Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

It can be seen that all these categories of new replicators are dependent, like viruses, on replicative machinery that is built and maintained directly or indirectly by the parent process of biological evolution. Were all DNA life-forms to go extinct, all their habits and metahabits, their artifacts and meta-artifacts, would soon die with them, lacking the wherewithal (both the machinery and the energy to run the machinery) to reproduce on their own. This might not be a permanent feature of the planet. For the time being, our computer networks and robot fabrication and repair facilities require massive supervision and maintenance by us, but it has been suggested by the roboticist Hans Moravec (1988) that silicon-based electronic (or photonic) artifacts could become entirely self-sustaining and self-replicating, weaning themselves from their dependence on their carbon-based creators. This improbable and distant eventuality is not a requirement for evolution, however, or for life itself. After all, our own self-replication and self-maintenance is entirely dependent on the billions of bacteria without which our metabolisms would fail, and if our artifactual descendants similarly have to enslave armies of our biological descendants to keep their systems up and running, this would not detract from their claim to be a new branch on the tree of life.

As with many taxonomies in evolutionary theory, there are controversies and puzzles about how to draw the branchings, and how to name them. Some of these puzzles are substantive and some are merely disagreements about which terms to use. The zoologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in a chapter of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and the term has caught on. He opened his discussion of these “new replicators” with a discussion of birdsong, but others who have adopted the term have wanted to restrict memes to human culture. Should such evolving animal traditions as alarm calls, nest-building methods, and chimpanzee tools also be called memes? Researchers concentrating on cultural transmission in animals, such as John Tyler Bonner (1980) and Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka (2000), have resisted the term, and others writing on human cultural evolution, such as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (1981), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson(1985), have also chosen to use alternative terms. But since the word “meme” has secured a foothold in the English language, appearing in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition “an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means,” we may conveniently settle on it as the general term for any culturally based replicator—if such there are. Those who are squeamish about using a term whose identity conditions are still so embattled should remind themselves that similar controversies continue to swirl around how to define its counterpart, “gene,” a term that few would recommend abandoning altogether.