Daniel Dennett: Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

good evening you're all very welcome I'm Timothy O'Shea I'm the principal of the University tremendous pleasure to welcome you to this nature of knowledge lecture delighted to see so many philosophers from the university delighted that philosophers from the University of Stirling and other places have joined this our speaker tonight is very distinguished Daniel Dennett received his BA in philosophy from Harvard and then he took a DPhil in philosophy at Oxford where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and his studies under I'll really set his direction he is the Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy and co-director of the center of cognitive studies at Tufts University and as you will all very well know the author of many major books on evolution and consciousness it's tremendously fitting that he be speaking here at the University of Edinburgh fitting for three reasons one philosophy has been a key part of this University's activity and of its teaching from its very foundation and remains an area which flourishes here and which we are very proud of secondly this university played a key role in the Enlightenment and in in some ways it's reasonable to regard professor Dennett as the equivalent of a contemporary enlightenment figure and thirdly which follows on naturally he is a very important public intellectual known worldwide for debating and advancing issues which are very very important and this university of course has a tremendous history in producing and supporting public intellectuals and so I'm delighted to introduce him and he will be speaking to the topic religion as a natural phenomenon professor thank you thank you Tim O'Shea it's good to see you again I'm so thrilled to be here just a few minutes ago I found myself looking firsthand at the famous portrait of my hero David Hume which is in the principal's office that gives us an extra special meaning to this occasion to me Hume is one of my heroes another one of my heroes is Charles Darwin of course and some people have even gone so far as to say that I carry my my hero worship a little bit far extending even to my appearance now I really don't know why anybody would say that I don't think there's anything to it but uh in any case uh Darwin certainly is one of my heroes today I'm going to be talking about religion as a natural phenomenon with an evolutionary history and the reason that I turn to this topic not a not a topic that I had ever thought I would ever write on was because I began to be worried about what was happening with religion in the world it seemed to be mounting and importance in many spheres playing a very disruptive and worrying role and as I looked around I realized that I hadn't the faintest idea what was going to happen with religion in the next hundred years in the next 20 years in the next five years and I looked around to see if anybody else did and I decided that nobody did just to dramatize how ignorant we are of where religion is taking us I want to walk you through five scenarios there's many others and I just want you to think which of these is most likely to be true one is that I'll ask the Enlightenment is over in spite of the efforts in Edinburgh and elsewhere and that religion is in fact going to sweep the planet here's a recent map of the religions of the world showing how they dominate in various regions and if religion does sweep the planet you might want to know which religion is going to sweep the planet and go to fixation as it or whichever religion it is it will be a religion that most of the people in the world do not now adhere to there is no majority religion and this means there's going to be a tremendous amount of strife if that's what the future holds for us well maybe that's not what's going to happen maybe in spite of the recent uproar religion is in its death throes as as Hume I think in many others predicted back several hundred years ago they were just wrong by a few hundred years maybe science and technology in the modern world will will in fact lead to the evaporation or extinction of religion it's possible I suppose that within the lives of our grandchildren that Vatican City will become the European Museum of Roman Catholicism maybe Mecca will become Disney's Magic Kingdom of Allah this does not seem very likely but we have to remember that the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul started off as a church and later was a mosque and now it's a museum worth bearing in mind well there's two hypotheses here's a third that religions transform themselves into creed 'less moral teams the actual Creed's drop out of the the running more or less they become vestigial and it's the moral teamwork the the organization the infrastructure and perhaps the particular sense of duty and this might be different with one religion concentrating on social justice and another concentrating on the environment and so forth we could imagine that all that really remains that shows their religion is the pageantry and that we have different varieties of pageantry in different colors different songs and you know well would you would like for like sports teams would you want your daughter to marry a Chelsea fan it might be rather like that unlikely yes I guess unlikely but wished for by many and some religions do to be heading in this direction another possibility is that religions may just diminish and prestige and visibility rather the way smoking has in recent years and that we decide well yes if you are religious you can be elected to public office but as long as you don't make too big a deal of it and don't you sort of don't smoke in