Today I have spent some time trying to understand the doctrine of original sin. Not because of a resurgence of interest in the memetics of Christianity, but because of an observation in an article titled: "The Theology of Global Warming" linking fossil fuel consumption with original sin. The author wrote:
It was Michael Crichton who pointed out in his Commonwealth Club lecture some years ago that environmentalism had become the religion of Western elites. Indeed it has. Most notably, the burning of fossil fuels (a concomitant of economic growth and rising living standards) is the secular counterpart of man's Original Sin. If only we would repent and sin no more, mankind's actions could end the threat of further global warming.
The whole business of global warming as a religion of secular western elites with fossil fuels playing the role of original sin and conservation and green energy being the path to salvation seems to me to have some truth to it. Both Christianity and global warming are like apocalyptic cults. Their members are out to save the world. There's even a secular version of hell: Venusian runaway global warming reputedly awaits if we do nothing.
I have some basic understanding of how causes use superstimuli (like hell and global apocalypse) to motivate people and morally-charged sentiments (like original sin) to attract their attention. It is fairly clear that both Christianity and global warming are pyramid schemes of virtue (and virtue signalling), where converting unbelievers is one of the main ways to advance up the pyramid. But how exactly does original sin work? and what can we learn about the global warming movement from understanding it?
One thing which is obvious is that putting a moral spin on the issue gives it salience. If you learn you can save a few bucks by shopping around the corner, you might tell some freinds, but if you learn you have been doing something morally wrong your whole life without even realizing it, then that's a message worth sharing more widely.
Another thing that is worth noting is that the whole scheme works even without any factual truth being involved. Christianity is proof of the concept that the whole "original sin" scam works without reference to truth, reality or facts being involved.
Original sin is generally accompanied by docrines of "redemption" or "salvation". Rarely do you hear that you were born a sinner - and there's nothing you can do about it. Sin is the hook, salvation is the bait. The path to salvation usually involves spreading the word to others - as memetics would suggest is favored by selection.
Deep general theories that explain many phenomena are worth looking into. I am intrigued by these parallels between Christianity and the global warming movement and expect that more can be learned by looking into them. Aside from original sin, there are other parallels between AGW alarmism and apocalyptic cults in general, including the modern variants that involve "existential risks" and an apocalypse involving intelligent machines.
Understanding the details of exactly how these types of social movement work is a massive challenge. This is just the sort of application which we need a mature version of cultural evolution to help us understand. It is worth digging in a bit, I think. Otherwise we will continue to see massive resource allocation failures arising out of memeplexes that exploit bugs in human psychology.
Meme enthusiasts like to point out that the common argument that religions must be beneficial to humans - or else they would have gone extinct by now - is a fallacy. I notice that Jared Diamond committed exactly this fallacy in his 2013 book, The World Until Yesterday. Here's what he wrote:
For individuals and for societies, religion often involves a huge investment of time and resources. To mention just a few examples, Mormons are expected to contribute 10% of their income to their church. It's estimated that traditional Hopi Indians devote an average of one out of three days to religious ceremonies, and that one-quarter of the population of traditional Tibet consisted of monks. The fraction of resources in medieval Christian Europe devoted to building and staffing churches and cathedrals, supporting the many orders of monasteries and nunneries, and underwriting crusades must have been large. To borrow a phrase from economists, religion thus incurs "opportunity costs": those investments of time and resources in religion that could have been devoted instead to obviously profitable activities, such as planting more crops, building dams, and feeding larger armies of conquest. If religion didn't bring some big real benefits to offset those opportunity costs, any atheistic society that by chance arose would be likely to outcompete religious societies and take over the world. So why hasn't the world become atheistic, and what are those benefits that religion evidently brings? What are the "functions" of religion?
Essentially, the same argument shows that the common cold must be beneficial, or else those immune to it must have taken over the world. That argument does not prove that the cold virus is beneficial to humans. So, merely noting that something is common doesn't show it is beneficial to humans. Bedbugs are common and they have clear costs - but that doesn't mean that they must have associated benefits that outweigh these costs. The whole argument is just a fallacy.
There are a lot of articles out there that claim that humans
are a self-domesticated species.
