missionaries. Eventually he returned to the ancestors, after promising a triumphal second coming, bear- ing bountiful cargo. His apocalyptic vision included a 'great
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cataclysm; the mountains would fall flat and the valleys would be filled;* old people would regain their youth and sickness would vanish; the white people would be expelled from the island never to return; and cargo would arrive in great quantity so that everybody would have as much as he wanted'.
Most worryingly for the government, John Frum also prophesied that, on his second coming, he would bring a new coinage, stamped with the image of a coconut.
The people must therefore get rid of all their money of the white man's currency. In 1941 this led to a wild spending spree; the people stopped working and the island's economy was seriously damaged. The colonial administrators arrested the ringleaders but nothing that they could do would kill the cult, and the mission churches and schools became deserted.
A little later, a new doctrine grew up that John Frum was King of America. Providentially, American troops arrived in the New Hebrides around this time and, wonder of wonders, they included black men who were not poor like the islanders but
as richly endowed with cargo as the white soldiers. Wild excitement overwhelmed Tanna. The day of the apocalypse was imminent. It seemed that everyone was preparing for the arrival of John Frum. One of the leaders said that John Frum would be coming from America by aeroplane and hundreds of men began to clear the bush in the centre of the island so that the plane might have an airstrip on which to land.
The airstrip had a bamboo control tower with 'air traffic controllers' wearing dummy headphones made of wood. There were dummy planes on the 'runway' to act as decoys, designed to lure down John Frum's plane.
In the 1950s, the young David Attenborough sailed to Tanna with a cameraman, Geoffrey Mulligan, to investigate the cult of John Frum. They found plenty of evidence of the religion and were eventually introduced to its high priest, a man called Nambas.
* Compare Isaiah 40: 4: 'Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. ' This similarity doesn't necessarily indicate any fundamen- tal feature of the human psyche, or Jungian 'collective unconscious'. These islands had long been infested with missionaries.
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Nambas referred to his messiah familiarly as John, and claimed to speak regularly to him, by 'radio'. This ('radio belong John') con- sisted of an old woman with an electric wire around her waist who would fall into a trance and talk gibberish, which Nambas inter- preted as the words of John Frum. Nambas claimed to have known in advance that Attenborough was coming to see him, because John Frum had told him on the 'radio'. Attenborough asked to see the 'radio' but was (understandably) refused. He changed the subject and asked whether Nambas had seen John Frum:
Nambas nodded vigorously. 'Me see him plenty time. ' 'What does he look like? '
Nambas jabbed his finger at me. "E look like you. 'E
got white face. 'E tall man. 'E live 'long South America. '
This detail contradicts the legend referred to above that John Frum was a short man. Such is the way with evolving legends.
It is believed that the day of John Frum's return will be 15 February, but the year is unknown. Every year on 15 February his followers assemble for a religious ceremony to welcome him. So far he has not returned, but they are not downhearted. David Attenborough said to one cult devotee, called Sam:
'But, Sam, it is nineteen years since John say that the cargo will come. He promise and he promise, but still the cargo does not come. Isn't nineteen years a long time to wait? '
Sam lifted his eyes from the ground and looked at me. 'If you can wait two thousand years for Jesus Christ to come an' 'e no come, then I can wait more than nineteen years for John. '
Robert Buckman's book Can We Be Good without God? quotes the same admirable retort by a John Frum disciple, this time to a Canadian journalist some forty years after David Attenborough's encounter.
The Queen and Prince Philip visited the area in 1974, and the Prince subsequently became deified in a rerun of a John-Frum-type cult (once again, note how rapidly the details in religious evolution
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can change). The Prince is a handsome man who would have cut an imposing figure in his white naval uniform and plumed helmet, and it is perhaps not surprising that he, rather than the Queen, was elevated in this way, quite apart from the fact that the culture of the islanders made it difficult for them to accept a female deity.