public you know or as long as you don't blow the smoke in our direction it's alright that also seems a bit unlikely and then there's one more hypothesis that we might want to consider in addition to these four and this is the one that according to Newsweek magazine is actually believed by a majority of my countrymen and that is the judgement day arrives and that Jesus Christ God's chosen King will destroy the world at Armageddon now there's five hypotheses they're all quite different and what I want to draw to your attention is that all that one of these at most is wildly wrong and nobody knows which one is right nobody knows I don't know I don't think anybody knows if they do they've been doing an awful lot of research and keeping it very quiet that it would seem to me is reason enough to want to study religion with scientific intensity because such an important phenomenon we should try to get a grip on it understand it well enough so that we can predict what it's likely to do in the future and why now here's a beautiful dairy cow and the question I want to raise is who designed it well the answer of course is complicated because this is a this is an animal that's been under domestication for thousands of years actually and much of the design work on the dairy cow was done thousands of years earlier hundreds of thousands of years earlier by the process of evolution by natural selection here's the Oryx which is the the the pretty well-established the wild ancestor of the domesticated cattle in the world today and oryx's were wild as I say and what that means is that what they were for is for themselves bar axes were for making more oryx's just the way beetles are for making more beetles and palm trees or for making more palm trees but once they became domesticated then they were for us and the domesticate errs first unconsciously as Darwin puts it he in the in the Origin of Species he has this wonderful pedagogical transition he goes from from deliberate breeding improvement of the breed 4-sided deliberate breathing then he does what he calls unconscious selection this is the unintended consequences of just favoring the best animal you're not trying to change the breed you're just you're just a favoring breeding some animals and not breeding others the runts of the litter or just not being kept and then of course before that we have just natural selection so we have sort of three grades of of involvement in the process very self conscious redesign of the animal and certainly in the case of the dairy cow we can see that that the the cow was very carefully analyzed sort of reverse engineered and every part of it was subjected to intense scrutiny and whether we want to improve this bit or who that bit what it's good for what what the optimal arrangement is this is very much a matter of deliberate human design and redesign well now why am I talking to you about cows supposed to be talking about religions well because I want to say exactly the same thing is true of religions religions have evolved over thousands of years they're actually not as old as cows that is the ancestry of religion only goes back maybe tens of thousands of years not millions of years and the evolution of religion began with in effect wild forms of religion and then these became domesticated and when they became domesticated there was first unconscious selection of features and later very deliberate four-sided carefully reasoned attempts to revise and to refine and to change the designs of religions so what I want to suggest is that the reason that the uninformative reason of why religions have such a hold on us why the why the enlightenment was wrong why religions have not vanished is that they have been brilliantly designed over the eons to do just that to have a hold over us to be robust wonderfully self-maintaining organizations that are designed to hold us in thrall and that the design process has an evolutionary history in recent years it's been under very conscious and self-conscious human not under human control because the best laid plans of mice and men often gang agley but there's been the intention to ravana revise and refine the design of religions in other words what i want to talk about is the project of reverse engineering religions see looking under the hood seeing how the parts work seeing why they work the way they do it's only when we've done this job well that we'll understand what we might want to do in the future to steer religions in the directions that we think are benign if we act without information if we if we engage in well-intentioned but ill informed tinkering we do that at our peril now part of the job of getting something clearly in view is getting enough distance from it so it's not it's very familiarity doesn't blind you and a favored trope people want to talk this way is to say well what would Martian say Martian biologists make of the planet Earth if they came here what would they make what would startle them what would surprise them what would they think was worth studying here's something that might very well surprise them I don't know how well even in the front you can see this well what is this is this a whale seeing underwater or is it is it a tongue or or maybe is it some bacteria growing in a petri dish or some kind of mold on the edge of a root or something no that's not what it is what it is is approximately a million human beings gathered on the banks of the Ganges on one day in 2001 has seen from outer space perhaps the largest convocation gathering of human beings ever on the planet that would impress the Martians Wow what an expensive extravagant extraordinary gathering of mammals in one place well here's another one maybe