God Soul Mind Brain

connecting strand.

    In a sense I am taking an eye-dropper of memes—things that swim around and replicate in the cloudy suspension of human culture—and I am squirting it onto a slide under a microscope. Examined closely from the point of view of neuroscience and psychology, the memes that are potent, that succeed best in spreading, tend to have the distinctive internal structure of a thought or perception or action plan residing in the cerebral cortex, an emotion residing in the hypothalamus, and a connecting strand through the amygdala.

    Memes should not be thought of as exactly analogous to genes. The evolution of memes is much more complex and much more difficult to define precisely. It is difficult to tell where one meme ends and the next one begins. How exactly does one subdivide cultural beliefs into units? To some extent the same difficulty exists with genes—the dividing line between genes can be poorly defined—but the confusion is less, and genes at least come in definite atomistic units, the base pairs of the DNA molecule. For these reasons, genetic evolution is easier to understand and to describe mathematically. Furthermore, gene mutations are thought to be essentially random, accumulating through generations at a steady rate, whereas the process by which memes mutate is not well defined. Indeed intelligent design is actually present in the case of meme evolution. A person can sit down, think hard, intelligently design a meme, and then send it out into the culture. The mixture of accident, random variation, intelligent design, and perhaps sometimes not-so-intelligent design, gives the process of meme evolution a confusing complexity. Yet even though the ground rules are modified and greatly diversified in the case of memes, the fundamental principles of Darwinian evolution are still present. Memes that are better at replicating, at spreading from person to person, outcompete the weaker memes. The hypothesis of cultural evolution by meme is almost certainly valid in principle.

    The ideas discussed in this book provide a psychological and neuroscientific basis for the idea of meme evolution. The root cause is social perception. The method is imitation. The consequence is the spread of memes from person to person.

Religion

    In previous chapters I discussed the spirit world including God, soul, ghosts, and angels, and suggested that these things are perceptions of mind. Yet for all the discussion of gods and ghosts I have not talked much about religion. Religion is a cultural phenomenon that is much larger than a belief in a soul or a deity. In this final section I would like to add a few brief speculations about religion as a cultural phenomenon.

    I grew up as an atheist believing in the brain rather than the immortal soul. Like almost all people taken by a particular belief system, I harbored contempt and fear toward competing belief systems. I was hostile to religion just as the religious are often hostile toward each other and toward scientific atheism. We are all humans alike, I guess. It has taken me many years to grow away from that harsh position, and I think my opinions are still in the process of changing.

    What I find most surprising is that I lost my negativity toward religion by insisting that I take an intellectually rigorous and scientific perspective. Religion is something complex and marvelous that people do. As a naturalist, I should be delighted to think about it and study it. I don’t mean studying it for the purpose of reducing it and dismissing it. I mean studying it with a certain degree of respect, as one might study the incredible complexity of whale society, or the richness of the chemistry inside a cell. To gain some scientific understanding of religion does not explain it away or trivialize it. The analytical perspective hopefully can open a sliver of a window on who we are and how we got to be so, well, human.

    I know that atheism is not palatable to many people. Some share my point of view and some do not. The ideas described below, however, stand whether or not one believes in a god. Through these ideas I attempt to come to an understanding of human religion from the point of view of social imitation and memes. It seems to me that both believers and atheistic scientists should find the speculations sensible. Whether you inhabit religion from the inside, or view it from a cultural distance, surely it is clear in either case that religion is something that changes