I don't want to make too much of the cargo cults of the South Pacific. But they do provide a fascinating contemporary model for the way religions spring up from almost nothing. In particular, they suggest four lessons about the origin of religions generally, and I'll set them out briefly here. First is the amazing speed with which a cult can spring up. Second is the speed with which the origination process covers its tracks. John Frum, if he existed at all, did so within living memory. Yet, even for so recent a possibility, it is not certain whether he lived at all. The third lesson springs from the independent emergence of similar cults on different islands. The systematic study of these similarities can tell us something about human psychology and its susceptibility to religion. Fourth, the cargo cults are similar, not just to each other but to older religions. Christianity and other ancient religions that have spread worldwide presumably began as local cults like that of John Frum. Indeed, scholars such as Geza Vermes, Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, have suggested that Jesus was one of many such charismatic figures who emerged in Palestine around his time, sur- rounded by similar legends. Most of those cults died away. The one that survived, on this view, is the one that we encounter today. And, as the centuries go by, it has been honed by further evolution (memetic selection, if you like that way of putting it; not if you don't) into the sophisticated system - or rather diverging sets of descendant systems - that dominate large parts of the world today. The deaths of charismatic modern figures such as Haile Selassie, Elvis Presley and Princess Diana offer other opportunities to study the rapid rise of cults and their subsequent memetic evolution.
That is all I want to say about the roots of religion itself, apart from a brief reprise in Chapter 10 when I discuss the 'imaginary friend' phenomenon of childhood under the heading of the psycho- logical 'needs' that religion fulfils.
Morality is often thought to have its roots in religion, and in the next chapter I want to question this view. I shall argue that the
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origin of morality can itself be the subject of a Darwinian question. Just as we asked: What is the Darwinian survival value of religion? , so we can ask the same question of morality. Morality, indeed, probably predated religion. Just as with religion we drew back from the question and rephrased it, so with morality we shall find that it is best seen as a by-product of something else.
CHAPTER 6 The roots of morality: why are we good?
Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
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Many religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can be good, or would even want to be good. I shall discuss such questions in this chapter. But the doubts go further, and drive some religious people to paroxysms of hatred against those who don't share their faith. This is important, because moral considerations lie hidden behind religious attitudes to other topics that have no real link with morality. A great deal of the opposition to the teaching of evolution has no connection with evolution itself, or with anything scientific, but is spurred on by moral outrage. This ranges from the naive 'If you teach children that they evolved from monkeys, then they will act like monkeys' to the more sophisticated underlying motivation for the whole 'wedge' strategy of 'intelligent design', as it is mercilessly laid bare by Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross in Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent
Design.
I receive a large number of letters from readers of my books,* most of them enthusiastically friendly, some of them helpfully crit- ical, a few nasty or even vicious. And the nastiest of all, I am sorry to report, are almost invariably motivated by religion. Such unchristian abuse is commonly experienced by those who are per- ceived as enemies of Christianity. Here, for example is a letter, posted on the Internet and addressed to Brian Flemming, author and director of The God Who Wasn't There,S6 a sincere and mov- ing film advocating atheism. Titled 'Burn while we laugh' and dated 21 December 2005, the letter to Flemming reads as follows:
You've definitely got some nerve. I'd love to take a knife, gut you fools, and scream with joy as your insides spill out in front of you. You are attempting to ignite a holy war in which some day I, and others like me, may have the pleasure of taking action like the above mentioned.
The writer at this point seems to come to a belated recognition that his language is not very Christian, for he goes on, more charitably:
However, GOD teaches us not to seek vengeance, but to pray for those like you all.
* More than I can hope adequately to reply to, for which I apologize.
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His charity is short-lived, however:
I'll get comfort in knowing that the punishment GOD will bring to you will be 1000 times worse than anything I can inflict. The best part is that you WILL suffer for eternity for these sins that you're completely ignorant about. The Wrath of GOD will show no mercy. For your sake, I hope the truth is revealed to you before the knife connects with your flesh. Merry CHRISTMAS! ! !
PS You people really don't have a clue as to what is in store for you . . . I thank GOD I'm not you.
I find it genuinely puzzling that a mere difference of theological opinion can generate such venom. Here's a sample (original spelling preserved) from the postbag of the Editor of the magazine Freethought Today, published by the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), which campaigns peacefully against the under- mining of the constitutional separation of church and state:
Hello, cheese-eating scumbags. Their are way more of us Christians than you losers. Their is NO separation of church and state and you heathens will lose . . .
What is it with cheese? American friends have suggested to me a connection with the notoriously liberal state of Wisconsin - home of the FFRF and centre of the dairy industry - but surely there must be more to it than that? And how about those French 'cheese-eating surrender-monkeys'? What is the semiotic iconography of cheese? To continue:
Satan worshiping scum . . . Please die and go to hell . . . I hope you get a painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you can meet your God, SATAN . . . Hey dude this freedom from religion thing sux . . . So you fags and dykes take it easy and watch where you go cuz whenever you least expect it god will get you . . . If you don't like this country and what it was founded on &C for, get the fuck out of it and go straight to hell . . .