not quite so impressive this is course st. Peter's Square and another one this is Mecca what would impress the Martian biologists is that these are extremely expensive occasions tremendous effort travel preparation rehearsal the erection of huge buildings these are extremely costly Affairs why do they happen how did this all originate what is it for how does it perpetuate itself these are the questions the Martian biologists would be eager to answer and we should try to answer them for ourselves since our future on this planet may well depend on our getting the right answers well now here's another thing that might really impress anybody cause for wonder you're out in the meadow and you see an ant climbing up a blade of grass she climbs and she climbs if she falls she gets back on the blade and climbs again climbs the end she falls and she climbs and she climbs and she climbs until she reaches the very top of the blade of grass and you might wonder here's an expenditure of energy - this is this is purpose of behavior if I ever sunk what on earth is the ant doing this for but what benefit accrues to the ant is she looking for food is she looking for a mate she lost is she trying to get home wrong answers in fact no benefit at all accrues to the ant well then is this just a fluke yes it's just a fluke it's a brain fluke a Lancet fluke died Krissi Liam dendritic um a parasitic little brain worm that has to get into the belly of a cow or a sheep in order to continue its reproductive cycle what does it do it commandeer is a passing ant climbs into the ants brain and drives it like an all-terrain vehicle up the blade of grass to a position where it is more likely to be eaten by a cow or a sheep spooky it's not an isolated case I become collecting some of these marvelous cases of manipulative symbiotic relationships manipulative host manipulation by parasites here's another one sort of fascinating very similar actually Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that infects mice and in order to continue its lifecycle it has to get in order to reproduce it has to get into the belly of a cat well now what would you do if you were in a mouse and you wanted to get into a cat you would turn the mouse into Mighty Mouse make the mouse bold fearless so it runs out in the open that's what mice do when they are are when they are infested with Toxoplasma gondii yeah they're more likely that way to be eaten by a cat I could give you other examples but to will have to do there's not that much time what we have in these cases we have a hijacker that parasite that infects the brain and induces suicidal behavior on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness gosh that's scary does anything like that ever happened to us yeah well I want to remind you that the Arabic word Islam means submission it means surrender of self-interest to the will of Allah but Islam is not alone in Christianity we have the same theme this is a not very good photograph of a parchment page man using manuscript page done mid 16th century I found this in a Paris book stall about fifty years ago and the text is interesting what it says is say minest where boom Dei sotware Eltham priestess on this crowded hey on my name it in eternal by the way if you I don't think I think you can maybe make out if you're up close that the creaseless is spelled with a two Greek letters first kai and ro and then the scribe has put an R after the ro this is a type of graph this is a mutation in the copying in the mindless copying of this text and it's also of course showing how a text gets translated from one language into another so what does that mean it means the Word of God is a seed and the sower of the seed is Christ and all who hear it will have eternal life that's the quid pro quo well this idea of planting the seed is a little different from the idea of of infest infesting the brain with a parasite but in fact Christianity very often does adopt the language and the imagery that Islam uses as well consider these words the heart of worship is surrender and these words surrendered people obey God's Word even if it doesn't make sense now who said those these are the recent words of Pastor Rick Warren the author of a book called The Purpose Driven Life this is an evangelical Christian book which has sold 30 million copies in the United States since it was published a few years ago this is one of the most influential religious figures in America today other religions as well have similar imagery now what I want to draw your attention to is that although as I've presented these ideas they seem repugnant even shocking at the same time I want to suggest if you think about them slightly differently you recognize this is nothing to be appalled by this is in fact the key to our specialness as human beings that we have ideas to die for not just the ideas of Islam or the ideas of Christianity but think in the 20th century for instance how many people lay down their lives for the idea of communism or democracy or justice probably everybody in this room has a recent ancestor who laid down his life for freedom or democracy or justice I live in Massachusetts the state just to the north of Massachusetts is New Hampshire and the license plate of the state of New Hampshire says live free or die this is the motto of my neighboring state makes the point unmistakably clear I want to draw your attention to the fact that the Moose can't contemplate that fact can't endorse that ringing patriotic and that's an important biological difference between us and the moves between us and every other species of the planet we are the only species that has the capacity to set aside our genetic imperative and decide