The role of genetic naturalselection in the story is to provide the brain, with its predilectionsand biases - the hardware platform and low-level system softwarewhich form the background to memetic selection. Given this back-ground, memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me tooffer a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particularreligions. In the early stages of a religion's evolution, before itbecomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of theiruniversal appeal to human psychology. This is where the memetheory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomesorganized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions,are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes - cartels ofmutually compatible memes. This doesn't rule out the additionalrole of deliberate manipulation by priests and others
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When the message makes sense in thechildren's own language, and doesn't contain any unfamiliarwords like 'phenotype' or 'allele', it survives. Instead of mimickingthe sounds phonetically, each child recognizes each word as amember of a finite vocabulary and selects the same word, althoughvery probably pronounced in a different accent, when passing iton to the next child. Written language is also self-normalizingbecause the squiggles on paper, no matter how much they maydiffer in detail, are all drawn from a finite alphabet of (say) twenty-six letters.
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In the world of genes, the occasional flaws in replication(mutations) see to it that the gene pool contains alternative variantsof any given gene - 'alleles' - which may therefore be seen as com-peting with each other. Competing for what? For the particularchromosomal slot or 'locus' that belongs to that set of alleles. Andhow do they compete? Not by direct molecule-to-molecule combatbut by proxy. The proxies are their 'phenotypic traits' - things likeleg length or fur colour: manifestations of genes fleshed out asanatomy, physiology, biochemistry or behaviour. A gene's fate isnormally bound up with the bodies in which it successively sits.
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In its most general form, natural selection must choose betweenalternative replicators. A replicator is a piece of coded informationthat makes exact copies of itself, along with occasional inexactcopies or 'mutations'. The point about this is the Darwinian one.Those varieties of replicator that happen to be good at gettingcopied become more numerous at the expense of alternativereplicators that are bad at getting copied. That, at its most rudi-mentary, is natural selection.
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majortrends in language, such as the Great Vowel Shift which took placein English from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.
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Breakfast, makes a suggestion that can be seen as a generalizationof the idea of constructive irrationality. His point is that irrationallystrong conviction is a guard against fickleness of mind: 'if beliefsthat saved lives were not held strongly, it would have been dis-advantageous in early human evolution.
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In his book Social Evolution, Robert Trivers enlarged on his1976 evolutionary theory of self-deception. Self-deception is hiding the truth from the conscious mind the better to hide it from others. In our own species we recognize that shifty eyes, sweaty palms and croaky voices may indicate the stress that accompanies conscious knowledge of attempted deception. By becoming unconscious of its deception, the deceiver hides these signs from the observer. He or she can lie without the nervousness that accompanies deception.
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In its lower orders at least, the intentional stance, like the designstance, saves time that might be vital to survival. Consequently,natural selection shaped brains to deploy the intentional stance asa short cut. We are biologically programmed to impute intentionsto entities whose behaviour matters to us.
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psychologist Deborah Keleman tells us in her article 'Are children"intuitive theists"?' Clouds are 'for raining'. Pointy rocks are 'sothat animals could scratch on them when they get itchy'. Theassignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Childrenare native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
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F. Anstey's 1882 novel Vice Versa makes sense to a dualist, butstrictly should be incomprehensible to a dyed-in-the-wool monistlike me. Mr Bultitude and his son mysteriously find that they haveswapped bodies. The father, much to the son's glee, is obliged to goto school in the son's body; while the son, in the father's body,almost ruins the father's business through his immature decisions.
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The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the'religion is a by-product' view, points out that children have anatural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, forhim, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, hesuggests, and especially children, are natural born dualists.
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Theethologist Robert Hinde, in Why Gods Persist, and the anthro-pologists Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, and Scott Atran, inIn Gods We Trust, have independently promoted the general ideaof religion as a by-product of normal psychological dispositions
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Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress?Possibly,
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the expansion may reverse itself and go into con-traction, culminating in the so-called 'big crunch'. Some big crunchmodels have the universe then bouncing back into expansion, andso on indefinitely with, say, a 20-billion-year cycle time. Thestandard model of our universe says that time itself began in the bigbang, along with space, some 13 billion years ago. The serial bigcrunch model would amend that statement: our time and space didindeed begin in our big bang, but this was just the latest in a longseries of big bangs, each one initiated by the big crunch thatterminated the previous universe in the series.