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PS Fuck you, you comunist whore . . . Get your black asses out of the U. S. A. . . . You are without excuse. Creation is more than enough evidence of the LORD JESUS CHRIST'S omnipotent power.
Why not Allah's omnipotent power? Or Lord Brahma's? Or even Y ahweh's?
We will not go quietly away. If in the future that requires violence just remember you brought it on. My rifle is loaded.
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself. Bear in mind, through all this, that the Editor being abused and threatened so viciously is a gentle and charming young woman.
Perhaps because I don't live in America, most of my hate mail is not quite in the same league, but nor does it display to advantage the charity for which the founder of Christianity was notable. The following, dated May 2005, from a British medical doctor, while it is certainly hateful, strikes me as more tormented than nasty, and reveals how the whole issue of morality is a deep wellspring of hostility towards atheism. After some preliminary paragraphs excoriating evolution (and sarcastically asking whether a 'Negro' is 'still in the process of evolving'), insulting Darwin personally, misquoting Huxley as an anti-evolutionist, and encouraging me to read a book (I have read it) which argues that the world is only eight thousand years old (can he really be a doctor? ) he concludes:
Your own books, your prestige in Oxford, everything you love in life, and have ever achieved, are an exercise in total futility . . . Camus' question-challenge becomes inescapable: Why don't we all commit suicide? Indeed, your world view has that sort of effect on students and many others . . . that we all evolved by blind chance, from nothing, and return to nothing. Even if religion were not
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true, it is better, much, much better, to believe a noble myth, like Plato's, if it leads to peace of mind while we live. But your world view leads to anxiety, drug addiction, violence, nihilism, hedonism, Frankenstein science, and hell on earth, and World War III. . . I wonder how happy you are in your personal relationships? Divorced? Widowed? Gay? Those like you are never happy, or they would not try so hard to prove there is no happiness nor meaning in anything.
The sentiment of this letter, if not its tone, is typical of many. Darwinism, this person believes, is inherently nihilistic, teaching that we evolved by blind chance (for the umpteenth time, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process) and are annihilated when we die. As a direct consequence of such alleged negativity, all manner of evils follow. Presumably he didn't really mean to suggest that widowhood could follow directly from my Darwinism, but his letter, by this point, had reached that level of frenzied malevolence which I repeatedly recognize among my Christian correspondents. I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here. This chapter is about evil, and its opposite, good; about morality: where it comes from, why we should embrace it, and whether we need religion to do so.
DOES OUR MORAL SENSE HAVE A DARWINIAN ORIGIN?
Several books, including Robert Hinde's Why Good is Good, Michael Shermer's The Science of Good and Evil, Robert Buckman's Can We Be Good Without God? , and Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, have argued that our sense of right and wrong can be derived from our Darwinian past. This section is my own version of the argument.
THH ROOTS OF MORALI TY: WHY ARE WE GOOD? 215
On the face of it, the Darwinian idea that evolution is driven by natural selection seems ill-suited to explain such goodness as we possess, or our feelings of morality, decency, empathy and pity. Natural selection can easily explain hunger, fear and sexual lust, all of which straightforwardly contribute to our survival or the preservation of our genes. But what about the wrenching com- passion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain? What gives us the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are highly unlikely to return the favour? Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from? Isn't goodness incompatible with the theory of the 'selfish
gene'? No. This is a common misunderstanding of the theory - a distressing (and, with hindsight, foreseeable) misunderstanding. * It is necessary to put the stress on the right word. The selfish gene is the correct emphasis, for it makes the contrast with the selfish organism, say, or the selfish species. Let me explain.
The logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the ones that succeeded in surviving at the expense of their rivals at their own level in the hierarchy. That, precisely, is what selfish means in this context. The question is, what is the level of the action? The whole idea of the selfish gene, with the stress properly applied to the last word, is that the unit of natural selection (i. e. the unit of self-interest) is not the selfish organism, nor the selfish group or selfish species or selfish ecosystem, but the selfish gene. It is the gene that, in the form of information, either survives for many generations or does not. Unlike the gene (and arguably the meme), the organism, the group and the species are not the right kind of entity to serve as a unit in this sense, because
* I was mortified to read in the Guardian ('Animal Instincts', 27 May 2006) that The Selfish Gene is the favourite book of Jeff Skilling, CEO of the infamous Enron Corporation, and that he derived inspiration of a Social Darwinist character from it. The Guardian journalist Richard Conniff gives a good explanation of the mis- understanding: http://money. guardian.