Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

11. Some readers may be bothered by my persistent talk of memes in this chapter, since the anthropologists whose work I am discussing so favorably, Boyer and Atran and their mentor, Sperber, are united in their rejection of the memes perspective, as they make quite clear in their books and articles. I have been discussing this with them for some time, both in print (Dennett, 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2002b [reprinted here as appendix A], and especially 2005b; and see Sperber, 2000) and at conferences. I think they are making a mistake, but it is a bit of a technical disagreement that would be a distraction to most readers. Still, a reply to their objections is in order, and is supplied in appendix C. See also the other essays in Aunger, ed., 2000, where Sperber, 2000, appears; and Laland and Brown, 2002, chapter 6.

12. Thanks to Dan Sperber for popping this balloon by drawing my attention to Mahadevan and Staal, 2003, from which the passage is quoted.

13. For a vivid but controversial introduction to the field, now somewhat out of date, see Ruhlen, 1994. For an overview of the current state of the science, see Christiansen and Kirby, eds., 2003. Other thought-provoking studies are Carstairs-McCarthy, 1999, and Cavalli-Sforza, 2001.

14. Swimming is an interestingly intermediate case: Unlike running and walking, swimming strokes have quite a memetic history. In the late nineteenth century, an Englishman, Arthur Trudgen, carried the overarm Native American way of swimming (soon called the “trudgeon” or “trudgen crawl” after this meme-vector) to England, but he miscopied the kick, using a breaststroke “frog” kick instead of the flutter kick used by Native Americans. This transmission error was corrected by Richard Cavill in 1902, and today’s front crawl is the descendant of that quite recent improvement. But versions of the crawl have probably been invented and reinvented numerous times over the eons, since it is so clearly superior to all other known ways of propelling oneself through the water at high speed. Not for nothing is this Good Trick known as freestyle in competitive swimming. The only rule in freestyle is that you must break the surface every now and then (and this rule was introduced to prevent swimmers from experimenting with dangerous underwater strokes that might drown them if they passed out). In freestyle, you are welcome to improve on the front crawl if you can.

15. Note that today, thanks to writing and other storage media, this is not a problem, so a religion no longer needs such regular rituals of unison to keep the text pure. But a religion that makes the rituals optional is in danger of succumbing for other reasons.

16. Atran, 2002, and Lawson and McCauley, 2002, provide detailed critiques of the hypotheses of Whitehouse (1995, 2000) and others.

17. Orgel’s Second Rule is “Evolution is cleverer than you are!” (Dennett, 1995b, p. 74). Stark and Finke (2000) argue that many religious “reforms” deliberately and consciously executed in recent times undo the wise design work implicit in traditional religious practices. It is a serious design error, they argue, to make religious ritual too easy, too inexpensive, too painless.

6 The Evolution of Stewardship

1. The ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon introduced me to the music of gospel preaching in his pioneering analysis of the art of John Sherfey (Titon, 1988); you can see and hear for yourself in his documentary video, Powerhouse for God (Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street, Watertown, MA 02472). Dozens of C. L. Franklin’s sermons in Detroit and Memphis were recorded and broadcast nationwide by Chess Records, and are available through various Web sites.

2. It is also possible that some stable elements in leks are transmitted by imitation, not through the genes—yet another instance of animal tradition, not instinct (Avital and Jablonka, 2000). Cross-fostering studies, in which birds’ eggs from one lek tradition were hatched and raised by birds with a different lek, could shed light on this.

3. Pinker, 1994; Deacon, 1997; and Jackendoff, 2002, are the most accessible recent works on this topic.

4. And, yes, the pendulum is swinging back about tans. It now emerges that sunlight is so good for you (in moderation) that the coverup recommended by many dermatologists was going too far. It’s hard to keep up with all this information, and so mostly we just don’t question “what everyone knows.”