that we're going to live for and if necessary die for furthering the prospects of some idea this is what makes us human this is this is the very source of our of our wonderful complicated difference from the rest of the biosphere I look around the room here and I see there's people that are my age no doubt a lot of parents how many parents do we have here how many grandparents okay now I want to know how many of you think that the most important thing in life is having more grandchildren within your next-door neighbor I don't see any hands up in other words maximizing your progeny is not the Summa bonum of your life not a single one of you thinks this is the most important thing this is your raison d'être your Summa bone I want to point out that that makes us weird every other species on the planet that's their Summa Bonin everything they do is designed to further that interest and they are unable to conceive of any alternatives the salmon struggling upstream to spawn they can't think to themselves oh never mind I think I'd rather go learn French you know I think I'll devote myself to spreading the word on some topic no other species only us we're the ones that can live for an idea that can die for an idea it's ideas not worms that hijack our brains these are ideas that can copy themselves that get that can make us copy them not only rehearsing them in our own brains over and over but spreading them to our friends and our neighbors and our family and populating the world with many copies of these ideas this of course is the idea of memes that Richard Dawkins first introduced in his famous book The Selfish Gene which appeared just thirty years ago Dawkins pointed out that evolution cultural evolution goes on in the medium not in the medium of genes but in the medium of ideas and that idea is just like genes replicate and can be designed Fitness some replicate better than others in the great competition for space in people's brains so memes are not any old idea if you just have an idea in your head of you know a yellow chair in the corner that's not a mean it's only a meme if it replicates many times and if it gets passed on and spread so that pretty soon everybody is thinking of that yellow chair the idea of a yellow submarine wasn't a meme until the Beatles made it one and of course they didn't make it one it was all the people who sang it and copied it that made it Amin ideas are more like viruses than like living things viruses aren't alive but they do have an evolutionary history because they are capable of provoking their own reproduction by entering into a cell my definition of a virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitudes it's not alive and it has attitude in the sense that there's just something about it we can actually figure that out now we can reverse-engineer it understand how this works that provokes its own replication when it gets inside a cell it common dears the reproduction of a machinery of that cell to make more copies of it and if it does that better than its competitive viruses then it flourishes that's how viruses evolve and Dawkins suggested that's how cultural ideas can as well the most obvious case are words sometimes people's ask me well I not even sure memes exist what are they made of they're not made of DNA well what are words made of what are words made how many people believe that there are words do you believe that there are words I do but they're not animal vegetable or mineral they're not made out of sound and they're not made out of ink they're actually very subtle complicated sort of behavioral recipes recipes for speaking recipes for putting them together in combination with others and they have evolutionary histories the words of French have are descended mostly from the words of Latin for instance and that's a process that was not deliberate or farsighted or planned words have their own fitness some words go extinct other words proliferate like mad so do memes exist well words exist and the words or memes that can be pronounced there's all the memes it can't be pronounced - like fashions or ways of carving or wearing your baseball hat backwards or there's there's lots of other memes but the ones that can be pronounced are the ones we call words and it's not just words but larger clumps of words here's a quote from a theologian Hugh Piper if survival of the fittest has any validity as a slogan then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts fittest in what sense in the sense that there's more copies of it than any other text it has simply out reproduced all the other texts around the world translated into many different languages it found in many hotel bedrooms there's just more Bibles than than any other text that makes it the fittest of texts that's the memes eye perspective notice that it is usefully independent of the question of whether the text is good or true or useful that may well be I think the Boy Scout manual is a very useful book and there's many copies of it and it probably survives as well as it does because it's so useful but other other means survive for all sorts of different reasons and their fitness is a measure of their fitness not their contribution to our fitness and besides everybody in this room has already acknowledged that their own biological fitness is not that important to them they don't care if they are biologically fitter than their neighbors that's not the point of living so you certainly shouldn't care whether or not any memes make you biologically fitter maybe we used to care we don't care much anymore human culture is itself one of the fruits on the tree of life I want to draw your attention to the tree of life I'm sorry those of you in