Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Could such a bargain pay for itself? That is the question at the heart of current research in evolutionary biology, and if the positive answer holds up to further scrutiny, then we will have found the ancient but ongoing source, in evolution, of the huge system of activities and products that we normally think of when we think of sex: marriage rituals and taboos against adultery, clothing and hairstyles, breath fresheners and pornography and condoms and HIV and all the rest. To explain why each and every facet of this huge complex exists, we will have to resort to many different kinds and levels of theory, not all of it biological. But none of this would exist if we weren’t sexually reproducing creatures, and we need to understand the biological underpinnings first if we are to have a clear view of what is optional or mere historical accident, what is highly resistant to perturbation, what is exploitable. There are reasons why we love sex, and they are more complicated than you might think.

With alcohol, a somewhat different perspective emerges. What pays for the breweries, the vineyards and distilleries, and the massive delivery systems that bring alcoholic beverages within easy reach of almost every human being on the planet? We know that alcohol, like nicotine, caffeine, and the active ingredients in chocolate, has quite specific effects on receptor molecules in our brains. Let us suppose that these effects are just coincidences at the outset. That some large molecules in some plants happen to be biochemically similar to large molecules that play important modulating roles in animal brains is, let us suppose, as likely as not. Evolution must always begin with an element of brute chance. But, then, it is not surprising that, over millions of years of exploratory ingestion, our species and others should discover the plants with psychoactive ingredients and develop preferential or aversive dispositions regarding them. Elephants—and baboons and other African animals—have been known to get falling-down drunk eating fermenting fruit from marula trees, and there is evidence that elephants will travel great distances to arrive at the marula trees just when their fruits ripen. It seems that the fruit ferments in their stomachs when yeast cells resident on the fruit undergo a population explosion, consuming the sugar and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol. The alcohol happens to create the same sort of pleasurable effects in the elephants’ brains that it does in ours.

It may be that the basic bargain struck between fruit trees and frugivores—the seed-spreading-for-sugar deal—is enhanced by an additional partnership of yeast and fruit tree. This would create an added attraction that pays off by enhancing the reproductive prospects of both the yeast and the trees, or it may be just an accident in the wild. In any case, another species, Homo sapiens, has closed the loop and initiated just such a coevolutionary bargain: we domesticated both the yeast and the fruit, and for thousands of years we have been artificially selecting for the varieties that best engender the effects we love. The yeast cells provide a service for which they are paid off in protection and nutrients. That means that the yeast cultures carefully husbanded by brewers, vintners, and bakers are human symbionts just as much as the E. coli bacteria that inhabit our intestines. Unlike endosymbiont bacteria, such as Toxoplasma gondii, which have to get into the bodies of both rat and cat, the yeast cells are a sort of ectosymbiont, like the “cleaner” fish that groom larger fish, depending on another species, us, but not having to enter our bodies. They may—like a wayward cleaner fish—get ingested by us more or less by accident, but it is really only their excretions that need to get inside us for them to prosper!

Now consider a strikingly different sort of good thing: money. Unlike the other goods we have considered, it is restricted (so far) to a single species, us, and its design is transmitted through culture, not genes. I will have more to say about cultural evolution in later chapters. In this introductory overview I want to point out just a few striking similarities between money and the “more biological” treasures we have just surveyed. Like eyesight and flight, money has evolved more than once, ⁵ and hence is a compelling candidate for what I call a Good Trick—a move in design space that will be “discovered” again and again by blind evolutionary processes simply because so many different adaptive paths lead to it and thereby endorse it (Dennett, 1995b). Economists have worked out the rationale for money in some detail.

Money is clearly one of the most effective “inventions” of our clever species, but that rationale was free-floating until very recently. We used, and relied on, and valued money, and occasionally killed and died for money, long before the rationale of its value was made explicit in any minds. Money is not the only cultural invention to lack a specific inventor or author. Nobody invented language or music either.⁶ An entertaining coincidence is that an old term for money in the form of coin and paper issue is specie (from the same Latin root as species), and, as many have noted, the free-floating rationale of specie could lapse in the foreseeable future, and it could go extinct in the wake of credit cards and other forms of electronic funds transfer. Specie, like a virus, travels light, and doesn’t carry its own reproductive machinery with it, but, rather, depends for the persistence of its kind on provoking a host (us) to make copies of it using our expensive reproduction machinery (printing presses, stamps and dies).⁷ Individual coins and pieces of paper money wear out over time, and unless more are made and adopted, the whole system may go extinct. (You may confirm this by trying to buy a boat with a pile of cowrie shells.) But since money is a Good Trick, expect some other species of money to take over the niche left vacant by the departing specie.

I have another, ulterior motive for bringing up money. The goods being surveyed—sugar, sex, alcohol, music, money—are all problematic because in each case we can develop an obsession, and crave too much of a good thing, but money has perhaps the worst reputation as a good thing. Alcohol is condemned by many—by the Muslims in particular—but among those who appreciate it—such as the Roman Catholics—a person who loves it in moderation is not considered ignoble or a fool. But we are all supposed to despise money as a thing in itself, and value it only instrumentally. Money is “filthy lucre,” something to be enjoyed only for what it can provide in the way of more worthy things of value, things with “intrinsic” value.⁸ As the old song says, not entirely convincingly, the best things in life are free. Is this because money is “artificial” and the others are all “natural”? Not likely. Is a string quartet or a single-malt whisky or a chocolate truffle any less artificial than a gold coin?