It is certainly true that modern humans show many signs of domestication.
Humans are domesticated creatures.
At first glance there is no other dominant species around to do the domesticating - thus the popularity of the
"self-domestication" concept.
In this article, I will argue that institutions and organizations act as powerful
masters to humans, and act as the agents responsible for the domestication of
modern humans. The idea of institutions and organizations as domesticators
renders the "self-domestication" hypothesis largely redundant.
Institutions and organizations are largely cultural phenomena. Some employers
make their humans into replaceable components, making their essence primarily
cultural. By contrast, some organizations are personality cults - where a single
humans forms an essential component. Overall, although institutions and organizations
typically have both organic and cultural components, the cultural element is often
very significant. It is common for modern organizations to actively eliminate
dependency on any individual humans.
Similarly, human responses to domesticating forces are also largely cultural.
Modern humans are domesticated in a way that cavemen are not. Maybe cavemen
are a bit domesticated - compared to chimpanzees - but it is mainly cultural
responses to cultural forces that compose the phenomenon under discussion.
Institutions and organizations can often be very powerful, compared to
individual humans - making them worthy domesticating agents.
Presumably, critics might claim that institutions and organizations have
only been substantial sources of human power for the last 10,000 years -
and that in hunter-gatherer tribes human personalities were a more dominant
force. It is true that institutions and organizations weaken in power
(relative to individual humans) the further back in time you consider -
but they would still have had considerable power 10,000 years ago. Also,
quite a bit can happen on that timescale - including quite a bit of human
genetic evolution.
Another comment by critics might be that within institutions and organizations
there's often a chain of command - where increasingly powerful humans monitor
and manage those beneath them, while reporting to those further up the chain.
So even within institutions and organizations, there's always a more powerful
human immediately above any individual - who can act as the domesticating agent.
That may be true, but if you ask where the power differential comes from in the
first place, it comes from the institution itself. Without that, the whole
structure collapses.
The humans-as-a-self-domesticated-species meme seems to have some
momentum behind it. However, science isn't a popularity concept.
While humans show many signs of domestication, a failure to understand
cultural evolution has led to a misidentification of the domesticating
species. Modern humans have been domesticated largely by institutions and organizations -
which have their own inheritance mechanisms and lineages that are independent from
those of humans. Saying that humans are "self-domesticated" totally misses this important point.
One approach for parasites seeking to evade the host's immune system is to attack it and disable it. This approach is famously taken by the HIV virus - the virus which produces AIDS. However the result is typically a weakened immune system, and a collection of opportunistic infections that take advantage of the breaches in the host's defenses.
The nearest cultural equivalent to these types of parasite are probably beliefs that compromise critical thinking faculties. Probably the most famous of these is the belief that faith is a virtue. Faith - in the sense of belief without evidence - allows a variety of religious memes to thrive which would ordinarily be eliminated by critical faculties. Such memes benefit by association with the "faith" meme. However, the host of a "faith" infection is left with a weakened memetic immune system. This creates an environment in which a wide variety of other counter-factual beliefs can flourish.
“The Evolution of Religion and Morality” is a grant awarded to a group of directors from UBC-SFU’s Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC), led by Edward Slingerland (PI) at UBC. It centers on a project of unprecedented scope and ambition aimed at exploring the cultural evolutionary roots of religion.
This six-year project brings together the expertise of over fifty scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars from universities across North America, Europe and East Asia—along with postdocs and graduate students—into a research network that will be called the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC). Over this six-year project, CERC aims to answer the question of what religion is, how it is linked to morality, and why it plays such a ubiquitous role in human existence.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson
This is a relatively early book by a scientist looking at religion. Religion is a messy subject, which only a few scientists have attempted to deal with. Wilson's thesis is that religion is functional, and that its associated benefits accrue to groups of humans. He compares religious communities to beehives - on the grounds that their members cooperate with each other much as members of a bee hive do.
