A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in a fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician treats a patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - AD 65)
Atheists might be roughly divided into two groups: The "Live and Let Live Atheists," who feel religion is misguided but harmless, and the "Anti-Religion Atheists," who believe religion is harmful. Some strongly anti-religion atheists even claim that religion is at the root of most of the world's evil, and assert that without religion, peace would reign and poverty and disease could be eliminated. Several bestselling books criticizing religion include words like "poison" and "delusion" in their titles.
These strong anti-religion views are not typical of atheists, but it is fair to say many or most atheists believe that religion does more harm than good. At the same time, almost all atheists believe in Darwin's Evolution Science.
These two beliefs, in Darwin's evolution and that religion is harmful, seem to create a paradox. The Christian satirist Becky Garrison, who gets many things wrong, is at least a good writer. Garrison puts the paradox succinctly, and shows that this is a genuine problem that atheists need to address. She writes:
Here's a real puzzler to hard-core Darwinians. If religion were a truly useless and destructive mechanism with no redemptive quantities whatsoever, then wouldn't faith be extinct by now? At the very least, I expect religion would be akin to an appendix or tonsils. ... [W]hat does this say to us, that religion is still standing?
As we've seen many times, evolution has a harsh and effective way of filtering out traits that are harmful. If religion is so awful, why hasn't evolution changed the human brain to make it resistant to religious memes? This is the anti-religion atheist's paradox: Why hasn't evolution turned us all into atheists?
There are two errors in Garrison's conclusion.
First, Garrison makes a classic mistake about evolution: Natural Selection works on the individual, not the group. Religion is an individual choice, but the burdens of religion may be on society. If religious beliefs benefits the individual, natural selection will favor it, even if religion is bad for society as a whole.
Second, parasites and symbiotes are very common in nature. Just because something is harmful doesn't mean you can get rid of it.
Let's explore these points in some detail, and see how they resolve the paradox.
It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.
– Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The difference between what's good for the individual and how that can be radically different from what's good for society is illustrated by the classic 1968 paper by zoologist Garrett Hardins entitled The Tragedy of the Commons. Imagine a village with ten farmers, and a pasture that the farmers all share ("the commons"), which can support about one hundred cows before overgrazing starts to damage the pasture. Good sense tells us that the if the farmers want to maximize the village's income, and be fair to everyone, then each farmer should have ten cows.
But good sense for the village is not good sense for each farmer – it's an inherently unstable situation. Suppose one greedy farmer buys an eleventh cow, what happens? The pasture now has 101 cows, which isn't really all that much different than 100, maybe the grass is a little degraded, and the overall herd productivity is a little less. But the greedy farmer fares quite well, his productivity is up almost ten percent!
In other words, each individual farmer is motivated to do something that's bad for the village. The cost of the extra cow is shared by all ten farmers, but the benefit goes to the one "greedy" farmer. If the village sticks to one hundred cows, the total weight of the herd (all the cows' weight combined) will be maximized. But if any individual farmer breaks the rules and buys an eleventh cow, that farmer will make more money.
The real tragedy that ensues is when the other nine farmers each look at the situation, and logically conclude that they should also each buy another cow. "After all," a farmer might say, "why should I be the only farmer with just ten cows?" So they too buy an extra cow, and now the pasture is seriously overgrazed. Perhaps one of the farmers, disappointed that his production isn't what he hoped for, buys a twelfth cow ... and so forth. The farmers' individual decisions are all logical, almost inevitable, yet the result is that all of the farmers are worse off than if they'd stuck with ten cows to begin with.
This is the "tragedy of the commons." In any situation where there is a commons, a shared resource, the economic forces almost guarantee the destruction of the commons. Whether it's a pasture for a few farmers, or the Pacific Ocean salmon fisheries, the individual is motivated to overuse the resource, to the detriment of all. The farmer buys too many cows, the fisherman catches too many fish, and the net result is disastrous.
This "tragedy of the commons" happens all the time in evolution. Recall from our earlier chapters that most species have far more offspring than can possibly survive, whether it's a spider laying thousands of eggs, a rabbit having dozens or hundreds of baby rabbits, or a mushroom spewing millions of spores into the air.
Rabbits' breeding habits are almost an exact analogy to the farmers-and-cows story. In any given ecology, the food available to the rabbits is limited, and there is some number of rabbits that would be best in that given ecology. Fewer rabbits, and some of the food goes to waste, more rabbits, and they start to starve, and to degrade their environment.
But do the rabbits breed until they get to this optimal population and then stop? No! They keep "breeding like rabbits." Rabbits that have the most babies are the ones whose genes get passed on to the next generation. If there was some sort of "responsibility gene" that told certain rabbits to slow down when the food ran short, the rabbits that didn't have that gene would breed faster, and the "responsibility gene" would quickly disappear. The brutal and inexorable "survival of the fittest" guarantees that the rabbits will breed far beyond the optimal population.