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All the other elements in the universe are made ultimatelyfrom hydrogen by nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is a difficultprocess which occurs in the intensely hot conditions of the interiorsof stars (and in hydrogen bombs). Relatively small stars, such asour sun, can make only light elements such as helium, the secondlightest in the periodic table after hydrogen. It takes larger andhotter stars to develop the high temperatures needed to forge mostof the heavier elements, in a cascade of nuclear fusion processeswhose details were worked out by Fred Hoyle and two colleagues(an achievement for which, mysteriously, Hoyle was not given ashare of the Nobel Prize received by the others). These big starsmay explode as supernovas, scattering their materials, including theelements of the periodic table, in dust clouds. These dust cloudseventually condense to form new stars and planets,
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Two main explanations have been offered for our planet'speculiar friendliness to life. The design theory says that God madethe world, placed it in the Goldilocks zone, and deliberately set upall the details for our benefit. The anthropic approach is verydifferent, and it has a faintly Darwinian feel. The great majority of planets in the universe are not in the Goldilocks zones of theirrespective stars, and not suitable for life. None of that majorityhas life. However small the minority of planets with just the rightconditions for life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of thatminority, because here we are thinking about it.
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Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It's not- it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an 'Idunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone cred-its something to God, generally what it means is that theyhaven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable,unknowable sky-fairy. A
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Teller'smarked bullet ends up in Penn's mouth and Penn's marked bulletends up in Teller's. I [Richard Dawkins] am utterly unable to thinkof any way in which this could be a trick. The Argument fromPersonal Incredulity screams from the depths of my prescientificbrain centres, and almost compels me to say, 'It must be a miracle.There is no scientific explanation. It's got to be supernatural.'
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In his book Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, the Scottishchemist A. G. Cairns-Smith makes an additional point, using theanalogy of an arch. A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones andno mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: itcollapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in thefirst place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefullyremove stones one by one. More generally, there are manystructures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survivethe subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid ofscaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longervisible.
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Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader'sappetite for the full explanation that was to follow.
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Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon istoo statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the onlyalternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore adesigner must have done it. And science's answer to this faulty logicis also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance.Natural selection is a better alternative.
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Pascal's wager could only ever bean argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claimto believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'dsee through the deception.
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A more systematic study by Benjamin Beit-52 Hallahmi 'found that among Nobel Prize laureates in the sciences,as well as those in literature, there was a remarkable degree ofirreligiosity, as compared to the populations they came from'.
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As herealized, the existence or non-existence of God is too big a questionto be decided by 'dialectical prestidigitation'.
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reminds me of the old man in Aldous Huxley'sPoint Counter Point who discovered a mathematical proof of theexistence of God: You know the formula, m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought. In which case you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the prod- uct of zero and infinity. Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of no- thing? Doesn't it?
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Achilles really would fail to catch the tortoise. Instead, they calledit a paradox and waited for later generations of mathematicians toexplain it (with, as it turned out, the theory of infinite series con-verging on a limiting value).
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Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logi-cians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. IfGod is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to interveneto change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that meanshe can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is notomnipotent. Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox inequally engaging verse: Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?
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for any civilization capable of broadcasting a signal oversuch an immense distance is likely to be greatly superior to ours.Even if that civilization is not more advanced than ours at the timeof transmission, the enormous distance between us entitles us tocalculate that they must be millennia ahead of us by the time themessage reaches us (unless they have driven themselves extinct,which is not unlikely).
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like agnosticism of the permanent and irrevocable kind, full-blownPAP. It implies that science cannot even make probability judge-ments on the question. This remarkably widespread fallacy - manyrepeat it like a mantra but few of them, I suspect, have thought itthrough - embodies what I refer to as 'the poverty of agnosticism'.
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The fact that I cannot know whether your red isthe same as my green doesn't make the probability 50 per cent. Theproposition on offer is too meaningless to be dignified with a prob-ability. Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meetagain, to leap from the premise that the question of God's existenceis in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence andhis non-existence are equiprobable.
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