Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

My main reply to this objection is to be found in appendix A, “The New Replicators.” Here I will expand on that reply by concentrating on the word italicized above: “instead.” I want to challenge the Sperberians’ conviction that they need to turn their backs on memes in order to study the constraints and biases of psychology. Atran, for instance, complains that the memetic approach is “mind-blind” (2002, pp. 241ff.) in that it ignores the detailed role of specific psychological mechanisms in shaping cultural items that proliferate. This is not at all an obvious point of disagreement, since Atran agrees that there is differential proliferation of cultural items. It is tempting to see the dispute as an artifact of miscommunication, with (some) memeticists promising too much and antimemeticists taking them at their word. As I note at the end of appendix A, memetics does not replace or pre-empt psychology any more than population genetics replaces or pre-empts ecology. (Is population genetics environmentblind? Yes, in general, and none the worse for it, since its models typically don’t go into the details of how and why there are selective pressures in the environment; they just show how the effects of those selective forces, whatever they are, will be manifested in populations over time as migrations and births and deaths take their toll. To get a whole biological explanation, you still need the ecology, and for a whole cultural explanation, memeticists still need psychology—though they may deny it in the throes of partisanship.)

Boyer expresses the Sperberian objection in similar terms, but in spite of his stated opposition to memes, he often cannot resist couching his points in terms of differential replication. Indeed, his theory has been summarized by one sympathetic commentator as the thesis that “religion can primarily be understood as the systematic exploitation of mundane psychological systems by especially virulent strains of cultural concepts” (Bering, 2004, p. 126). “Virulent” is not quite the word Bering is seeking, since its (dictionary) connotations are all negative; “prolific” or “fit” would be a more accurate summary of Boyer’s thesis, since Boyer is careful to be neutral on the issue of whether religion is a good or bad accompaniment to human life, but, leaving that aside, it seems that Bering would include Boyer among the memeticists in spite of his disclaimers. So why couldn’t we just encourage Boyer and Atran and Sperber to concentrate on the selective forces provided by psychology, which they do so well, leaving the (trivial?) unificatory work to the memeticists down the corridor?

But there is more to be said. We want to conceive of cultural evolution in terms of memes and in terms of the constraints of psychology—and the further constraints that emerge from the earlier interaction of memes and those very constraints! Consider an experiment we might do inspired by the research on “urban legends” by Heath, Bell, and Sternberg (2001). Did you hear about the bellboy who was caught on surveillance video putting the hotel guests’ toothbrushes up his…? How about the driver who heard a thump and when he stopped his car, many miles later, found the body of a baby embedded in the grillework of his car? Noting that many of the most popular urban legends involve shockingly disgusting tales, these researchers investigated the role of disgust in heightening the likelihood of transmission of a wide variety of urban legends. They provided competing “alleles” (alternative tellings) of each story and found that, sure enough, the more disgusting versions traveled better. Alas, they didn’t measure actual transmission, just their subjects’ convictions about how likely they were to repeat the stories. Research is expensive. But thought experiments are cheap, so let us imagine an experiment that would nicely illustrate the Sperberians’ point—and why I don’t find it a good argument against the memes approach.