the back will not be able to make this out at all it doesn't look much like a tree from any even from up close unless you realize this is a tree as seen as a bird's eye view you're looking down on the top of the tree the in the in the center we see the putative root there's controversy about just where the where the the trunk of the tree and the roots should be but it shows the the three main branches the bacteria the Archaea and the eukaryotes eukaryotic cells all the multicellular life forms are on this lower branch and the artist who drew this has put us with two of our close neighbors on the Tree of Life right out at the tip of the branch of eukaryotes this is co primus homo and zaiah what are they well homo is us Capri noses mushrooms and zaiah is corn close cousins on the Tree of Life we're actually relatively close to them compared with most of the rest of the things in the biosphere we're rather different from mushrooms and corn and even from all other vertebrates and from all other mammals in that we have human culture there are some other mammalian and bird species that have elements of culture we know for instance that beaver dams and the Hoover Dam both require some small element at least of cultural transmission beavers don't get all their know-how in engineering of dams but through their genes some of it is culturally transmitted offspring copying parents and other members of the of the of the group so here are two different fruits of the tree of life they are both artifacts made by mammals cast or in one case and homo and the other a spiderweb is one of the artifacts made by a living form the world wide web or the power grid is an artifact made by another species it's important to recognize that although there are wildly different methods involved in the production of these artifacts they are both artifacts made by living things and hence they have a place as in effect those fruits on the tree of life on the left we see a bird's nest on the right we see an ode to a nightingale now indeed they are very different as artifacts they both have an evolutionary history the poet can't write the ode to a nightingale without the words that doesn't make the words itself the words have to be gathered and learned and they have an evolutionary history of their own and the style of the poem the fact that it is an ode the fact that it has the rhyme pattern it has and so forth these have a cultural evolutionary history of their own this is not to say that looking through Darwinian glasses at poems is the only way but it is an important way and one way in which even poetry should be looked at for its evolutionary history and the poetry and other forms of religion I would include in that as well and these all get under way all human culture gets under way without any insightful design or designer to prime the pump it gets underway by natural selection itself now in my book I give several chapters are devoted the middle of the book is devoted to providing a somewhat speculative sketch of a theory of the evolution of religion how it came to exist in the first place I don't pretend I don't claim or pretend that it is the truth that I have confirmed it it is speculative but the idea was to give a sketch of the best theory I could based on what research has been done and so that people who initially might think well I just can't imagine what an evolutionary theory of the origins of religion would be now they can imagine it they may not like the theory they may think it's false fine replace it with a better theory one that is better confirmed by the evidence but recognize that this is a valuable task to engage in and if one theory isn't quite right then fix the parts that are wrong and then we'll have a much better theory I don't have time to present to you a full version of it I'm just going to give you a few of the of the key features of it it starts with an instinct that we share with other mammals it's an instinct for instance that you might see in your dog if if your dog was sort of snoozing by the hearth and then and some snow slid off the roof and landed with a loud thud outside the window and your dog would jump up and growl and bark and look around and basically the dog is asking who's there what do you want it's looking for an agent in the world this hyperactive agent detection device as Justin Barrett calls it is something that we share with basically with all mammals it's a very useful evolutionary habit to have the habit of looking for agents whenever there's something puzzling or surprising going on not necessarily startling if if it won't rain and it won't rain and it won't rain you can start looking for an agent to blame for that maybe want to appeal to to ask for rain to come that's another phenomenon in life that would lead to the positing of an invisible agent that plays a role in your life this suggestion of not just me but actually a number of theorists is that what this does and has these this is found in every culture every culture that's ever been looked at is a rather large population of local imp imps goblins fairies gods leprechauns invisible supernatural agents that are deemed to play in one role or another in the local culture now how did that happen the suggestion is that in the dog when the hyperactive agent detection device fires the dog looks around for a few seconds and then basically this evaporates this it goes back to sleep but when a person does it because of our language and because we have these echo chambers for brains a little rehearsal is set up so you're out in the woods and crackle crackle what's that what's oh my god did who said who said that what what did that tree just talk oh my god a talking tree