The idea of a "responsibility gene" in rabbits is amusing, but it has a real counterpart in the ideosphere of human memes: The Zero Population Growth (ZPG) Meme. In 1968, entomologist Paul Erlich published a seminal book called The Population Bomb, in which he pointed out that without family planning worldwide, humanity was facing a population "explosion" that could only end in famine, starvation, and probably wars. Erlich's book had some mathematical errors that made his predictions overly pessimistic, but he nevertheless brought the topic of zero population growth into the mainstream of modern thinking.
The idea that responsible families should limit themselves to two children, or even fewer, became a new ethic in America and Europe. Prior to Erlich's book, couples who had three, four, five or even more children were congratulated, but by the mid-1970's, large families were considered in many social circles to be a sign of irresponsibility. The ZPG Meme was firmly planted in American and European culture.
Just four short decades later, evolution has already started shredding the ZPG Meme. In countries like Germany, France, Switzerland, and The Netherlands, immigrants from places like Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East, people who never acquired the ZPG Meme, still have a very high birth rate. The native Germans, whose birth rate is below replacement levels, are facing a future where they will be the minority in their own country within a decade or two, overwhelmed by immigrant Germans who don't believe in the ZPG Meme and continue to have lots of children. The ZPG Meme is thus breeding itself out of existence.
Getting back to the point that started this chapter: Becky Garrison asked the question: If religion is so bad, why hasn't evolution eliminated it? We now know there is at least one scientific explanation: "Survival of the fittest" works on individuals, not on species or societies, whether we're talking about genetic evolution or memetic evolution. It is entirely possible for something to be harmful to the species, or to society, yet still be favored by evolution.
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, yet he makes gods by the dozens.
– Michel De Montaigne
The coral reefs and small islands that make up the South Pacific Kwajalein Atoll are among the most beautiful in the world. Like a string of pearls, they encircle one of the world's largest oceanic lagoons, over 2,000 square kilometers in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia. The first occupants arrived in the area over 3,000 years ago, and lived in relative obscurity until World War II. Sadly, their ancient way of life came to an abrupt end when the Japanese and Americans fought fierce battles on Kwajalein Island.
The real destruction of their ancient ways of living didn't start until a few years later when the United States decided to use the Kwajalein Atoll as the target area for intercontinental ballistic missiles and ballistic missile interceptors. Missiles were aimed at Kwajalein, and the interceptors tried to blow them up before they arrived. Needless to say, the United States couldn't have a bunch of people living in the target area, so the Islanders were uprooted from their ancient home islands. The tiny island of Ebeye at the south end of the atoll was virtually paved over, and a small city was built. Something like 6,000 Islanders were taken from their rich fishing grounds and coconut groves, and packed into the tiny island.
The Kwajalein Islanders, for a time at least, had a remarkably low incidence of suicide, in spite of the massive overcrowding on the island, and the culture shock caused by the United States' policies. For ten years, from 1955 to 1965, there wasn't a single suicide on the entire island of Ebeye. In 1966, a young man in jail hanged himself, but the event had little impact. Then, a few months later, another young man, the popular and respected son of a prominent businessman, found himself with two lovers and a baby by each. Despondent over his situation, he killed himself to avoid facing the consequences.
Three weeks later, another young man killed himself in a "copycat" suicide, then another, and the toll started mounting. In the next ten years, there were twenty-five suicides, all very similar to one another. It was almost always young men, almost always by hanging, and almost always accompanied by a note similar to the one written by the young man who started it all. The act of suicide gained a sort of cult underground status in the communities, and was found in graffiti, on T-shirts, and in the words of local songs played on the radio.
The "Micronesian Suicide meme" is best understood as a "disease germ," an idea that is inherently harmful, yet "sticks" because it has other traits that make it fascinating or appealing. Suicide and death have a dark attraction for teenagers who are maturing and learning the reality of their own mortality.
We've discussed both ends of the spectrum of inter-species relationships, from symbiosis (beneficial to both species) to fatal diseases (bad for both species). In reality, the relationships between species cover the whole spectrum, from diseases and parasites, to species so symbiotically intertwined that neither can live without the other.
You might be surprised to find that disease-causing organism are the least common infection in your body. Most of the critters that live in and on you cause few or no symptoms at all. These organisms' strategies are much more successful than a disease-causing infection. They slip in unnoticed, usually early in your life, and find their niche, perhaps on your skin, your eyelashes, your hair, or your gut.
Eye mites (demodex folliculorum or demodicids) are a great example. Most of us have these little worm-like mites living in the roots of our eyelashes. They're only 0.4 mm long (about fifteen thousandths of an inch), so they're essentially invisible, and the worst they'll ever do is make your eyes itch a little. You may have as many as a dozen or more on each of your eyelashes, yet most of us don't even know (or want to know) they're there.
Notice how the eye mite's successful strategy contrasts with disease-causing species. An influenza virus faces a hostile, and ultimately fatal, environment in your body. It has just a week or two to reproduce, make you sneeze and cough to infect the next person, before your body kills it off completely. It's tough being an influenza virus. By contrast, the eye mite settles in for the duration. An eye mite and its descendants will be with you, living peacefully and undisturbed, for your entire life.
