Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Cultural symbionts—memes—are similarly passed on to one’s offspring by nongenetic pathways. Speaking one’s “mother tongue,” singing, being polite, and many other “socializing” skills are transmitted culturally from parents to offspring, and infant human beings deprived of these sources of inheritance are often profoundly disabled. It is well known that the parent-offspring link is the major pathway of transmission of religion. Children grow up speaking their parents’ language and, in almost all cases, identifying with their parents’ religion. Religion, not being genetic, can

be spread “horizontally” to nondescendants, but such conversions play a negligible role under most circumstances. A dim appreciation of this has led in the past to some crude and cruel programs of “hygiene.” If you think that religion is, all things considered, a malignant feature of human culture, a childhood disease of sorts with lingering aftereffects, the public-health policy to deal with it would be politically drastic but quite simple: inoculation and isolation. Don’t let parents give their own children a religious upbringing! This policy has been tried, on a major scale, in the former Soviet Union, with dire consequences. The rebound of religion in post-USSR Russia suggests that religion has roles to play and resources undreamt of by this simple vision.

A completely different sort of evolutionary possibility is represented by sexual-selection

theories. Perhaps religion is like a bowerbird’s bower. Male bowerbirds devote extraordinary time and effort to building and decorating elaborate structures designed to impress females of the species, who choose a mate only after assessing rival bowers carefully. This is an example of runaway sexual selection, the subvariety of natural selection in which the pivotal selective role is played by the choosy female, whose preferences may, over many generations, snowball into highly specific and onerous demands, such as the whims of peahens that oblige peacocks to grow spectacular—and spectacularly expensive and awkward—tails. (See Cronin, 1991, for a fine overview.) The bright coloration of male birds is the best-studied example of sexual selection. In these cases, an initial bias in the innate whims of females, such as a preference for blue over yellow, gets amplified by positive feedback into intensely blue males, the bluer the better. Had a majority of the females in an isolated population of the species just happened to prefer yellow over blue, the runaway selection would have ended up with bright-yellow males. There is nothing in the environment that makes yellow better than blue or vice versa except for the reigning taste of the species’ females, which exerts a powerful, if arbitrary, selection pressure.