what's that a talking tree I don't think so taught no couldn't be a talking tree oh no could it be a talking tree a talking tree one two three four five six six little rehearsals six little generations of the talking tree idea call your neighbor over hey I think there's a talking tree you says a talking tree yes a talking tree we now have 10 11 12 the idea is having offspring pretty soon the whole village is talking about the talking tree that's how a meme is born one thing to understand about evolution cultural evolution as well as genetic evolution is that evolution is all about things that almost never happen mutation almost never happens that ever lucien depends on the amplification of the effects of mutation every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event not one in a trillion is but that's the source of all the variety on the planet every time you're hyperactive agent detection device fires that and you create a momentary off-the-wall hunch I think there's a goblin out there let's suppose not that 99 times out of 100 let's suppose it 999 times out of a thousand that's the end of it evaporates dies you never you don't even remember it for five minutes but every now and then every now and then one comes along that gets rehearsed by you and rehearsed and once it's been rehearsed a few times it can be rehearsed a few more times and then it's going to be spread and now we have a lineage they won't take long before these rare replications lead to a population explosion of sorts and now they're going to compete for rehearsal time in brains because that's limited so we have a population explosion with competition for a limited resource that is time and space and people's brains only the unforgettable ones are going to survive the ones that are memorable that are unforgettable that you can't get out of your head so those are going to be the winners of this tournament this replication tournament in the brains of our ancestors now what are the winners for I ask this curious question because I have found that when I tell people I'm working on an evolutionary theory of religion of the origins of religion they say oh that's a good idea yes I often wondered what religion is for it's got to be for something after all every every human population we've ever looked at every tribe on every continent we've always found a some sort of religion it's it's a universal it's got to be good for something I say well yes it's true that it's a ubiquitous feature but it doesn't follow that it's got to be good for something what's the common cold for every human group that's ever been studied has it what's it for it's for itself it survives because it can it just happens to be able to exploit human hosts and spread and spread and spread it's not for anything but itself and that's what the original population of supernatural agents before they were for occupying the minds that they find themselves in and that's all they have their own fitness independently of whether they're doing us any good some of them may be doing this harm some of them may be doing us a lot of good and some of them may be neutral we want to start from a position of neutrality which says these are all three possible this is in in evolutionary terms we talk about symbionts coming in three varieties there's the parasites proper which are harmful Fitness lowering there are the mutualists that are beneficial Fitness enhancing like for instance in your gut many of the flora the flora in your gutter largely you couldn't live without them they are they are essential to your life so you certainly wouldn't want to get rid of them by the way just while you're while we're thinking about this as you sit there you are composed of by latest count roughly a hundred trillion cells what percentage of those do you suppose are human cells that is Homo sapiens eukaryotic cells with a human genome of the what percentage about ten percent nine out of ten of the cells that are where you sitting in your chair they're nine out of ten of them are not human cells they have their own DNA they are Symbian visitors and they fall in all three categories most of them are not very Fitness reducing that's how you manage to be you're not at home dying you're ambulatory some of them are moderately Fitness reducing pain in the neck a bother you know athlete's foot things like that some of them you couldn't live without so don't be disgusted by your symbionts they outnumber you and most of them are at least harmless I want to say the same thing about all the cultural symbionts that infest your brain some of them are wonderful you couldn't live without them some of them are horrible but you can't get rid of them and then there's the ones that neither here nor there and they all have their own fitness that's what the memes perspective gives you here's a riddle leg how are spoken words and folk songs like squirrels rats pigeons and barn swallows I want you to think about this for a minute not written words but spoken words folk songs folk songs I mean real folk songs not written by Woody Guthrie folk songs but maybe child ballads would do it and the answer is that they are not domesticated but wild these are species squirrels rats hunts mice pigeons barn swallows these are species that are not domesticated but that have evolved by natural selection to live in close proximity with us to exploit aspects of human ecology for their own benefit we don't particularly protect them we don't need them we don't own them we don't worry it we they're just around but they do very well oddly enough I want to say the same thing is true of spoken language languages don't need Guardians they've got them a plenty there are grammarians and