Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Other objections to memes seem to exhibit an inverse relationship between popularity and soundness: the more enthusiastically they are championed, the more ill informed they are. They have been patiently rebutted again and again by proponents, but those who are appalled by the prospect of an evolutionary account of anything in human culture don’t seem to notice. A common mistake is for critics to imagine that memes must be more like genes than they need to be for the three conditions to be met. It has been observed, for instance, that when an individual first acquires some encountered cultural item, this is typically not a case of imitating a single instance of it. (If I take up the practice of wearing my baseball cap backward, or add a new word to my working vocabulary, am I copying the first instance of it I ever noticed, or the most recent instance, or am I somehow averaging over all of them?) This embarrassment of riches in the search for the parent of the new offspring does complicate the model of cultural replication, but it does not in itself disqualify the process as one of replication. For instance, the ultra-high-fidelity copying of computer files depends in many instances on error-correcting code-reading systems that in effect let “majority rule” determine which of several candidate exemplars should count as canonical. In such cases, no single vehicle of the information can be identified as the source, but it is an instance of replication if anything is. Darwin’s trio of requirements is both substrate-neutral and implementation-neutral to a degree that is not always appreciated.

Is cultural evolution Darwinian?

Marking these unresolved problems of nomenclature and individuation, we can turn to the more fundamental and important question: Do any of these candidates for Darwinian replicator actually fulfill the three requirements in ways that permit evolutionary theory to explain phenomena not already explicable by the methods and theories of the traditional social sciences? Or does this Darwinian perspective provide only a relatively trivial unification? It would still be important to conclude that cultural evolution obeys Darwinian principles in the modest sense that nothing that happens in it contradicts evolutionary theory, even if cultural phenomena are best accounted for in other terms. In The Origin of Species, Darwin himself identified three processes of selection: “methodical” selection by the foresighted, deliberate acts of farmers and others intent on artificial selection, “unconscious” selection, in which human beings have engaged in activities that have unwittingly contributed to the differential survival and reproduction of species, mostly on their way to domestication, and “natural” selection, in which human intentions have played no role at all. To this list we can add a fourth phenomenon, genetic engineering, in which the intention and foresight of human designers plays a still more prominent role. All four of these phenomena are Darwinian in the modest sense. Genetic engineers do not produce counterexamples to the theory of evolution by natural selection, any more than plant breeders over the eons have done; they produce novel fruits of the fruits of the fruits of evolution by natural selection. The idea of memes promises similarly to unify under a single perspective such diverse cultural phenomena as deliberate, foresighted scientific and cultural inventions (memetic engineering), such authorless productions as folklore, and even such unwittingly redesigned phenomena as languages and social customs themselves. As we enter the age of deliberate, purportedly foresighted tinkering with our own genomes and the genomes of other species, we face the prospect of strong interactions between genetic and memetic evolution, including many that may take off without having been foreseen at all. It behooves us to investigate these possibilities with the same vigor and attention to detail we devote to the investigation of the evolution of carbon-based pathogens and the swift disappearance of natural barriers that have structured the biosphere until very recently.