What are we to make of David's thesis? Bees in hives cooperate because they are extremely close relatives - since they are all daughters of the same queen. However most humans in religious communities are not anywhere near as closely related. So, in terms of DNA genes, the relationship between religious communities and bee hives is pretty far fetched. However, religious communities also share their memes, and a reasonable fraction of their memes is shared between community members. In particular the memes associated with their religion are often present in the form of near-identical copies in different members of the same religious community. Cultural relatedness does not necessarily lead towards altruism between the hosts involved, but it can do so. Much depends on the nature of memes in question and the strength of the host's memetic immune system. Memes don't have a free ride in manipulating the behaviour of their host - since they must compete with the other memes in the host and the host's own DNA genes. However with large coadapted meme complexes many memes can gang up together in an attempt to influence their host by force of numbers. That's exactly what religious memes do - and they evidently do have considerable success in influencing their host's behaviour. So, a comparison with bees may have something to it - though memetic relatedness between humans from the same religious group is probably not as high as genetic relatedness between bees within hives.
Another of the ideas David advocates is that religion is "functional" - by which he seems to mean adaptive to humans or groups of humans. He contrasts this position with "religion as a byproduct" hypotheses, economic theories involving religion as a form of transaction with alleged supernatural agents and the idea of religion as selfish memes. I think most consider religion to frequently be adaptive to its hosts. Religious people typically have more kids than secularists, often quite a lot more. One of the insights into the subject from cultural evolution is that when talking about the adaptive function of some aspect of religion, the DNA genes of the hosts are not the only possible beneficiary - religious traditions may be treated as cultural symbionts which have adaptations that benefit themselves. Wilson acknowledges the possible viability of such hypotheses, but categorises them in such a way that they compete with his own preferred explanation. He categorises adaptive theories of religion into those that invoke benefits to individuals, those that invoke benefits to groups, and those that treat religion as a cultural parasite that often evolves at the expense of individuals and groups. However, real religions vary considerably in the extent to which the interests of their memes is aligned with the the interests of the DNA genes of their hosts. Those religions which are transmitted primarily vertically down the generations can be expected to have evolved to have interests aligned with those of their hosts. Cultural and organic evolution pulling in the same direction explains the cases where religious groups typically have many children. By contrast, evangelical religions depend less on vertical transmission with respect to their hosts, and spread virally even between unrelated hosts. Such religions can be expected to be less in tune with the interests of their host's DNA genes, and more inclined towards redirecting host reproductive resources into meme propagation via evangelism. They will tend to be nastier religions.
David's correctly identifies kin selection at work - though he classifies it as group selection. Since group selection and kin selection are now widely thought to be equivalent, this is a valid perspective. However he doesn't really identify it as a cultural phenomenon. Indeed he seems to identify cultural evolution with the idea of "demonic memes" that act as parasites on humans - and then largely ignores it. Instead he proposes human groups as the beneficiaries of selection on religions. This seems like a muddled way of looking at the situation to me. Instead, the humans genes are weakly kin-selected, the religious memes are strongly kin selected - and the genes and the memes coevolve in a symbiosis. The interests of the memes and genes are somewhat aligned - largely due to the component of vertical transmission of religious beliefs. I felt that David's treatment of the topic muddled together cultural and organic evolution.
It is possible to ask whether religion is adaptive without distinguishing between cultural and organic evolution. I compare this approach to asking whether smallpox is adaptive. Through much of human history, smallpox helped groups of humans with smallpox to obliterate other tribes of humans who lacked it. Evidently smallpox is an adaptive trait at the group level. While partly accurate, this analysis is unorthodox - and misses out much of interest about the relationship between the smallpox virus and its human hosts. David's explanation of religion is like this. He just says it is adaptive at the group level - without teasing apart the relationship between the cultural and organic components of the system involved.
David does display some understanding of cultural evolution in this book. He invokes Calvin and Plotkin's idea of "Darwin Machines", uses it to explain how the brain evolves in a Darwinian fashion and then goes on to explain that human culture evolves. The section near the start of the book about cultural evolution is quite reasonable - as far as it goes.
Memetics isn't the only rival theory which I felt David treated unsympathetically. He also contrasts his approach with the idea of religion as a by-product. While functional explanations and "by-product" explanations can be seen as being opposed, it is pretty evident that the various "by-product" theories of religion have a lot going for them. The "Hyperactive Agent Detection Device" idea, is correct, for example. "By-product" hypotheses explain quite a few aspects of religion. Also, some of the traits which religion is thought to be a "by-product" of are themselves adaptive traits - so "by-product" hardly means the same as "non-adaptive". I think we should accept many of the "by-product" hypotheses concerning religion - without necessarily granting them everything.