scolds and Meuse egde mavens and people right columns for the newspaper about whether or not you should you should say ain't or whether whether some new idiom is is abhorrent and should be banished but languages survived quite well without these people they are strictly speaking unnecessary however entertaining they may be at times so languages I'm saying are sort of wild memes that have grown up around us and Nathan they seem to be extremely fitness enhancing to us language has taken us to great heights in the fitness department but many of the memes that compose language are not themselves in effect domesticated well let's talk about domestication for a moment how clever of sheep to acquire shepherds what a smart move from the fitness point of view that was what they did is they outsource all their problems their predicted protection from predators food finding even their health maintenance the cost of this was a small loss of free mating and the diminution of their brains sheep are pretty stupid they're stupid because they can be embrace or expensive wild sheep are much smarter and have bigger brains because they haven't out sourced all their problems now this was a clever move for sheep because domesticated sheep it's like Bibles domesticated sheeps number in the hundreds of millions their their nearest wild relatives you could probably carry off in a few arcs so it was a great fitness enhancing move but it wasn't cleverness on the part of the sheep the sheep are stupid the cleverness was on the part of evolution Francis Crick once as a joke articulated what he calls orbitals second rule named after his brilliant colleague Leslie Orgel and that is that evolution is cleverer than you are now this is not an endorsement of intelligent design by Francis Crick needless to say and in fact if you understand Orgel second rule correctly you understand what is fraudulent I use the word advisedly what is fraudulent about the intelligent design movement because there's an equivocation on the word design the products of evolution are brilliant brilliantly designed the process of design that produces those products is not itself brilliant or farsighted or intelligent at all it is purposeless and mechanical and without any foresight however it is amazingly well suited to produce brilliant designs and these designs have rationales I want to say that the same thing there's going to be true what's true of sheep is also true of the wild means of religion they got themselves domesticated they acquired stewards who devoted their lives to their flourishing they were not just the Shepherd's of people they were the shepherds of the ideas and here they used their own intelligence to further the welfare of the ideas that they had domesticated and made their own now this changes everything this changes everything on the evolutionary landscape because whereas before you had memes that were just for themselves now you have memes that are for us so what are we going to use them for well here are some uses of domesticated God memes one of my favorites is an idea that was brilliantly presented by the late Julian James in his classic sort of cult classic book the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind James proposed that when our ancestors began living in larger and more complicated societies larger groups of people they found that decision-making was a very difficult and fraught behavior noting few things more anxiety-provoking than not being able to side what to do next or what to think about next and what they did not knowing what they were doing was they they cast about for some way of getting off the dime of making a move and so they hit upon all sorts of rituals of decision making throwing Lots our giri's cutting open vowels and looking at their entrails pouring melted wax into water looking at the clouds sacrificing virgins to see which way the smoke blows all of these elaborate rituals were invented by people who didn't really know what they were doing this is unconscious selection creating rituals that permitted them in effect to ask their departed ancestors what to do next and there are many reasons why this is a really good idea even if you don't understand why for one thing if what you decide to do next turns out badly you can blame your ancestor who can't talk back but it's a great way of just getting you up and running after all flipping a coin is okay if you're trying to decide whether to eat those berries if you're going to side whether to go to war or whether to marry this woman it's just a bit too you know flippant you need something more powerful to hold you to hold your your resolve and if as Jane suggested our ancestors had a real problem with resolve any ritual that would simply give them backbone that would give them confidence in their own decision so they could execute it and keep everybody in the group on the same path would be a valuable trick to have in your kit one that I explore and some length in my book is McClellan's suggestion that shamanic healing rituals played a key role in just about all religions all folk religions and that the shaman's designed designed rituals which were basically hypnotic induction and that hypnotic induction actually does provide medical benefits it provides a placebo effects it provides analgesia and that if you weren't susceptible to hypnotic induction in those days you didn't have any health insurance so there was selection for susceptibility to hypnotic rituals this would be a case of cultural evolution the practices of the Shaymin and genetic evolution coevolving working together is that implausible no not at all actually we already know of a well studied case and that is back to our cows