Just as every gene is the centre of a radiating field of influence on the world, so every phenotypic character is the centre of converging influences from many genes, both within and outside the body of the individual organism.
Something has shifted in the intervening decades. It has shifted in all of us, and the shift has no connection with religion. If anything, it happens in spite of religion, not because of it.
When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books.
Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of an obsessive reverence for rules.
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.
But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can? I suspect that neither the Cambridge nor the Oxford astronomer really believed that theologians have any expertise that enables them to answer questions that are too deep for science.
But think about why it is impolite to ask such direct, factual questions of religious people today. It is because it is embarrassing! But it is the answer that is embarrassing, if it is yes.
It seems to me to require a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness.
The history-deniers themselves are among those I am trying to reach in this book. But, perhaps more importantly, I aspire to arm those are not history-deniers but know some – perhaps members of their own family or church – and find themselves inadequately prepared to argue the case.
There’s a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs.
The genotype may be a ‘physiological team’, but we do not have to believe that that team was necessarily selected as a harmonious unit in comparison with less harmonious rival units. Rather, each gene was selected because it prospered in its environment, and its environment necessarily included the other genes which were simultaneously prospering in the gene-pool. Genes with complementary ‘skills’ prosper in each others’ presence.
Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.
And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book.
What does complementariness mean for genes? Two genes may be said to be complementary if the survival of each, relative to its alleles, is enhanced when the other is abundant in the population.
To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for the preservation of the group.
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.
To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrills bottom that religion may be adaptive. – MAREK KOHN.
H. L. Mencken was prophetic when he wrote: ‘Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.
It is fundamental to the idea of a replicator that when a mistake or ‘mutation’ does occur it is passed on to future copies: the mutation brings into existence a new kind of replicator which ‘breeds true’ until there is a further mutation.