Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Cardinal Dulles is interested in getting conversions; and so are scientists. They campaign with vigor and ingenuity for their pet theories. But they are constrained by the rules of science not to engage in practices that would tend to disable the critical faculties of potential hosts for the memes they want to spread. No such rules have yet evolved to govern the practice of religion.

2 What pays for science?

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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What about science itself? What happens when we turn the harsh light of evolutionary theory on itself, for instance, and ask what conspiracy of conditions and payoffs led to its existence? Science in general is a very expensive human activity. What dark cravings might it be satisfying? Might it not have its share of ignoble ancestors, or be driven by embarrassing lusts? The practical benefits that have driven the scientific quest are often there, to be sure, but perhaps just as often science has proceeded by an arguably pathological excess of curiosity—knowledge for its own sake, at whatever cost. Might science turn out to be an irresistible bad habit? It might be. So might religion. Let’s find out, with the scientific study of science itself, an investigation already well under way.

Why do we do science? Our brains certainly didn’t evolve to do quantum physics or even long division. The standard answer, which may mask important complexities, begins with what we might call our native curiosity drive, which we share with almost all animals, and which focuses our attention on just about anything novel or complex, especially if it is in motion, and more or less compels us to examine it (cautiously). The free-floating rationale of this is obvious: as locomotors, we diminish the risks of damage and enhance our chances of finding what we need by looking where we are going. If we found that trees were also curious, we’d have to rethink this common wisdom, but the famous example of the sea squirt suggests that the principle is safe. The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the ocean looking for a good place to settle. For guidance in this task it needs a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds a suitable rock to cling to for the rest of its life (as a sessile filter-feeder), it no longer needs its nervous system, which it disas sembles and assimilates, a vivid example in support of the hypothesis that curiosity is costly, and when it can’t pay for itself by guiding locomotion, it is abandoned. As the joke has it, this is like tenure for a professor—once you have it, you are free to eat your own brain!

Curiosity must be tempered by caution, and by thrift as always, so it is not surprising that animals tend to exhibit curiosity only about the most immediately pressing ecological concerns. Herbivores check out the plants in the vicinity, whereas carnivores largely ignore them. Omnivores are busier investigators than herbivores, though both keep an eye out for predators, and so forth. Our closest relatives, the great apes, show a more catholic interest in almost all things, but even chimpanzees born in captivity are remarkably uninterested in all the human speech they hear all around them from the day they are born, ecologically relevant though it surely is to them in their evolutionarily novel circumstances. A human infant’s intense interest in speech sounds may in fact be one of the most important genetic differences between us and chimpanzees. Nobody knows how differently an infant chimpanzee’s brain might develop if it simply had the urge to attend to the torrent of overheard verbal input that its auditory system receives but regularly discards, the way ours discards the rustling of the leaves in the wind. We know of no organ of the body that pays greater homage than the brain does to the maxim “Use it or lose it,” and it is conceivable that a tiny genetic change, turning up the competitive volume, in effect, for the category of speech sounds, might cascade into major anatomical changes in the developing brain.