It would be nice to have a scientific understanding of religion, not least so we can build new and better religions that draw from the best parts of their historical practices while missing out their toxic elements. However to do that we need to understand which bits of religion are desirable and which are not. Some things are obvious: yoga and meditation are good while hellfire and the oppression of women are not. However with other practices, things are not so clear. Just saying that religions are adaptive doesn't really help to identify which are the useful practices.
At the end of the book, David explains that a grant from the Templeton foundation helped to finance the book. The Templeton foundation is famous for paying scientists to say nice things about religion. I expect this funding source will turn off some readers.
Studying religion seems like a dirty job for a scientist - but someone has to do it. David Sloane Wilson seems to be OK with the topic. However back in 2002, he seemed to be rather hampered by his preference for explanations based on group selection and his reluctance to conceptually separate out cultural and organic evolution. Also, alas, this book isn't terribly readable. I found the long section analysing Calvinism in the middle to be especially tedious. I recommend that those interested in David's work should read Evolution for Everyone first.
Memes are the topic for the first 30 minutes - and in the questions.
Daniel Dennett says he is planning a memetics book - a few minutes in:
Actually right now I am planning - as soon as I have finished the book I am working on - to write a book about memetics and memes, the bad arguments against them and what it really can do.
This one is called "The Groupish Gene: Hive psychology and the origins of morality and religion".
It is more from Jonathan Haidt advocating group selection. I tend to see this as the sort of thing you get without proper ideas about memetics and cultural kin selection.
Kin selection pretty-much swept group selection away in the 1960s and 1970s. We may well see history replay itself in some detail - with cultural kin selection and cultural group selection.
Ara Norenzayan is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His areas of research include evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religious thought and behavior, issues of cultural variability and universality in human psychology, and relations between culture and evolution.
Videos
Darwin and your beliefs - Ara Norenzayan
Memes get explicitly mentioned at 1:12:00 in the above video. Ara says "the meme idea is underdeveloped".
The above video is mostly about group selection. Memes get briefly mentioned at 07:00 - Jonathan says:
Many scientists who study religion take this view: the "New Atheists", for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, parasitic memes that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well, let me show you.
That's when the material about group selection begins.
Jonathan says:
In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection. This idea has been very controversial over the last 40 years, but it is about to make a major comeback this year especially after E. O. Wilson's book comes out in April making a very strong case that we and several other species are products of group selection.
Does Jonathan understand that the "new" group selection makes all the same predictions as inclusive fitness theory - which has been orthodoxy in evolutionary biology for decades? If so, that doesn't come across in this video. Kin selection doesn't even get mentioned - which seems to be pretty ridiculous in a talk about why humans are so other-oriented. Indeed, from this talk, it isn't clear whether Jonathan Haidt actually understands the issue he is discussing very well.
I also notice that the Jonathan Haidt page on Wikipedia says he was given the 2001 Templeton Prize in "Positive Psychology" - a hundred thousand US dollars.
This video shows that Richard Dawkins was still going strong on memes in 2010.
At 08:25, Richard points out that genetic advantages are not the only possible explanation for the existences of religions - they could also exist for the benefit of the memes, or due to differential reproductive success of religions themselves.
Alain de Botton proposes importing educational strategies, pilgrimmages, preaching (and numerous other things) from traditional religions into secular life.
Many people have already imported key technologies like yoga, meditiaion and group chanting from the world of traditional religions and into the secular realm.
It does look as though there will be other types of secular "religions" which have nothing to do with theology. Some of the modern end-of-the-world cults closely resemble secular religions.
I expect we will see more religious-style cults based around creating/worshipping future artificial intelligences fairly soon.
I don't usually write very much about memes relating to sex or religion. Sex and religion are major areas to which memetics can be usefully applied - but writing about sex seems somehow cheap - while writing about religion probably means that my writing will get dated. Also, both areas have already been covered well by others.
However, I should probably offer my 2 cents on the issue of whether religion is good for those who are religious.
