Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

What has been spread, Manji notes, is the “imitation of imitation,” a copy-fidelity-enhancing mechanism like those discussed in chapter 5, but in this case deliberately designed by stewards, to edit out all exploratory mutations before they can spread.

3. Wilson’s book is brimming with important evidence and analyses, but one of the disappointments for evolutionary theorists is that the machinery of multilevel-selection theory, so strenuously developed and defended by Sober and Wilson in Unto Others (1998), is not put to use here. We never see any analyses of empirical data showing populations of groups periodically dissolving into their constituents and re-forming into groups with higher proportions of altruists, for instance. We don’t see differential group replication at all—except for some tantalizing informal remarks late in the book on the way established religions give birth to sects. An early endnote (n. 3 on p. 14) acknowledges these complications: “If the groups remain permanently isolated from each other, the local advantage of selfishness will run its course within each group and drive altruism extinct. There must be a sense in which the groups compete with each other in the formation of new groups, although the competition need not be direct…”(p. 235). But that is the only place these complications are treated in the book, aside from unargued claims such as this one: “In general, social control mechanisms do not alter the basic conclusion that group-level adaptations require a corresponding process of group selection” (p. 19). This claim is in need of more careful defense, however, and depends critically on the definition of group selection used.

4. In his list of theories on p. 45, he defines the meme theory as “1.3. Religion as a cultural ‘parasite’ that often evolves at the expense of human individuals and groups.”

5. It is not just that many of the points Wilson makes in support of his group-selection theory can be readily translated into meme talk and used to support the meme-selection theory. Wilson acknowledges that his theory of group selection depends on the existence of cultural evolution:

…it is important to remember that moral communities larger than a few hundred individuals are “unnatural” as far as genetic evolution is concerned because to the best of our knowledge they never existed prior to the advent of agriculture. This means that culturally evolved mechanisms are absolutely required for human society to hang together above the level of face-to-face groups. [p. 119]

And since, as Wilson notes, excellent features of one religion often get copied by other, unrelated religions, he is already committed to tracing the ease of host-hopping by innovations quite independently of any “vertical” transmission of the features to descendant groups. Wilson makes a variety of important points that really cannot be understood except as a tacit reversion to the “meme’s-eye view,” so one could view my “mild memetic alternative” as a friendly amendment, though I expect that Wilson will go on carrying the torch for group selection. That is the meme that he has devoted his career to spreading, after all.

6. The fact that the supply-side theory offends them is not in itself an argument against it, of course. Neither is the claim (which many make) that they don’t consider themselves to be making rational market choices about their religion. They may be deluding themselves about their actual thought processes. But, other things being equal (which they may not be), the fact that people respond with disbelief and outrage when considering the supply-siders’ theories is some evidence that the reasonableness of these theories is not as obvious as Stark and his colleagues like to claim. See Bruce, 1999, for a detailed critique of rational choice theories of religion.

7. An introductory discussion of this recent literature is given in Dennett, 2003c, chapter 7, “The Evolution of Moral Agency.”

8. Quoted in Armstrong, 1979, p. 249.

9. In my terminology, gods as conscious beings are higher-order intentional systems, rational agents with whom one can converse, bargain, argue, to whom promises can be made, and from whom promises can be solicited. It is hard to imagine the point of making a promise to the Ground of All Being.