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| Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell |
Dennett wants to study religion as a branch of evolution science. Religions are, per Dennett, "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought." As such, they have evolved over the course of time. Their evolution has been governed by the same abstract principles as govern biological evolution à la Darwin.
For this to be so, there must be in religions and other aspects of human culture a gene-equivalent. Biological evolution happens when genes aren't copied perfectly during the course of cell manufacture, such that an egg or sperm — and thus a child organism — winds up with a new gene that does not appear in the parent organism's genome.
If this new gene promotes the child's "fitness," the child is apt to grow up healthy, parent yet more offspring, and pass the new gene along to roughly half of them. The recipients in turn will tend to be fitter than others in their generation ... and the new gene will gradually gain a permanent foothold in the total population. At some future point the new gene, originally a novelty, may indeed become "standard equipment" for most or all individuals in the then-extant population.
Multiply this by many, many gene mutations over incredibly vast amounts of time, and a population (provided it is somehow shut off from the other local populations of its species) may evolve into a completely new species. Allowed access to a population of the original species, it will no longer interbreed with it.
Of course, most mutations are deleterious to their possessors' fitness to survive, thrive, and reproduce in their local habitations. For instance, a mutation that shortens a bird's bill may render it unable to feed on the long, tubular blossoms whose nectar is its primary food source. That adverse mutation will not prosper and spread through the population. It will never contribute to species evolution.
It all comes down to differential rates of reproduction, then. Genes that promote a possessor organism's fitness to thrive and reproduce in a particular environment get replicated much faster or much more often than genes that harm fitness. They spread through the total population over the course of time. They may even become ubiquitous.
Does the same kind of logic apply to aspects of human culture? Dennett thinks so. After an idea first broached by biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, Dennett calls the gene-equivalents found in human culture "memes."
A meme is basically an idea, a notion. For example, the idea that people ought to have computers which allow them to go online and make posts to blogs like this one is a meme. The baggy clothes affected by the devotees of hip-hop are a meme. Political conservatism is a meme, as is political liberalism.
Or, maybe one's political orientation ought to be considered a package of several memes — just as it takes many, many genes working in conjunction with each other to make an eye. Regardless, according to Dennett, memes participate in an evolutionary process, just as do genes.
In some respect, memes are like viruses, which in the biological world travel from host organism to host organism and insert themselves in the DNA of the hosts' cells, which they appropriate in order that they, the viruses, may get reproduced inordinately swiftly. Thus does the common cold spread rapidly through an entire first-grade class.
Memes also spread from host to host — in this case, from mind to mind. If I think your baggy, low-riding, too-short pants make you look cool, and I too want to look cool, next thing you know I'll be wearing baggy, low-riding, too-short pants.
That said, maybe hip-hop attire's rate of spread through the general population is not unlimited. Maybe other memes spread faster and farther. One of the memes that recently has spread fast and far has been the use of the phrase which I just employed: "that said." You almost never used to hear that expression. Now you do, all the time. Same with "going postal." Same with "It's a perfect storm of ... whatever." For that matter, same with "whatever."
Dennett's thesis is that religion is carried from person to person and from generation to generation by means of meme propagation. Because my take on any given meme may not be an exact replica of your understanding of it, there is such a thing as meme mutation. For example, I can say confidently as a Roman Catholic that not all the Catholic memes that exist in my head are precise replicas of those in the head of Pope Benedict XVI.
Meme mutations may make religions more or less fit to survive the rigors of competition with other religions. Early "folk" religions had to mutate to survive, when agriculture and cities changed the way we humans lived. Dennett says they turned into the evolutionary ancestors of today's highly complex organized religions, or they died.
Interestingly, in today's Christianity there are memes running around — though they're not shared by all Christians — that say evolution is bunk because it undercuts the idea of God as Creator of all creatures great and small, the way chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis says was so. These memes say the Bible must be read with utmost literalness. When that is done, they say it is impossible to believe Darwin was right about the evolutionary origin of species.
Those memes also say Dennett is wrong about evolution as it applies to culture, and to the development of religion in particular. In fact, they say that there is, for all practical purposes, no such thing as a meme. Memes, if they do not exist, do not mutate. And if they do not mutate, the meme packages they come in — such as Roman Catholicism — cannot in any meaningful sense evolve. Thus may the Catholic Church (or any other religious body) claim that it embodies the same divine truth it always did, handed down once and for all by a graciously self-revealing God.
I tend to think Dennett is right about memes and cultural evolution — including the evolution of religions. Although there are lots of valid questions that anthropologists can raise about whether the memes perspective has anything like the same explanatory value as the genes perspective in biological evolution, I'm willing to play along until someone gives me a good reason not to.
The reason I am is that, as with genes in Darwin's theory as presently understood, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to deny the mechanics. In Darwinian evolution, there are carriers of information (genes) that are copied from generation to generation, sometimes imperfectly (as mutations). These carriers determine the characteristics of those new organisms that come into their possession (as genotypes express themselves as phenotypes or, in everyday terms, bodies). The various extant phenotypes then compete to see which will send more of their own unique information carriers into the next generation. The local environment potentially limits the phenotypes' fitness to do so successfully. Thus, differential reproduction rates are foreordained ... in view of the fact that only the strong survive in the competition for the resources needed to sustain life.
Meme packages — religions, political ideologies, youth cultures — also compete for ... well, they compete for allegiance. If I embrace Catholicism, I reject Islam, at least in terms of which religion I espouse and which ones I accordingly fail to espouse. Failing to espouse a religion is like failing to sneeze in front of a first-grade class. If I don't sneeze, I don't spread the virus which lies behind the meme package that spreads itself by people sneezing. On the other hand, if I act as a strong advocate for Catholicism, that amounts to a memetic sneeze. I tend to infect many of those I come into contact with.
Of course, my sneeze has no such effect if those I cast droplets of mist on have an immunity to that particular meme package, that particular virus. If all my classmates are Muslim, chances are they will be immune to my Catholic memes. My Catholic memes have to take their chances in a particular local environment that may or may not be hostile to them. Obviously, during the course of history the memes which are today's Christianity — Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox — fell on fertile soil, grew, and prospered. Same for the memes which are today's Islam. That's why these are now two of the world's great religions.
For how could such evolutionary mechanics not have happened? How could differential rates of reproduction not have mediated the competitive forces which naturally arise when meme systems vie with alternative meme systems?
The question has exactly the same form as the one which applies to genes and biological evolution: how could mutations, competitive pressures, and the "survival of the fittest" not have led to vast changes in life on earth, over eons of time?
I think religious people are wrong to deny evolution, at either the biological or the cultural level. What the religious miss is the realization that — once a genius like Darwin points the theory out to us for the first time — evolution by natural selection has to take place. What could, or would, stop it?
No, evolution is built into the fabric of reality. We who are religious have to assume that God was the one who built it in. Dennett, of course, might not agree. Nor would he agree with the next thing I am about to say: God influences evolution. God changes, somehow, the outcomes that would otherwise occur. He loads the dice.
That God does so probably can never be proven by science. Yes, we have the Intelligent Design movement, which claims to argue that God must have taken a hand in getting biological evolution over certain humps that it could otherwise never have surmounted. I for one feel I.D.ers' arguments are insufficient. Evolution could have gotten over the humps in question, all by itself, I think. I just don't think it did.
Likewise, I think God is at work in human cultural history ... while, at one and the same time, the memes perspective accounts for much of what transpires. Whether in the world of biology or in the world of human culture, evolution is the clay, God somehow the potter.
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