Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (33 page)

In addition, even if, as seems almost certain, there are no genes for counting or doing arithmetic, it is equally certain that there are genes whose effects include having the ability to do arithmetic. And there is no particular mystery why such a capacity hasn’t been selected against: It can be very useful to keep track of the numbers of things, and very little liability. But what of religion?

Let’s note, in addition, that even if there were a God gene, the evolutionary mystery would still be unsolved, since the deeper question would be: Why is there such a gene? Similarly, even if there were a God gene (and even if we understood its evolutionary history), this wouldn’t say anything about whether or not there is a God. God could have implanted such a gene in the human genome for our edification and/or His greater glory. Alternatively, such a hypothetical gene could be as disconnected from reality as the fact that people have a predisposition—presumably, genetically influenced in some roundabout way—to take their sense perceptions as accurate when often they are not. (Thus, people are predisposed to think that the sun moves around the earth, that the earth itself is flat, and so forth.)

If it were demonstrated that there is a particular gene or combination of genes that generates religious behavior, or similarly, if it were found that there is a particular god-loving brain region, this wouldn’t say anything about whether religion is correct, or whether god exists. Thus, one possible interpretation would be that people believe in God because they possess certain conglomerations of DNA or certain arrangements of neurons that, if real, might cause people to believe in a God or gods that are not necessarily real at all. A hard-wired biological underpinning for religious belief could thus somewhat undermine the divine legitimacy of that belief. Conversely, it might be claimed that a neuronal or genetic substrate for religious belief makes such belief more legitimate, implying that God implanted the appropriate genes or orchestrated the neuronal connections.

Responding to an article about the evolution of receptivity (for the positive spin) or susceptibility (the negative) to religion, a letter from the Rev. Michael P. Orsi argued as follows: “If religion is good for humans, as evolutionary biologists now seem to recognize, doesn’t it seem reasonable that the Creator would design us with a congeniality to receive Him?”
¹²
One problem with this line of argument is that human beings have evolved with all sorts of perceptions that aren’t necessarily true: for example, the
perception that the world is flat, or that the sun moves around the earth.
^vii

Another is that we have numerous other predispositions that contribute to evolutionary success but certainly aren’t admirable or worth retaining: for example, a tendency to homicidal violence, to rape on occasion, and so forth. Moreover, the notion that people may be inclined to believe in God because such belief has been reproductively useful would itself seem bad news for believers, who presumably would be more comfortable if people believed in God because He exists, not because our ancestors have somehow been bribed by natural selection to follow religion.

Sometimes the dictates of religion lead directly to increased biological fitness, suggesting that there are some aspects of religious practice that map directly onto evolutionary benefit. In orthodox Judaism, for example, intercourse is forbidden from the day menstruation begins until 7 days after it has ended. Then, after the woman cleanses herself in the mikva, a Jewish husband is expected to have sex with her when she returns. The result: intercourse when the woman is maximally fertile! At least as direct—and better known to most readers—is the Catholic Church’s prohibition against not just abortion but even contraception. In fact, the most orthodox and fundamentalist religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, are all vigorously pronatalist, frowning on any behavior likely to diminish reproduction. Typically included is intolerance of homosexuality, as well as resistance to divorce—except, notably, in cases of infertility or failure to “consummate” the marriage. On the other extreme, the Shakers, a peculiar sect that prohibited sex and thus the bearing of children, went extinct. Not surprisingly.

Religion is not an absolute human need, like breathing. There are no nonbreathers, noneaters, or nondrinkers, but lots of non-theists (i.e., atheists, including the present author). Nonetheless, according to Thomas Hobbes, himself a nonbeliever, “Religion can never be abolished out of human nature. An attempt to do so would just lead to new religions springing out of the old ones.” Indeed, given its universality across human cultures as well as its
stubborn persistence in the face of persecution, there seems little doubt that although the specifics of religious belief and practice are determined by the vagaries of personal situation and experience, our species was primed for religion, predisposed to engage in one kind or another, just as we are primed for language, sex, and sociality. But whereas it is relatively easy to imagine the adaptive value of language, sex, and sociality, religion is more puzzling.

