The GOD Delusion (29 page)

I
surmise that religions, like languages, evolve with sufficient
randomness, from beginnings that are sufficiently arbitrary, to
generate the bewildering - and sometimes dangerous - richness of
diversity
that we observe. At the same time, it is possible that a form of
natural selection, coupled with the fundamental uniformity of human
psychology, sees to it that the diverse religions share significant
features in common. Many religions, for example, teach the objectively
implausible but subjectively appealing doctrine that our personalities
survive our bodily death. The idea of immortality itself survives and
spreads because it caters to wishful thinking. And wishful thinking
counts, because human psychology has a near-universal tendency to let
belief be coloured by desire ('Thy wish was father, Harry, to that
thought', as Henry IV Part II said to his son*).

*
Not my joke: 1066
and All That.

There
seems to be no doubt that many of the attributes of religion are well
fitted to helping the religion's own survival, and the survival of the
attributes concerned, in the stew of human culture. The question now
arises of whether the good fit is achieved by 'intelligent design' or
by natural selection. The answer is probably both. On the side of
design, religious leaders are fully capable of verbalizing the tricks
that aid the survival of religion. Martin Luther was well aware that
reason was religion's arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its
dangers: 'Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes
to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles
against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from
God.'
⁸⁵
Again: 'Whoever wants to be a Christian
should tear the eyes out of his reason.' And again: 'Reason should be
destroyed in all Christians.' Luther would have had no difficulty in
intelligently designing unintelligent aspects of a religion to help it
survive. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he, or anyone else, did
design it. It could also have evolved by a (non-genetic) form of
natural selection, with Luther not its designer but a shrewd observer
of its efficacy.

Even
though conventional Darwinian selection of genes might have favoured
psychological predispositions that produce religion as a by-product, it
is unlikely to have shaped the details. I have already hinted that, if
we are going to apply some form of selection theory to those details,
we should look not to genes but to their cultural equivalents. Are
religions such stuff as memes are made on?

Truth,
in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

—
OSCAR WILDE

This
chapter began with the observation that, because Darwinian natural
selection abhors waste, any ubiquitous feature of a species - such as
religion - must have conferred some advantage or it wouldn't have
survived. But I hinted that the advantage doesn't have to redound to
the survival or reproductive success of the individual. As we saw,
advantage to the genes of the cold virus sufficiently explains the
ubiquity of that miserable complaint among our species.* And it doesn't
even have to be genes that benefit. Any
replicator
will
do. Genes are only the most obvious examples of replicators. Other
candidates are computer viruses, and memes -units of cultural
inheritance and the topic of this section. If we are to understand
memes, we have first to look a little more carefully at exactly how
natural selection works.

*
Especially my nation, according to national stereotyping legend:
'Void
I'anglais avec son sang froid habituel'
(Here is the
Englishman with his habitual bloody cold). This comes from
Fractured
French
by F. S. Pearson, along with other gems such as
''coup
de grace'
(lawnmower).

In
its most general form, natural selection must choose between
alternative replicators. A replicator is a piece of coded information
that makes exact copies of itself, along with occasional inexact copies
or 'mutations'. The point about this is the Darwinian one. Those
varieties of replicator that happen to be good at getting copied become
more numerous at the expense of alternative replicators that are bad at
getting copied. That, at its most rudimentary, is natural selection.
The archetypal replicator is a gene, a stretch of DNA that is
duplicated, nearly always with extreme accuracy, through an indefinite
number of generations. The central question for meme theory is whether
there are units of cultural imitation which behave as true replicators,
like genes. I am not saying that memes necessarily
are
close
analogues of genes, only that the more like genes they are, the better
will meme theory work; and the purpose of this section is to
ask
whether meme theory might work for the special case of
religion.

In
the world of genes, the occasional flaws in replication (mutations) see
to it that the gene pool contains alternative variants of any given
gene - 'alleles' - which may therefore be seen as competing with each
other. Competing for what? For the particular chromosomal slot or
'locus' that belongs to that set of alleles. And how do they compete?
Not by direct molecule-to-molecule combat but by proxy. The proxies are
their 'phenotypic traits' - things like leg length or fur colour:
manifestations of genes fleshed out as anatomy, physiology,
biochemistry or behaviour. A gene's fate is normally bound up with the
bodies in which it successively sits. To the extent that it influences
those bodies, it affects its own chances of surviving in the gene pool.
As the generations go by, genes increase or decrease in frequency in
the gene pool by virtue of their phenotypic proxies.

Might
the same be true of memes? One respect in which they are not like genes
is that there is nothing obviously corresponding to chromosomes or loci
or alleles or sexual recombination. The meme pool is less structured
and less organized than the gene pool. Nevertheless, it is not
obviously silly to speak of a meme pool, in which particular memes
might have a 'frequency' which can change as a consequence of
competitive interactions with alternative memes.

Some
people have objected to memetic explanations, on various grounds that
usually stem from the fact that memes are not entirely like genes. The
exact physical nature of a gene is now known (it is a sequence of DNA)
whereas that of memes is not, and different memeticists confuse one
another by switching from one physical medium to another. Do memes
exist only in brains? Or is every paper copy and electronic copy of,
say, a particular limerick also entitled to be called a meme? Then
again, genes replicate with very high fidelity, whereas, if memes
replicate at all, don't they do so with low accuracy?

