Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

10. Biologists can perhaps better understand the resistance of many social scientists to the biologizing of their disciplines by reflecting on their own discomfort with attempts to…physicize biology. Ernst Mayr, the legendary evolutionary biologist, recently published a book (shortly after his hundredth birthday) on the autonomy of biology, showing why it doesn’t “reduce” to physics (Mayr, 2004). I agree with most of the claims he makes. He is not declaring that physics provides no constraints or principles that biologists must understand and may exploit. There are different brands of reductionism; only some of them—which I call greedy reductionisms (Dennett, 1995b)—are mistakes. When somebody declares that a view under attack is reductionistic, we have to look closely to see whether this is a bad thing.

11. Among those credited with this aphorism are the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the artist Paul Klee, and the critic Viktor Shklovsky.

12. Of course there are plenty of intermediate cases, in which boatbuilders have some idea or other, good or bad, dim or brilliant, behind the mutations that they introduce, which are thus not all slips of the adze. What seemed like a good idea at the time may prove worthless in fairly short order. This speeds up the design process, but in both directions—larger bad ideas get tried out in the trial-and-error process as well as good ideas. Richard Dawkins has proposed to call designs-without-designers “designoid” (1996, p. 4). The coinage is useful for marking the error people often make in supposing that anything that appears designed must have been produced by a deliberate conscious mind, but it shouldn’t be taken to mark a bright line in nature. Are the short legs of dachshunds design or designoid? Human breeders set out to achieve the effect, and they had reasons for it. Are genetically engineered organisms design or designoid? Is the beaver’s dam that ingeniously makes use of local and unprecedented opportunities for dam-building design or designoid? A beaver’s dam requires considerably more cognitive talent to build than the ant lion’s conical sand trap. The work of exploring the grand unity of Design Space is distributed between the slow ratcheting of natural selection of genes, and the swift trial-and-error explorations of individual brains (and their numerous artifactual exploration vehicles), so I will continue to use the umbrella term “design” to cover it all.

13. One of the main themes of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Dennett, 1995b) is that what Darwin discovered is fundamentally an algorithm, an information-processing recipe that can be executed in many different media, just as the long-division algorithm can be done with pencil, pen, chalk, or scratching with a stick on the ground.

14. For more on memes, see also Dennett, 1995b, 2001b, 2001c, 2005c, and appendix C of this book.

15. For some of the details, see Dawkins, 2004a, pp. 31–32.

16. Group selection has had a controversial career in evolutionary theory, and technical disputes make it treacherous territory for the uninitiated. See Wilson and Sober, 1994 (and all the commentaries published in the same journal); Sober and Wilson, 1998; and Dennett, 2002a (and Sober and Wilson’s reply in the same journal). Wilson’s views will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter.

4 The Roots of Religion

1. There is no consensus among surveys about how to count religions (as contrasted with cults and other typically short-lived organizations), but by any benchmark there are many thousand distinct (independent, noncommunicating) religions. The almanacs have identified over thirty thousand distinct Christian churches. The more or less standard reference work for all religions is Barrett et al., World Christian Encyclopedia (2nd ed., 2001). Religions crop up so frequently that even Web sites have difficulty keeping their lists up to date. A few good ones are http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm and http://www.watchman.org/cat95.htm—the latter indexes over a thousand new cults and religions. There are also journals and other organizations devoted to the study of new religions, easily found on the Web.

2. Dunbar (2004) calls these graves unequivocal evidence of religion, but they are in fact highly enigmatic. There is no doubt the bodies were deliberately placed in position with objects covered in red ocher, but the meaning of the tableau is highly contentious. See, e.g., http://home/earthlink.net/~ekerilaz/ dolni.html.

3. A useful overview is Atran and Norenzayan, 2004, with its two dozen accompanying expert commentaries and a response from the authors. Other essential reading includes Sperber, 1975, 1996; Lawson and McCauley, 1990, 2002; Guthrie, 1993; Whitehouse, 1995; Barrett, 2000; Pyysièainen, 2001; Andresen, 2001; Shermer, 2003.