In what might itself be testimony to the power of the religious impulse, even some great, deep-thinking evolutionary biologists seem to have checked their critical faculties at the door when it comes to examining religion. Thus, in his
Essays of a Biologist
, no less a scientific giant than Julian Huxley
^viii
described religion as “the most fundamental need of man … to discover something, some power, some force or tendency, which was moulding the destinies of the world—something not himself, greater than himself, with which he yet felt that he could harmonize his nature.”
¹³

But the mere fact that something is widespread—even universal—doesn’t necessarily mean that it is adaptive. Appendicitis is ubiquitous in our species. So is the common cold.

Appendicitis appears to be simply the unavoidable downside of a particular vestigial structure, and the common cold results from an arms race between human beings on the one side and the cold virus on the other. What about religion, which certainly seems to be something that human beings have evolved, for its own reasons? But what reasons? Religion has shown itself to be quite persistent—consider, for example, the stubborn survival of religion for decades in the Soviet Union despite vigorous efforts to wipe it out. In itself, of course, this doesn’t say anything about whether it is good or bad, adaptive or maladaptive; our hearts’ stubborn insistence upon beating, despite injuries and illnesses of various sorts, is “good” from the perspective of survival. But numerous pathogens and parasites are also stubborn about their continued existence—the fact that it is difficult to eliminate the tuberculosis bacteria or HIV doesn’t mean that tuberculosis or AIDS is in any sense good for us.

On the other hand, an equally strong case can be made against biologists being disdainful of religion, insofar as religion itself is almost certainly a product of biology. There is accordingly no more reason to derogate religion because it is in some sense biologically grounded than to disdain birdsong, wolf predation, or the long-distance migration of Arctic terns.

But the question persists: Given that religion has discernible downsides (as does birdsong, wolf predation, or the long-distance migration of Arctic terns), why has it evolved? How have its liabilities been compensated at the level of differential reproduction?

One possibility is that it hasn’t happened, that
Homo sapiens
has been saddled with—or parasitized by—a tendency that is maladaptive. Not surprisingly, this idea comes from the fertile mind of a great evolutionary biologist who is also renowned (or infamous) as a vigorous opponent of religion: Richard Dawkins. Among Dawkins’s many intriguing ideas, one of the most widely accepted has been that of “memes,” which are essentially the cultural equivalent of genes. Whereas genes are entities of nucleic acid that reside in living bodies, memes are entities of memory and information that reside in society. Genes are inherited biologically, via reproduction; memes are acquired culturally, via teaching and imitation. Genes are Darwinian, projected across generations via reproduction and spreading by the process of organic evolution; memes are Lamarckian, acquired characteristics that are “inherited” culturally, passed along from ancestors to descendants, from parent to child, from adult to adult, rapidly and nongenetically via conversation, imitation, songs, schooling, books, radio, television, YouTube, email, Twitter, Facebook, and, yes, religious indoctrination.

Memes are increasingly acknowledged, to the extent that they have entered normal language. There is even a word—“memetics”—for the study of how memes originate and spread. Memes, the concept, have themselves become a meme! There is no doubt, as well, that religious memes spread like their sectarian relatives: The language and doctrine of religion, patterns of dress, song, prayer, and other traditions are promulgated among
congregants, varying slightly (mutating) on occasion, but for the most part being copied with remarkable fidelity. And they also reproduce differentially, experiencing a kind of “selection,” with certain ones outcompeting others, the winners prospering while the losers go extinct.

Michael Pollan’s best-selling book
The Botany of Desire
provided many readers with a novel perspective on plant domestication, showing how cultivated plants—notably apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes—can be seen as agents in their own promulgation, not merely passive recipients of human attention but active manipulators of
Homo sapiens
. Actually, it’s a perspective long known to evolutionary biologists in general, and devotees of memes in particular (also, as we’ll see, parasitologists). Just as genes orchestrate the behavior of the bodies they create and within which they reside, memes are, in a sense, replicating agents that succeed in proportion as they induce their “bodies” (human societies) to help them—the memes—to proliferate. Tulips, for example, have done well appealing especially to the human penchant for beauty; apples, sweetness; marijuana, intoxication; and potatoes, control.