and sheep we know that lactose tolerance in adulthood in us evolved genetically in response to the culturally evolved practice of dairy hurting how many of you people in this room are lactose intolerant as adults are there any there's a few if you are lactose intolerant as an adult you are a normal mammal we're the only species of mammal that can digest milk after infancy when animals are weaned the enzyme the gene for the enzyme for digesting raw milk for digesting lactose turns off it is superannuated in us that gene has evolved to provide us with this really infantile capacity throughout our lives but only in those lineages where dairy herding was in the cultural ancestry this is pretty well-established something similar could soon be established about differences in susceptibility to ritual for instance then of course there's everybody's idea of using god memes as surrogate police what do I mean I'll tell a little story about a town in Maine near where my farm is where when you enter town there's a sign that says you know welcome to Brooksville and then it says your speed controlled by radar and somebody asks a selectman the G that must be pretty spencer for a little town like this he says now it's about five dollars actually I just got a piece of plywood and some white paint and some black paint wrote the sign and put it up that's all works just fine you don't have to don't have to actually be there to play the role of the surrogate please we just have to be believed to be there so what I'm suggesting is that organized religions the religions of today we also have wild religions today tribal religions sometimes called primitive religions but the organized religions of today descended from folk religions which were wild when we became conscious deliberate stewards of our ideas this changed everything now I said before evolution comes up with brilliant designs and these designs have rationales brilliant rationales but they don't have to be in anybody's head dye Chris helium dendritic um the brain fluke doesn't understand why it is driving that ant up the blade of grass it's it's stupid it's got the IQ roughly I would guess of a carrot doesn't even have a brain really it's just the beneficiary of this brilliant design let's look at a case a little closer to us the cuckoo the cuckoo as you know is a parasite cuckoos do not make their own nests the mother cuckoo when she's ready to lay her egg finds a likely host pair with their medic ready-made nest with the eggs already in it she waits till they fly off she darts down lays her egg in the hosts nest and departs never to return the hosts come back and in due course the cuckoo chick hatches typically before the other eggs oh by the way the the cuckoo mother may sometimes when she lairs her actually may push one of the other eggs out that's just in case the hosts can count but in any case once once the fledgling cuckoo hatches it engages in the most obviously purpose of behavior you can a man tries to push the other eggs out of the nest I want to show you this I've got it on a clip here I think I can show it to you we won't have the sound but well maybe we're not going to be able to do that I don't know why let's try again there we go so this is a this is a host she's sitting on her nest but up what's going on underneath it whoa look out what's this one of her chicks has hatched so if she sits down again see everything seems to be well but uh wait a minute whoop there goes one oh there goes another yeah whoa throwing them out what's going on well there's the cuckoo chick inside getting all the food now that is certainly a brilliant stratagem that has evolved who benefits the cuckoo does but the cuckoo doesn't know the cuckoo is an innocent little featherless fledgling happily the cuckoo doesn't understand the rationale many of the ration many of the employs of organised religions I try to show in the book are similarly clever stratagems that work to further the to benefit the the fitness of the religions and the people who engage in these stratagems can be in effect as innocent as the cuckoo but in fact since they have larger brains in the cuckoo they can also understand the rationales they can come to understand the rationales and they might even come to feel a little bit ashamed of their use of some of these ploys that they start out using in all innocence when folk religions became organized religions there was a shift from the free-floating rationales of natural selection to the represented rationales now we're getting into the world of religious leaders priests Imams and so forth trying to redesign their religious institutions to make to make life easier for themselves and to improve the robustness of the religion and of course sometimes they made big mistakes sometimes they designed their religions right into extinction why Oracle's second rule evolution is cleverer than you are when you start tampering with something if you don't get it right evolution may punish you with extinction but nevertheless the rationales that this of the stewards are responsive to entirely new set of goals to represented goals just like the goals of animal domesticate errs many of the features of that cow are not for the benefit of the cow therefore our benefit and a similar design rationale can be found in many of the features of religions

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 80,903

Rating: 4.8088737 out of 5

Keywords: dennett, daniel, professor, prof, dan, religion, philosophy, evolution, biology, cognitive, edinburgh, university

Id: 5WhQ8bSvcHQ

Length: 58min 44sec (3524 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 10 2009

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