(Houghton Mifflin, Oct. 2006, 406pp, including 26pp of appendix, books cited, notes, and index)
One chapter for today. This is about where religion came from and what use it is.
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Ch 5, The Roots of Religion, p161
There are various ideas about the usefulness of religion, but this chapter focuses on the Darwinian imperative—if something exists, it must be ‘good for something’. What is religion ‘good for’? It might be good directly; it might involve group selection; it might involve the ‘extended phenotype’ (e.g. a parasite directing an organism to do something); it might involve memes.
Australian aboriginals are presumably typical of our distant ancestors; their minds are full of specific useful knowledge about their environment, but also nonsense about witchcraft and female menstruation. And all cultures have had some version of time-consuming apparently ‘useless’ rituals and fantasies… Even when people give it up, religion is a default; like heterosexuality; that everyone recognizes.
P166, Direct advantages of Religion. Some evidence suggests that religious belief protects people against stress. Not that this has anything to do with the truth of religion’s claims. Still, like other placebos, it might have an effect. Yet if so, why would the mind evolve to benefit from false ideas? Note difference between proximate and ultimate explanations. (Ref Shermer How We Believe.) Some claims for religion are the former; we’re concerned with the latter.
P169, Group selection. (Ref Colin Renfrew and DS Wilson.) This idea suggests that a tribe with a militant god would defeat tribes with a peaceful god, for example. Author does not support group selection, though admits it can happen in principle. It has too many problems, e.g. subversion from within—even in a militant tribe, an *individual* who held back might survive to reproduce, letting others sacrifice for him. Even Darwin allowed that some form of tribal competition might have consequences, 171. [[ I’ll have comments about this at the end of the post. ]]
P172, Religion as a By-product of something else. This is the author’s own view. An example is why moths fly into candle flames. The instinct to navigate by light serves when the moon or sun is the only light; with artificial lighting, the same instinct results in a death-spiral. Asking why moths commit suicide is the wrong question.
What is religion’s something else? Author hypothesizes the misfiring of the how parents pass along experience to their children—how children reflexively believe what they’re told by their parents, as a mean of culturally transmitting information. Preachers tell stories; example from author’s childhood about soldiers marching on into an oncoming train. Such transmission carries everything, valid or not, like computers who execute valid programs and also viruses. The flip-side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. Religious leaders know the value of indoctrinating a child early, cf the Jesuit boast, and James Dobson. 177m. [[ It seems to me author doesn’t explain why the adult wouldn’t abandon obviously baseless beliefs—the same way adults no longer believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus ]]
Where *other* beliefs seem weird to us who didn’t grow up with them. Example of a Cambridge theologian wonders how primitive tribes can believe such nonsense, contrasted with the beliefs of a mainstream Christian, p178-9.
P179, Psychologically primed for religion. Evolutionary psychology suggests reasons why human nature would be susceptible. Children have a natural tendency toward a dualistic theory of mind—they attribute minds to everything, just as some people and stories assume minds and bodies are distinct (e.g. fantasies about minds exchanging bodies, example of an 1882 novel.).
People are also predisposed to be creationists—i.e., children assign purpose for everything. The purpose of clouds is to make rain. This is teleology.
Why would this be?
Dennett offers his idea of the ‘intentional stance’—the way we understand objects and animals and other entities. The physical stance, the design stance, the intentional stance. The last is a shortcut to presuming things about an animal that might eat you. Part of this is the assumption of ‘mind’ and purpose.
We do this when we attribute events to inanimate things.
A similar pattern might be seen in romantic love, in which love of a spouse is exclusive, unlike other kinds of love. It makes sense for the purpose of ensuring loyalty to a spouse, at least for as long as it takes to rear a child. There are even similarities between religious devotion and such love.
Lewis Wolpert (p186) suggests that strong conviction is a type of irrationality to guard against fickleness of mind. Robert Trivers offers a theory of self-deception—the better to deceive others.
Frazer’s Golden Bough showed the diversity, but also the similarities, of religious belief. Something like ‘genetic drift’ may apply, as it does to languages (p189). Yet at times religions exhibit intelligent design; leaders, like Martin Luther, who warn against reason as the enemy of religion (p190).
P191, Tread Softly, Because You Tread on My Memes. A meme can be any replicator that works analogous to a gene—something that makes copies of itself, along with occasional ‘mutations’. Objections to memes are exaggerated; e.g. an idea or practice doesn’t have to be passed along in literal detail, just through general principle, and the latter can be sufficiently binary for replication to operate according to natural selection. (e.g. the concepts of driving a nail into wood, or doing origami to make a particular form.) The game of ‘telephone’ would also demonstrate this—a short message might well be passed along without error, while a drawing couldn’t be replicated even from one step to the next. Digital vs analog.
Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine developed these ideas more extensively than anyone. Like genes, which work in ‘cartels’ of interrelated effects, memes operate in synch with one another—a ‘memeplex’. Thus some individual ideas survive because of compatibility with others, not on their own merits. E.g. a religion memeplex—life after death, martyrs, killing heretics, belief as a virtue, etc. (p199-200). Different ‘sets’ might work equally well; Islam as a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism as a herbivorous one. People guide religions but don’t design them—with the rare exception of Scientology, and to an extent, Mormonism.
P202 Cargo Cults. As in The Life of Brian, they exhibit the extreme rapidity with which religions can evolve. (Ref. David Attenborough Quest in Paradise.) Natives of south sea islands saw white men bring supplies, do mysterious things like shuffle papers and talk through boxes with glowing lights, and concluded the cargo was of supernatural origin. Similar cults arose in dozens of places. One on the island now known as Vanuatu includes a messianic figure named John Frum—cited only since 1940, but whose confirmed existence is still uncertain. Doctrines concerned his second coming, his kingship in America, etc., and when later visitors came the doctrines were shifted to fit available evidence. They demonstrate certain common features of religions—four lessons: the speed with which they spring up; the speed with which it covers its tracks; their similarity to each other; and fourth, to older religions.
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My comments: The skepticism about group selection seems to have faded. The problem of the free-loader has been solved, it seems, by the realization that morality itself evolved: ideas of shame and honor, emotions like embarrassment. It’s precisely the development of such reactions that have allowed group selection, and thus the cooperation of larger and larger groups in competition with each other. Thus, even if not everyone within each group marches in lockstep with all the others, we can still observe differences in the outcomes between groups with different forms of government, or different religions.