These
alleged problems of memes are exaggerated. The most important objection
is the allegation that memes are copied with insufficiently high
fidelity to function as Darwinian replicators. The suspicion is that if
the 'mutation rate' in every generation is high, the meme will mutate
itself out of existence before Darwinian selection can have an impact
on its frequency in the meme pool. But the
problem is illusory. Think of a master carpenter, or a prehistoric
flint-knapper, demonstrating a particular skill to a young apprentice.
If the apprentice faithfully reproduced every hand movement of the
master, you would indeed expect to see the meme mutate out of all
recognition in a few 'generations' of master/apprentice transmission.
But of course the apprentice does not faithfully reproduce every hand
movement. It would be ridiculous to do so. Instead, he notes the goal
that the master is trying to achieve, and imitates that. Drive in the
nail until the head is flush, using as many hammer blows as it takes,
which may not be the same number as the master used. It is such rules
that can pass unmutated down an indefinite number of imitation
'generations'; no matter that the details of their execution may vary
from individual to individual, and from case to case. Stitches in
knitting, knots in ropes or fishing nets, origami folding patterns,
useful tricks in carpentry or pottery: all can be reduced to discrete
elements that really do have the opportunity to pass down an indefinite
number of imitation generations without alteration. The details may
wander idiosyncratically, but the essence passes down unmutated, and
that is all that is needed for the analogy of memes with genes to work.

In
my foreword to Susan Blackmore's
The Meme Machine
I
developed the example of an origami procedure for making a model
Chinese junk. It is quite a complicated recipe, involving thirty-two
folding (or similar) operations. The end result (the Chinese junk
itself) is a pleasing object, as are at least three intermediate stages
in the 'embryology', namely the 'catamaran', the 'box with two lids'
and the 'picture frame'. The whole performance does indeed remind me of
the foldings and invaginations that the membranes of an embryo undergo
as it morphs itself from blastula to gastrula to neurula. I learned to
make the Chinese junk as a boy from my father who, at about the same
age, had acquired the skill at his boarding school. A craze for making
Chinese junks, initiated by the school matron, had spread through the
school in his time like a measles epidemic, then died away, also like a
measles epidemic. Twenty-six years later, when that matron was long
gone, I went to the same school. I reintroduced the craze and it again
spread, like another measles epidemic, and then again died away. The
fact that such
a teachable skill can spread like an epidemic tells us something
important about the high fidelity of memetic transmission. We may be
sure that the junks made by my father's generation of schoolboys in the
1920s were in no general respect different from those made by my
generation in the 1950s.

We
could investigate the phenomenon more systematically by the following
experiment: a variant of the childhood game of Chinese Whispers
(American children call it Telephone). Take two hundred people who have
never made a Chinese junk before, and line them up in twenty teams of
ten people each. Gather the heads of the twenty teams around a table
and teach them, by demonstration, how to make a Chinese junk. Now send
each one off to find the second person in his own team, and teach that
person alone, again by demonstration, to make a Chinese junk. Each
second 'generation' person then teaches the third person in her own
team, and so on until the tenth member of every team has been reached.
Keep all the junks made along the way, and label them by their team and
'generation' number for subsequent inspection.

I
haven't done the experiment yet (I'd like to), but I have a strong
prediction of what the result will be. My prediction is that not all of
the twenty teams will succeed in passing the skill intact down the line
to their tenth members, but that a significant number of them will. In
some of the teams there will be mistakes: perhaps a weak link in the
chain will forget some vital step in the procedure, and everyone
downstream of the mistake will then obviously fail. Perhaps team 4 gets
as far as the 'catamaran' but falters thereafter. Perhaps the eighth
member of team 13 produces a 'mutant' somewhere between the 'box with
two lids' and the 'picture frame' and the ninth and tenth members of
his team then copy the mutated version.

Now,
of those teams in which the skill is transferred successfully to the
tenth generation, I make a further prediction. If you rank the junks in
order of 'generation' you will not see a systematic deterioration of
quality with generation number. If, on the other hand, you were to run
an experiment identical in all respects except that the skill
transferred was not origami but copying a
drawing
of
a junk, there would definitely be a systematic deterioration in the
accuracy with which the generation 1 pattern 'survived' to generation
10.

In
the drawing version of the experiment, all the generation 10 drawings
would bear some slight resemblance to the generation 1 drawing. And
within each team, the resemblance would more or less steadily
deteriorate as you proceed down the generations. In the origami version
of the experiment, by contrast, the mistakes would be all-or-none:
they'd be 'digital' mutations. Either a team would make no mistakes and
the generation 10 junk would be no worse, and no better, on average
than that produced by generation 5 or generation 1; or there would be a
'mutation' in some particular generation and all downstream efforts
would be complete failures, often faithfully reproducing the mutation.

What
is the crucial difference between the two skills? It is that the
origami skill consists of a series of discrete actions, none of which
is difficult to perform in itself. Mostly the operations are things
like 'Fold both sides into the middle.' A particular team member may
execute the step ineptly, but it will be clear to the next team member
down the line what he is
trying
to do. The origami
steps are 'self-normalizing'. It is this that makes them 'digital'. It
is like my master carpenter, whose intention to flatten the nail head
in the wood is obvious to his apprentice, regardless of the details of
the hammer blows. Either you get a given step of the origami recipe
right or you don't. The drawing skill, by contrast, is an analogue
skill. Everybody can have a go, but some people copy a drawing more
accurately than others, and nobody copies it perfectly. The accuracy of
the copy depends, too, on the amount of time and care devoted to it,
and these are continuously variable quantities. Some team members,
moreover, will embellish and 'improve', rather than strictly copy, the
preceding model.