Some Thoughts from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, part 2. Breaking the Spell

In the previous essay, I shared some ideas from my quick read of Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. A discussion of mimetic evolution was one of the main objectives of Dennett’s book. But an even more important objective, found also in his book Freedom Evolves, is that you do not have to have a spirit in order to have free will.

If we do not have free will, does this mean we will go wild? If we do not have a spirit, does this mean that everybody wants to get away with everything? Only God can keep us from going freaking crazy? Dennett says no. Most humans want to be morally responsible; benefits accrue from it. We choose to be good because when our evolutionary ancestors chose to be good, they reaped evolutionary benefits.

Another important Dennett book is Breaking the Spell. The meme that has grasped the minds of billions of people is that religion cannot be questioned. But Dennett says that if we don’t question religion, it might come to exist only in toxic forms. Many people consider religion to be good, a mimetic mutualist. If religion is a cultural parasite, it will conceal its true nature from its host. Only by examining religion can we consciously kill the toxic ideas and let the good ones reproduce.

Religion, Dennett suggests, is a placebo effect. We like it because it makes us feel better. But is this such a bad thing? Isn’t religion okay even if it is a placebo effect? In medicine, the placebo effect causes the body to unleash all of its healing capacities. Dennett discussed belief in believing in God, that is, the belief that believing in God is a good thing for an individual and society.

In his book Homo Mysterious, David Barash says that a sweet tooth was adaptive in prehistoric days, but now it is dangerous because it leads to obesity and diabetes; maybe religion is the same. The same idea was suggested centuries earlier by historian Edward Gibbon: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” If religion is a placebo, then has it outlived its usefulness? Or is it still a good placebo?

Sometimes. But perhaps more often religion inspires people to do heinous things, as with the Puritans and the Taliban. It depends on the side-effects. “The more you have invested in your religion, the more you will be motivated to protect that investment” (Breaking the Spell, 195). To assure faithfulness, and to keep out the pretenders, religions have high entry and exit costs. Like a virus, a religion can shed the antibodies of skepticism. Dennett says the moderates of any religion are being used by the extremists as a cloak of respectability (page 300). When Christians are quietly shocked by the deeds of Christian extremists, “expressions of dismay to close friends are not enough” (page 301).

The statement that “God exists,” says Dennett, is not even a theory, since God cannot be defined.

What should we teach about religion? Should we teach atheism? Dennett is one of the most famous atheists in the world, so you probably think you know the answer. You probably think he believes we should teach atheism. But his answer is that we should not teach atheism as truth. He says, Let’s have more religion rather than less religion taught in classes, and cover all religions, the positives and negatives of each. Let us reasonably choose our religion, or our lack of it, and give our students and readers the information they need to make a reasonable choice.

Darwin at the Mall

Ho ho ho. The Christmas shopping season is upon us. Greetings from someone who doesn’t enjoy shopping. I’m no Grinch or Scrooge; I just do not enjoy materialism. A walk in the woods, or reading or writing something creative, is much more enjoyable to me than a trip to the Mall. I enjoy receiving gifts, but not all that much. I am sort of like the Dalai Lama on his birthday in the cartoon: he said, “Just what I always wanted! Nothing!” as he looked into an empty box. But it was recently necessary for me to go with my family to the Mall, and when I did, I decided to use it as an opportunity to observe the human species from the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist.

In Tulsa, “The Mall” usually refers to Woodland Hills Mall at 71^st and Memorial. The first thing I noticed was how many clothes retailers there were, each with its own brand. As far as I could tell, all of the clothes that they sold were more or less alike, except for either (1) a status label, or (2) subtle messages that are meaningful only to the sender and the receiver of the message. Right away this reminded me of the 1981 discovery by Nancy Burley that the simple act of putting a red leg band on a male zebra finch would enhance its success of mating. Although this effect has recently been called into question, it remains a memorable example of how something as arbitrary as a leg band can turn out to be a social signal to animals. In many birds, bright feathers are indicators of health. But the exact form of the indicator in one animal species may be meaningless to another. We think it quaint when we read about the Mayoruna tribe in the Amazon decorating their faces with cat whisker tattoos and even embedding palm fibers in their lips like cat whiskers. But to them, our flaunting of brand name clothing would seem as incomprehensible as their decorations seem to us. Of course, they are probably now wearing American brand-name T-shirts and shorts, having been brought into the splendor and comfort of western civilization.

At the same time, many of the businesses appeared nearly desperate to come up with something new other than just to sell the same items as everyone else. In these cases, it is innovation, not just a label, that is the status marker. However, innovations can be just as arbitrary as labels. Just how much innovation can you have in a wristwatch? You can make them into timepieces with atomic accuracy. Or you can replace the hands with little bubbles on an analog face; a large and a small bubble revolve around the center of the watch face. And there was a shop that sold many interesting and wonderful flavors of tea. But after awhile, all the different fruit and flower flavors start seeming alike. Enter monkey-picked tea. This is tea made from the youngest leaves of the tea trees, which grow on branches so delicate that only trained monkeys can harvest them. I tried some; it tasted like tea. The only value of this type of innovation would be if the recipient knows that the tea leaves were picked by monkeys. These innovations are mostly valuable as status symbols.

Perhaps the main products being marketed at this mall are placebos. The labels and innovations do not produce a qualitative difference in the products, but the shoppers can easily imagine that they do. They imagine that monkey tea tastes different from ordinary tea if, in advance, they know that it is monkey tea. It is well known that even many expert wine-tasters will choose wines they think are expensive, even if the wines are cheap brands in expensive bottles. In one corner of the Mall, there were a few shiatsu-massage chairs into which you could insert a dollar and try them out. I gave one of them a try, and found it to be annoying, perhaps because I am not shaped like a typical American and the pokes and nudges touched me in the wrong places. It goosed me a couple of times. I wonder if  “shiatsu” is Japanese for “placebo.” While there is no doubt that massages feel good, I am skeptical that there are “shiatsu points” of special significance on the body. I watched a young Thai mother of four trying out the chair as her kids pommeled on her. The chair evoked an artificial lordosis from her as she was transported into ecstasy. It worked for her. Or maybe it was just her kids tickling her. I wondered whether I should even be watching her.

Finally, I noticed that even though I’d come without the intention of buying anything, I ended up spending a couple of hundred dollars, largely on status and placebo items. Social forces act upon our behavior in ways of which we are hardly conscious, and sometimes despite our best efforts to be conscious of them.

I bought some items at See’s Candies. At last here is something that is truly different and superior: I have tasted many kinds of candy, but none can measure up to See’s. As I tried a sample, I kept asking myself if I was merely experiencing a placebo effect. If I was, it was despite my best effort to be objective. But this purchase accounted for only about twenty dollars of my total expenditure. When I got home, I was not sure how I ended up spending sixty dollars on candles. Evolution has adapted us with flexibility to adjust to changing social environments. The social environment is our human environment; we create it, and it creates us.