Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

The interplay of cultural and genetic transmission should also be explored. Consider the well-studied case of lactose tolerance in adults, for instance. Many of us adults can drink and digest raw milk without difficulty, but many others, who of course had no difficulty consuming milk when they were babies, can no longer digest milk after infancy, since their bodies switch off the gene for making lactase, the necessary enzyme, after they are weaned, which is the normal pattern in mammals. Who is lactose-tolerant and who isn’t? There is a clear pattern discernible to geneticists: lactose tolerance is concentrated in human populations that have descended from dairying cultures, whereas lactose intolerance is common in those whose ancestors were never herders of dairy animals, such as the Chinese and Japanese.¹⁵ Lactose tolerance is genetically transmitted, but pastoralism, the disposition to tend herds of animals, on which the genetic trait depends, is culturally transmitted. Presumably it could have been genetically transmitted, but, so far as we know, it hasn’t been. (Border collies, unlike the children of Basque shepherds, have had herding instincts bred into them, after all [Dennett, 2003c, d].)

Then there are money theories, according to which religions are cultural artifacts rather like monetary systems: communally developed systems that have evolved, culturally, several times. Their presence in every culture is readily explained and even justified: it’s a Good Trick that one would expect to be rediscovered again and again, a case of convergent social evolution. Cui bono? Who benefits? Here we can consider several answers:

A. Everybody in the society benefits, because religion makes life in society more secure, harmonious, efficient. Some benefit more than others, but nobody would be wise to wish the whole away.

B. The elite who control the system benefit, at the expense of the others. Religion is more like a pyramid scheme than a monetary system; it thrives by preying on the ill-informed and powerless, while its beneficiaries pass it along gladly to their heirs, genetic or cultural.

C. Societies as wholes benefit. Whether or not the individuals benefit, the perpetuation of their social or political groups is enhanced, at the expense of rival groups.

This last hypothesis, group selection, is tricky, since the conditions under which genuine group selection can exist are hard to specify.¹⁶

The schooling of fish and flocking of birds, for instance, are certainly phenomena involving grouping, but they are not explained as group-selection phenomena. In order to see how individuals (or their individual genes) are benefited by the dispositions to school or flock, you have to understand the ecology of groups, but the groups aren’t the primary beneficiaries; the individuals that compose them are. Some biological phenomena masquerade as group selection but are better dealt with as instances of individual-level selection that depend on certain environmental phenomena (such as grouping) or even as instances of symbiont-selection phenomena. As we have already noted, a symbiont meme needs to be spread to new hosts, and if it can drive people into groups (the way Toxoplasma gondii drives rats into the jaws of cats) where it can readily find alternate hosts, the explanation is not group selection after all.