Turn next to “The Parable of the Sower” (Matthew 13), according to which “The Word of God is a seed and the sower of the seed is Christ,” and good Christians are called upon to follow in Christ’s footsteps. As Pollan pointed out, plants use seeds to spread themselves,
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and in the process, they employ us. We spread them, ostensibly for our own benefit, but at least as much to theirs. Who, then, is in charge, and can the same be said of religion? Perhaps human religions are a composite of “viral memes,” perpetuated and spread for the sake of the religions themselves, manipulating human beings to their meme-ish benefit (as well as that of their priestly, rabbinic, imam-ish, and other human guardians) and to the disadvantage of those poor dupes—the congregants—who serve as unwitting hosts, carriers, or victims. Sowers of seeds may think they are in control, but the beneficiaries—and, in a sense, the ones calling the shots—are the seeds!

The technical phrase is “host manipulation.” For example, the tapeworm
Echinococcus multilocularis
causes its mouse “host” to
become obese and sluggish, making it easy pickings for predators, notably foxes, which—not coincidentally—constitute the next phase in the tapeworm’s life cycle. Those the gods intend to bring low, according to the Greeks, they first make proud; those tape-worms intending to migrate from mouse to fox do so by making “their” mouse behave in a way that turns them into fox food—highly adaptive for the worm, not so much for the mouse.

In another example of host manipulation adduced as a metaphor for the viral meme hypothesis, Daniel Dennett begins his book
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by describing a creature much beloved of biologists, the lancet fluke or so-called brain worm,
Dicrocoelium dendriticum
. This creature hijacks the brain of an ant, inducing it to climb a blade of grass and hold on, whereupon the ant (and its accompanying worms) are eaten by sheep, cow, or horse, enabling the surviving worms to continue their life cycle. Dennett then asks whether anything comparable happens to human beings. His answer: “Yes indeed. We often find human beings setting aside their personal interests, their health, their chances to have children, and devoting their entire lives to furthering the interests of an
idea
[his emphasis] that has lodged in their brains.”

Of course, for all the importance typically associated with various holy objects, it is the ideas of religion rather than their material trappings that are generally acknowledged to be what really matters, and doctrines and belief systems are not physical entities like a worm. But as with all memes, the key characteristic for our purposes—and theirs—isn’t the structure of religious memes, but what they do. And what they do is promote themselves.

Christians make much about spreading the Gospel, disseminating seeds bearing the “good news” about Christ. Indeed, in many religions the Word itself trumps the lives of its practitioners. Among other things, it is this self-abnegation, often to the point of renunciation of various worldly pleasures, even celibacy and martyrdom, that demands the attention of evolutionary biologists. Bear in mind, for example, that Islam means “submission,” and Muslims are proud of subordinating themselves to the dictates of Allah. But why? Has Allah deceived them, for His own benefit and their disadvantage, in the manner of a mouse-inhabiting tapeworm? Perhaps. Or is He using them for their own good?
Could be. Or is it the various ideas of Allah and His dictation to the prophet Muhammad that is the ultimate beneficiary? Again, maybe so. But if this is the case, why are so many people bamboozled into playing along?

The “viral meme hypothesis” is most convivial for atheists, since it puts religion in so unfavorable a light. At the same time, the validity of a hypothesis should never be judged by whether it supports one’s prior convictions. Moreover, memes aren’t necessarily pernicious; most of the time, in fact, they are likely to be either neutral hitchhikers or actually beneficial to their hosts (hence, their success). Useful devices, whether mnemonic or mechanical, prosper in proportion as they help their practitioners do so. Applied to religion, the presumption of memic malevolence is an easy misunderstanding to make, since the concept was introduced by Richard Dawkins, who is avowedly antireligious, and who has argued that religion memes are comparable to viruses or other parasites, doing harm to their hosts. But, to repeat, it is also possible for memes to be neutral or even beneficial; indeed, the great majority of them probably are.