Being religious is certainly correlated with health, life satisfaction, having kids and many other fine traits. Corrleation is not causation - but this isn't an area where it is easy to perform randomised, controlled trials.
Most religion has probably been adaptive for most of its believers in the past. However, there's also another possibility to consider: that religion might be adaptive for a minority of those who promote it - but not so much for average believers. This is a picture of religion as manipulation. Not so much manipulation directly by memes, but rather manipulation by other humans using memes. We know of many cases in which religious influences have been used by those in power to help prevent violence and revolutions. In the past, rich English folk gave a lot of money to the church - and the church used this money to build cathedrals - where the poor could go to feel grand - and where they could be told how stealing from the rich people was wrong. Turning down requests for donations may not have been so wise - the church was a powerful and influential force. A similar situation led to the promotion of Buddhism within China - if happiness lies within, then you don't need to steal the rich people's stuff. This picture still has religious memes spreading because they are adaptive to DNA genes - but it would be more like smoking or obseity - where the benefits accrue to only a few. The beneficiaries may not necessarily have been priests - they could also have been "friends of the church" - politicians, royalty, the rich, etc.
It also seems obvious that - in societies dominated by a single religion - there would have been immense pressure to conform. Not being religious under such circumstances would typically have been very, very bad for both you and your DNA. If this is a parasite it is a pretty weird one - since it makes infected hosts punish the uninfected. The movie Shivers portrayed such a parasite - so it's not totally impossible, I suppose. However, even then, lacking "religious" cultural symbionts is still bad for you - if you are in an environment where there are may others who have "religious" cultural symbionts.
It looks as though most major religions have been beneficial to some religious humans historically in at least one of these ways. Maybe these religions will become maladaptive in modern times - but that's a bit of a different issue.
Ben Cullen pointed out that many religions can be expected to be beneficial - on grounds associated with parasite ecology - long ago, in a paper entitled: Parasite Ecology and the Evolution of Religion. Ben pointed out that a lot of religion is transmitted with a significant vertical component. Vertically-transmitted memes tend to coevolve with their hosts to become more benign. The hosts adapt to ameliorate their negative aspects, and both benefit from host reproduction - so their interests become more aligned. Of course, some religions spread horizontally better than others - this argument applies with reduced force to ones that are good at spreading horizontally.
All this is not really news. David Sloane Wilson has been pointing out that religions show every sign of being adaptive to their hosts for a long time.
Anyway, I think that the Dawkins speculation that major religions are like deleterious viruses - that spread because they spread - has been proven wrong - so wrong that Dawkins should probably recant. It was an interesting idea - but an incorrect one.
Alister McGrath is a long-term critic of memetics. Here he is saying: show me the memes! McGrath is a crazy christian - and so doesn't seem worth very much energy. However, this sort of thing is part of the environment in which memetics exists.
From a lecture entitled "The Bankruptcy of Scientific Atheism" by Alister McGrath, PhD, critiquing Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion." This took place at ISCAST 2007 on the Vic Annual Lecture.
More on memes from Alister McGrath here 7:00 in, and here: here.
The blurb says this video is about purposely-confusing theology and how it's used. It also describes Dan's new project interviewing clergyman who secretly don't believe anymore.
Today I have spent some time trying to understand the doctrine of original sin. Not because of a resurgence of interest in the memetics of Christianity, but because of an observation in an article titled: "The Theology of Global Warming" linking fossil fuel consumption with original sin. The author wrote:
Meme enthusiasts like to point out that the common argument that religions must be beneficial to humans - or else they would have gone extinct by now - is a fallacy. I notice that Jared Diamond committed exactly this fallacy in his 2013 book, 
There are a lot of articles out there that claim that humans
are a 
One approach for parasites seeking to evade the host's immune system is to attack it and disable it. This approach is famously taken by the HIV virus - the virus which produces AIDS. However the result is typically a weakened immune system, and a collection of 
The 
I don't usually write very much about memes relating to sex or religion. Sex and religion are major areas to which memetics can be usefully applied - but writing about sex seems somehow cheap - while writing about religion probably means that my writing will get dated. Also, both areas have already been covered well by others.
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