There is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.
Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.
You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you can say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.
Einstein also said, It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
We can’t prove there are no fairies but that doesn’t mean we think there’s a 50:50 chance fairies exist.
Premature erection of alleged philosophical problems is sometimes a smokescreen for mischief.
I suspect that both astronomers were, yet again, bending over backwards to be polite: theologians have nothing worthwhile to say about anything else; let’s throw them a sop and let them worry away at a couple of questions that nobody can answer and maybe never will.
The phenotypic effects of a meme may be in the form of words, music, visual images, styles of clothes, facial or hand gestures, skills such as opening milk bottles in tits, or panning wheat in Japanese macaques.
Sterelny challenges us to explain ‘how we can be simultaneously so smart and so dumb’.75.
The anthropologist Helen Fisher, in Why We Love, has beautifully expressed the insanity of romantic love, and how over-the-top it is compared with what might seem strictly necessary.
How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history?
The genes in one organism’s cells, then, can have extended phenotypic influence on the living body of another organism; in this case a parasite’s genes find phenotypic expression in the behaviour of its host.
The new copy of the meme is then in a position to broadcast its phenotypic effects, with the result that further copies of itself may be made in yet other brains.
But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations.
I am persuaded that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.
Martin Luther was well aware that reason was religion’s arch-enemy, and he frequently warned of its dangers: ‘Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.’84 Again: ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.’ And again: ‘Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.
Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.
There is no intrinsic tendency in gene pools for particular genes to increase or decrease in frequency. But when there is a systematic increase or decrease in the frequency with which we see a particular gene in a gene pool, that is precisely and exactly what we mean by evolution.
Returning, for clarification, to DNA as our archetypal replicator, its consequences on the world are of two important types. Firstly, it makes copies of itself, making use of the cellular apparatus of replicases, etc. Secondly, it has effects on the outside world, which influence the chances of its copies’ surviving.
Before writing was invented and before scientific archaeology started, word-of-mouth storytelling, with all its Chinese Whispery distortions, was the only way people learned about history.