Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Words exist. What are they made of? Air under pressure? Ink? Some instances of the word “cat” are made of ink, and some are made of bursts of acoustic energy in the atmosphere, and some are made of patterns of glowing dots on computer screens, and some occur silently in thoughts, and what they have in common is just that they count as “the same” (tokens of the same type, as we philosophers say) in a system of symbols known as a language. Words are such familiar items in our language-drenched world that we tend to think of them as if they were unproblematically tangible things—as real as teacups and raindrops—but they are in fact quite abstract, even more abstract than voices or songs or haircuts or opportunities (and what are they made of?). What are words? Words are basically information packets of some sort, recipes for using one’s vocal apparatus and ears (or hands and eyes)—and brains—in quite specific ways. A word is more than a sound or a spelling. For instance, fast sounds the same and is spelled the same in English and German, but has completely different meanings and roles in the two languages. Two different words, sharing only some of their surface properties. Words exist. Do memes exist? Yes, because words exist, and words are memes that can be pronounced. Other memes are the same sort of thing—information packets or recipes for doing something other than pronouncing—behaviors such as shaking hands or making a particular rude gesture, or taking off your shoes when you enter a house, or driving on the right, or making your boats symmetrical. These behaviors can be described and taught explicitly, but they don’t have to be; people can just imitate the behaviors they see others perform. Variations in pronunciation can spread, and so can variations in cooking methods, doing the laundry, planting crops.

There are vexatious problems about just what the boundaries of a meme are—is wearing a baseball cap backward one meme or two (wearing a cap, and putting it on backward)?—but similar problems arise for word boundaries—should we count “copping out” as one word or two?—and, indeed, for genes. The boundary conditions are crisp for single molecules of DNA, or their constituent parts such as nucleotides or codons (triplets of nucleotides, such as AGC or AGA), but genes don’t line up cleanly with these boundaries. They sometimes come apart into several separated pieces, and the reasons that biologists call the separated strings of codons parts of a single gene instead of two genes are very much the same reasons that linguists would identify “tickle [my, his, her] fancy” or “read [me, him, her] the riot act” as salient idioms, not just verb phrases composed of several words. Such yoked-together parts raise problems for anybody trying to count genes—not insurmountable, but not obvious, either. And what is copied and transmitted, in the case of both memes and genes, is information.

I will have more to say about memes in later chapters, and since overeager meme-enthusiasts and equally overeager memedebunkers have made the topic a hot-button issue for many people, I need to protect a (relatively!) sober version of the concept from some of its friends and enemies. Not everybody need participate in this exercise of conceptual hygiene, however, so I have reprinted my basic introduction to memes—“The New Replicators,” from the recent two-volume Encyclopedia of Evolution published by Oxford University Press in 2002—as appendix A at the back of this book.¹⁴ For our purposes now, the main reason for taking the memes perspective seriously is that it permits us to look at the cui bono? question for every designed feature of religion without prejudging the issue of whether we’re talking about genetic or cultural evolution, and whether the rationale for a design feature is free-floating or explicitly somebody’s rationale. This expands the space of possible evolutionary theories, opening up room for us to consider multilevel, mixed processes, getting us away from the simplistic ideas of “genes for religion” at one extreme and “a conspiracy of priests” at the other extreme and permitting us to consider much more interesting (and more probable) accounts of how and why religions evolve. Evolutionary theory is not a one-trick pony, and when the Martians set out to theorize about Earthly religion, they have lots of options to explore, which I will swiftly sketch, in extreme versions, just to give a sense of the terrain to be explored more carefully in later chapters.

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Sweet-tooth theories: First, consider the variety of things we like to ingest or otherwise insert into our bodies: sugar, fat, alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, nicotine, marijuana, and opium for a start. In each case, there is an evolved receptor system in the body designed to detect substances (either ingested or constructed within the body, such as the endorphins or endogenously created morphine analogues) that these favorites have in high concentration. Over the ages, our clever species has gone prospecting, sampling just about everything in the environment, and after millennia of trial and error has managed to discover ways of gathering and concentrating these special substances so that we can use them to (over) stimulate our innate systems. The Martians may wonder if there are also genetically evolved systems in our bodies that are designed to respond to something that religions provide in intensified form. Many have thought so. Karl Marx may have been more right than he knew when he called religion the opiate of the masses. Might we have a god center in our brains along with our sweet tooth? What would it be for? What would pay for it? As Richard Dawkins puts it, “If neuroscientists find a ‘god center’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me want to know why the god center evolved. Why did those of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god center survive better than rivals who did not?” (2004b, p. 14).

If any such evolutionary account is correct, then those with a god center not only survived better than those without one; they tended to have more offspring. But we should carefully set aside the anachronism involved in thinking of this hypothesized innate system as a “god center,” since its original target may have been quite unlike the intense stuff that turns it on today—we don’t have an innate chocolate-ice-cream center in the brain, after all, or a nicotine center. God may just be the latest and most intense confection that triggers the whatsis center in so many people. What benefit accrued to those who satisfied their whatsis craving? It could even be that there isn’t and never has been any actual target in the world to obtain, but just an imaginary or virtual target, in effect: it’s been the seeking, not the getting, that has had a fitness advantage. In any case, if the need, or at least the taste, for this still-unidentified treasure has become a genetically transmitted part of human nature, we tamper with it at our peril.