Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

A remarkable instance of this occurred in the preparation of this book. One of the readers of the penultimate draft noticed a typographical error in chapter 2, and since it was repeated in the bibliography, it occurred to him that I might miss it: Gould’s 1999 book is Rocks of Ages, he told me, but I had written it Rock of Ages. My first reaction was frank disbelief. I thought my reader was making the mistake; the first word of Gould’s book couldn’t be “Rocks,” could it? I had read the book, and noted his plays on words (the paleontologist studies the ages of rocks, while…) but had completely missed his putting the mutation in his title, because the hymn title was so well branded into my memory! I had to check the book for myself, and, sure enough, the title is Rocks of Ages, but then I hopped on the Web to see if I was alone in making the error. On March 23, 2005, there were approximately as many Google citations for “Gould ‘Rock of Ages’” (3, 860) as for “Gould ‘Rocks of Ages’” (3, 950), and although many of the former entries proved to have both the correct title of Gould’s book and the hymn title, among the entries with the title misspelled were reviews of the book, and discussions of the book, both positive and negative. To casual inspection, there didn’t seem to be any obvious pattern to the errors, but here is a fine elementary project in computational memetics for anybody who wants to dig deeper. There is sure to be an interesting story to be told about how often this error has crept in by mutation and who has copied whose error. (See Dawkins’s discussion [1989, pp. 325–29] of a similar transcription error of a title, and an introduction to the methods of memetics using the resources of the Scientific Citation Index.)

In addition to having the genetically evolved mechanisms or modules beloved by evolutionary psychologists, our brains are packed with culturally transmitted mechanisms of every imaginable sort, and the presence or absence of these sets up immunities and receptivities in hosts just as powerful as—or even more powerful than—the constraints exhibited by the underlying machinery. In his chapter against memes, Atran quotes me on this topic, but misses the point I was trying to make. I had said that the structure of Chinese and Korean minds is “dramatically different” from that of American or French minds (Dennett, 1995b, p. 365), and Atran supposes (2002, p. 258) that I am trying to make a subtle point about how people with different native tongues will interpret draw ings or attribute causation or blame in different scenarios. He cites experiments in which people from different cultural groups respond quite similarly in a variety of circumstances designed by psychologists to elicit such differences. But I had something much simpler and more obvious in mind: People with Chinese minds won’t laugh at, or remember, or repeat, jokes told in English! (A few years ago, the brilliant songwriter and singer Lyle Lovett released an album entitled Joshua Judges Ruth. I found that in general my friends didn’t get it; I’d ask them what Lovett’s next album might be entitled and none of them replied, “First and Second Samuel?”—which was the first thing that would pop into my head, thanks to Sunday-school drill more than half a century before.) And just as we can be quite sure that jokes told in French have a hard time getting spread in Anglophone neighborhoods, we can be quite sure that a person’s political views, and knowledge of art (or quantum physics, or sexual practices), would provide strong constraints or biases on his or her receptivity and eagerness to transmit various candidate memes. For instance, to my way of thinking, one of the funniest limericks I have ever heard is the following, which you will find funny only if you’ve heard lots of limericks:

There was a young lady named Tuck

Who had the most terrible luck:

She went out in a punt,

And fell over the front,

And was bit on the leg by a duck.