Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Some of the R & D can be observed by the Martians directly: debates among religious leaders about whether to abandon awkward elements of their orthodoxy, decisions by building committees to accept a winning architectural proposal for a new temple, composers executing commissions for new anthems, theologians writing tracts, televangelists meeting with advertising agencies and other consultants to plan their new season of broadcasts. In the developed world, in addition to the time and energy spent in religious observance, there is a huge enterprise of public and private criticism and defense, interpretation and comparison, of every aspect of religion. If the Martians just focus on this, they will form the impression that religion, like science or music or professional sport, consists of systems of social activity that are designed and redesigned by conscious, deliberate agents who are aware of the points or purposes of the enterprises, the problems that need solving, the risks and costs and benefits. The National Football League was created and designed by identifiable individuals to fulfill a set of human purposes, and so was the World Bank. These institutions show clear evidence of design, but they are not “perfect.” People make mistakes, errors get identified and corrected over time, and when there are substantial disagreements among those who have the power and responsibility for maintaining such a system, compromises are sought and often achieved. Some of the R & D that has shaped and is still shaping religion falls clearly into this category. An extreme case would be Scientology, a whole religion that is unquestionably the deliberately designed brainchild of a single author, L. Ron Hubbard, though of course he borrowed elements that had proved themselves in existing religions.

At the other extreme, there is no doubt that the equally intricate, equally designed folk religions or tribal religions found all over the world have never been subjected by their practitioners to anything like the “design review board” processes exemplified by the Council of Trent or Vatican II. Like folk music and folk art, these religions have acquired their aesthetic properties and other design features by a less self-conscious system of influences. And, whatever these influences are or were, they exhibit deep commonalities and patterns. How deep? As deep as the genes? Are there “genes for” the similarities among religions around the world? Or are the patterns that matter more geographical or ecological than genetic?

The Martians don’t need to invoke genes to explain why people in equatorial climates don’t wear fur coats, or why watercraft all over the world are both elongated and symmetrical around the long axis (aside from Venetian gondolas and a few other specialized craft). The Martians, having mastered the world’s languages, will soon notice that there is huge variation in sophistication among boatbuilders around the world. Some of them can give articulate and accurate explanations of just why they insist that their vessels be symmetrical, explanations that any naval architect with a Ph.D. in engineering would applaud, but others have a simpler answer: we build boats this way because this is the way we have always built them. They copy the designs they learned from their fathers and grandfathers, who did the same in their day. This more or less mindless copying, the Martians will notice, is a tempting parallel with the other transmission medium they have identified, the genes. If boatbuilders or potters or singers are in the habit of copying old designs “religiously,” they may preserve design features over hundreds or even thousands of years. Human copying is variable, so slight variations in the copies will often appear, and although most of these promptly disappear, since they are deemed defective or “seconds” or in any event not popular with the customers, every now and then a variation will engender a new lineage, in some sense an improvement or innovation for which there is a “market niche.” And, lo and behold, without anybody’s realizing it, or intending it, this relatively mindless process over long periods of time can shape designs to an exquisite degree, optimizing them for local conditions.

A culturally transmitted design can, in this way, have a free-floating rationale in exactly the same way a genetically transmitted design does. The boatbuilders and boat owners no more need to understand the reasons why their boats are symmetrical than the fruit-eating bear needs to understand his role in propagating wild apple trees when he defecates in the woods. Here we have the design of a human artifact—culturally, not genetically transmitted—without a human designer, without an author or inventor or even a knowing editor or critic.¹² And the reason the process can work is exactly the same in human culture as it is in genetics: differential replication. When copies are made with variation, and some variations are in some tiny way “better” (just better enough so that more copies of them get made in the next batch), this will lead inexorably to the ratcheting process of design improvement Darwin called evolution by natural selection. What gets copied doesn’t have to be genes. It can be anything at all that meets the basic requirements of the Darwinian algorithm.¹³

This concept of cultural replicators—items that are copied over and over—has been given a name by Richard Dawkins (1976), who proposed to call them memes, a term that has recently been the focus of controversy. For the moment, I want to make a point that should be uncontroversiaclass="underline" cultural transmission can sometimes mimic genetic transmission, permitting competing variants to be copied at different rates, resulting in gradual revisions in features of those cultural items, and these revisions have no deliberate, foresighted authors. The most obvious, and well-researched, examples are natural languages. The Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a few other variants—all descend from Latin, preserving many of the basic features while revising others. Are these revisions adaptations? That is, are they in any sense improvements over their Latin ancestors in their environments? There is much to be said on this topic, and the “obvious” points tend to be simplistic and wrong, but at least this much is clear: once a shift starts to emerge in one locality, it generally behooves local people to go along with it, if they want to be understood. When in Rome, speak as the Romans do, or be ignored or misunderstood. Thus do idiosyncrasies in pronunciation, slang idioms, and other novelties “go to fixation,” as a geneticist would say, in a local language. And none of this is genetic. What is copied is a way of saying something, a behavior or routine.

The gradual transformations that turned Latin into French and Portuguese and other offspring languages were not intended, planned, foreseen, desired, commanded by anyone. On rare occasions, a particular local celebrity’s peculiar pronunciation of a word or sound may have caught on, a fad that eventually turned into a cliché and then into an established part of the local language, and in these instances we can plausibly identify the “Adam” or “Eve” at the root of that feature’s family tree. On even rarer occasions, individuals may set out to invent a word or a pronunciation and actually succeed in coining something that eventually enters the language, but in general, the changes that accumulate have no salient human authors, deliberate or inadvertent.

Folk art and folk music, folk medicine, and other products of such folk processes are often brilliantly adapted to quite advanced and specific purposes, but, however wonderful these fruits of cultural evolution are, we should resist the strong temptation to postulate some sort of mythic folk genius or mystical shared consciousness to explain them. These excellent designs often do owe some of their features to deliberate improvements by individuals along the way, but they can arise by exactly the same sort of blind, mechanical, foresightless sifting-and-duplicating process that has produced the exquisite design of organisms by natural selection, and in both cases the “judging” is harsh, austere, and unimaginative. Mother Nature is a philistine accountant who cares only about the immediate payoff in terms of differential replication, cutting no slack for promising candidates who can’t measure up to the contemporary competition. Indeed, the tin-eared and forgetful singer who can hardly carry a tune and forgets almost every song he hears but can remember this one memorable song contributes as much quality control to the folk process (by replicating this classic-in-the-making at the expense of all the competing songs) as the most gifted tunesmith.