Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Would-be memeticists often ignore the fact that part of the “life” cycle of a meme is its moment-to-moment competition with other ideas—not just other memes, but every other idea anybody can think about—within a host brain. Rehearsal, deliberate or involuntary, is replication. We can try to make something a meme—or just a memory—by rehearsing it deliberately (a phone number, a rule to follow), or, if we just let “nature take its course,” our innate brain biases will automatically churn out rehearsals of the things that tickle them. This is probably the source, in fact, of episodic memory, our ability to recollect events in our lives. What did you have for breakfast on your last birthday? You probably can’t remember. What did you wear at your wedding? You probably can remember, because you’ve gone over it many times, before, during, and since the wedding. Unlike computer memory, which is an equal-opportunity storehouse that can readily record whatever is thrown into it, human brain memory is both competitive and biased. It has been designed by eons of evolution to remember some sorts of things more readily than others. It does this in part by differential rehearsal, dwelling on what is vital and tending to discard the trivia after a single pass. It does a pretty good job, keying on features that happen to have lined up with what tended to be vital in the past. Good advice to a potential meme is: if you want lots of rehearsals (replications), try to look important!

Human memory is biased in favor of vital combinations, but so, presumably, is the memory found in the brains of all other animals. Animal memory has probably been relatively impervious to fantasy, however, for a simple reason: lacking language, animal brains have not had a way of inundating themselves with an explosion of combinations not found in the natural environment. How is an anxious ape going to concoct the counterintuitive combination of a walking tree or an invisible banana—ideas that might indeed captivate an ape mind if only they could be presented to it?

Do we know that something like this fantasy-generation process has been taking place in our species (and our species alone) for thousands of years? No, but it is a serious possibility to investigate further. Using only materials that would have been put in place by evolution for other purposes, this hypothesis could explain the remarkably fertile imagination that must somehow be responsible for the world’s menagerie of mythical creatures and demons. Since the monsters themselves have never existed, they had to be “invented,” either deliberately or inadvertently (the way languages were invented). They are expensive creations, and the R & D required for the task had to be generated by something that could pay for itself. I’ve left the hypothesis quite unspecific for the moment, but more constrained forms of it are available, and they have the great advantage of having testable consequences. We can start scouring the world’s mythology for patterns that would be predicted by some versions of the hypothesis but not others.

And we don’t have to restrict ourselves to the human species. Experiments along the lines of Skinner’s provocation of superstition in the pigeon might begin to uncover the biases and fault lines in ape memory mechanisms, in much the way Niko Tinbergen’s experiments with gulls (1948, 1959) famously showed their perceptual biases. The adult female gull has an orange spot on her beak, at which her chicks instinctually peck, to stimulate the female to regurgitate and feed them. Tinbergen showed that chicks would peck even more readily at exaggerated cardboard models of the orange spot, so-called supernormal stimuli. Pascal Boyer (2001) notes that, over the eons, human beings have discovered and exploited their own supernormal stimuli:

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For instance, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise…. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound-experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it…. This phenomenon is not unique to music. Humanseverywhere also fill their environments with artifacts that over-stimulate their visual cortex, for instance by providing pure saturated color instead of the dull browns and greens of their familiar environments…. In the same way, our visual system is sensitive to symmetries in objects. Bilateral symmetry in particular is quite important; when two sides of an animal or person look the same it means that they are facing you, a relevant feature of interaction with people but also with prey and predators. Again, you cannot find a human group where people do not produce visual gadgets with such symmetrical arrangements, from the simplest makeup or hairdressing techniques to textile patterns and interior decoration. [pp. 132–33]

Why don’t other species have art? Once again, the answer that suggests itself—which does not mean that it is proven but only that it may well be provable—is that, lacking language, they lack the tools for creating surrogate stimulus combinations and hence they lack the perspective that permits exploration of the combinatorics of their own senses.¹ Using acute observation and trial and error, Tinbergen cleverly devised the supernormal stimuli that enticed his birds (and other animals) into a host of bizarre behaviors. No doubt animals do on occasion trap themselves by inadvertently discovering a supernormal stimulus in nature and letting it do its thing on them, but what would they do next? Do it again if it felt good, but the generation of diversity on which true design exploration depends would probably not be possible for them.

To sum up the story so far: The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us. This mindlessly generates a vast overpopulation of agent-ideas, most of which are too stupid to hold our attention for an instant; only a well-designed few make it through the rehearsal tournament, mutating and improving as they go. The ones that get shared and remembered are the souped-up winners of billions of competitions for rehearsal time in the brains of our ancestors. This is not a new idea, of course, just a clarification and extension of an idea that has been around for generations. As Darwin himself surmised:

…the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies…seems to be almost universal…nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally have craved to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence. [1886, p. 65]

So far so good, but what we have accounted for is superstition, not religion. Hunting for elves in the garden or the bogeyman under your bed is not (yet) having a religion.