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.
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.
Obviously, the vast majority of evolutionary change is invisible to direct eye-witness observation. Most of it happened before we were born, and in any case, it is usually too slow to be seen during an individual’s lifetime.
The word replicator is purposely defined in a general way, so that it does not even have to refer to DNA.
Why don’t religious people talk like that when in the presence of the dying?
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.
I am, indeed, quite sympathetic towards the idea that human culture provides a new milieu in which an entirely different kind of replicator selection can go on.
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.
The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned.
Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us.
From the viewpoint of this book an animal artefact, like any other phenotypic product whose variation is influenced by a gene, can be regarded as a phenotypic tool by which that gene could potentially lever itself into the next generation.
I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life.
What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54.