Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Memes include not just animal traditions, then, but also computer-based replicators, for two reasons: not only do computers and their maintenance and operation depend on human culture, but the boundaries between computer viruses and more traditional human memes have already been blurred. Simple computer viruses in effect carry the instruction copy me, which is directed to the computer, in machine language, and is entirely invisible to the computer’s user. Like the toxins unwittingly ingested by people who catch and eat freshwater fish, such a computer virus, while an element of the users’ environment, is arguably not part of their cultural environment. However, at least as widespread and virulent as such “proper” computer viruses are bogus computer-virus warnings, directed to the computer-user, in natural language. These, which depend directly on a comprehending (but duped) human vector to get themselves replicated on the Internet, are definitely within the intended understanding of memes, and intermediate cases are the computer viruses that depend on enticing human users to open attachments (thereby triggering the invisible copying instruction) by promising some amusing or titillating contents. These, too, depend on human comprehension; one written in German will not spread readily to the computers of monoglot English speakers. (This pattern may change if users avail themselves regularly of on-line translation services.) In the arms race between virus and antivirus, ever more elaborate exploitations of human interests are to be expected, so it seems best to include all these replicators under the rubric of memes, noting that some of them make only indirect use of human vectors, and hence are only indirectly elements of human culture. We are beginning to see this porous boundary crossed in the other direction as well: it used to be true that the differential replication of such classic memes as songs, poems, and recipes depended on their winning the competition for residence in human brains, but now that a multitude of search engines on the Web have interposed themselves between authors and their (human) audiences, competing with one another for reputation as high-quality sources of cultural items, significant fitness differences between memes can accumulate independently of any human appreciation or cognizance at all. The day may soon come when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliché, without anybody human having read the original book.

Problems of classification and individuation

Some problems of classification are substantive, depending in part on historical facts that are not well established, and others are tactical problems for the theorist: what divisions of the phenomena will prove most perspicuous? Are all computer viruses properly descended from the earliest forays into Artificial Life, or should at least some of them be shown as arising independently of that intellectual movement? Not all computer hackers are A-Life hackers, but there is also the unanswered tactical question of how to characterize what is copied. If one hacker gets the general idea of a computer virus from somebody else and then goes on to make an entirely new kind of computer virus, is that new virus properly a descendant with modifications of the virus that inspired its creation? What if the hacker adapts elements of the original virus’s design in the new type? How much sheer mindless copying must there be, or, alternatively, how much comprehending inspiration may there be, in an instance of replication? (More on this question below.) Is there cross-species meme-copying in the animal world? Polar bears build a den that includes a raised snow shelf that permits cold air to drain out the depressed opening of the den. Is this wise trend in arctic technology entirely innate (now) or do bear cubs have to copy their mother’s example? The same snow shelf is found in an Inuit’s igloo or quincy. Did the Inuit copy this tradition from the polar bear, or was it an independent invention? Does it ever happen that one species begins attending to the alarm calls of another and then develops an alarm-call tradition of its own? Does the alarm-call meme spread from species to species, or should we consider the intraspecific alarm calls and their variants as entirely independent lineages?