Memes have a similar spectrum of relationships with humans. Some are symbiotic, in that they help you stay safe, find food, attract a mate, enjoy life, reproduce, and live comfortably. A meme in a hunter-gatherer tribe might help the tribe remember where certain foods can be found at different times of the year. Joke memes are fun and help us to relax and enjoy life. Morality memes help us get along and behave well towards one another. The meme that says, "Save the women and children" helps protect our families.
But, as in the biological world, there are parasitic memes, ideas that are harmful, yet survive. Memes that encourage young men to join gangs, encourage tobacco use, encourage credit-card overspending, and encourage drug use, are all harmful. Yet they thrive in our modern societies, and are remarkably hard to eradicate.
Everyone is quick to blame the alien.
Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
In October of 1859, Mr. Thomas Austin, of Winchelsea, Victoria (Australia) started one of the worst scourges in modern history. Mr. Austin managed to wipe out one eighth of all mammalian species in the entire continent of Australia, and the plant life across the continent was devastated so badly we can't calculate the full extent. Mr. Austin started a severe erosion problem that continue to this day, sweeping vast swaths of Australia's fertile topsoil out to sea. The damage Mr. Austin caused to Australian agriculture, ecosystem and economy is incalculable.
What horrible crime did Mr. Thomas Austin commit? On that fateful October day of 1859, Mr. Austin turned twenty-four rabbits loose. He was an avid hunter, and he missed the good ol' days back in England where he could go out and bag a few rabbits for his dinner table. So he wrote to his nephew to send along a few rabbits (along with some hares, partridges and sparrows).
Unfortunately, Australia proved a test case for the old saying, "They're breeding like rabbits." Within a mere ten years, those twenty-four rabbits had proliferated so much that over two million could be killed every year without making a dent in their population. Today, their destructive habits continue unabated, costing the farmers and government of Australia hundreds of millions of dollars each year in rabbit-abatement, damage to crops and other problems that they cause. They've even managed to survive the deliberate introduction of two rabbit plagues, a deadly myxoma virus which the government introduced in 1950, and a less effective calcivirus (Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease) in 1996.
On the major continents, species have a hard life. Virtually every plant, animal, insect, and fungus competes fiercely for its "supper" (whatever that might be), and is constantly battling predators and parasites. Grass gets eaten by rabbits, rabbits get eaten by coyotes, and coyotes are plagued by fleas and ticks, plus they must outsmart the wolves, bobcats and cougars who also want to eat rabbits. Nobody has "the good life."
One of the more fascinating consequences of the principles of evolution is that species tend to "coevolve" in a way that keeps species balanced. Imagine, for example, that the coyotes somehow evolved to be much faster than rabbits, so that they could easily catch all the rabbits they wanted. Sounds great (for the coyotes), right? Wrong – the coyotes would quickly kill all of the rabbits, then the coyotes would starve and become extinct.
Suppose instead that rabbits evolved to be much faster than coyotes, so that they'd never be caught. Sounds grand (for the rabbits), right? Wrong again. Faster rabbits have bigger muscles and bones, and it means these super-rabbits have to eat more to stay alive. Once the coyote population dwindled, the super-rabbits would be at an evolutionary disadvantage, because they would have to eat more to support the (now unnecessary) bones and muscles, so the lesser (slower) rabbits would have the advantage. Evolution constantly favors a balance between a huge variety of factors.
One of the most exciting synergies between two academic fields of study occurred when economists applied their mathematics to the field of evolution. The economists realized they could study ecosystems using a cost/benefit analysis. By weighing a benefit (a rabbit doesn't become a coyote's dinner) against a cost (the rabbit has to eat a more to support bigger muscles), economists were able to show why species tend to stay in a constant, balanced battle. If the rabbits get a little faster, the coyotes do too, but there's never a huge imbalance.
We already saw this effect in the previous section, where we noted that an infectious disease will die out if it is too deadly. If we look at this phenomenon from an economist's point of view, it makes perfect sense: The disease-causing organism gets benefits from invading your body (it can reproduce itself dramatically), but at the cost of possibly killing you. The ideal disease balances the costs and benefits, keeping you alive (but possibly altering your behavior) long enough for it to reproduce in the next victim.
When Mr. Austin's rabbits found themselves free in the Australian continent, all of the forces that had kept them in check were gone: There were no predators, no freezing winters, and none of the diseases that cut their numbers. And all the things that helped them thrive were easily available: Food was bountiful, the terrain was ideal, and by 1859 farming was widespread, giving the rabbits even more to eat. The rabbit's habit of breeding, well, like rabbits, was necessary in Europe because most rabbits died before reaching breeding age. But in Australia, most rabbits lived to maturity, and their population grew exponentially.
To be fair to Mr. Thomas Austin, terms like "ecology" and "evolution" were unknown in his day. Charles Darwin published his brilliant Origin of the Species in that same year, 1859, and it's a good bet that neither Mr. Austin or anyone else in Australia could have predicted dire consequences of releasing those rabbits. (Although Darwin himself, and many other scientists, had already documented the catastrophic effects that alien species can have.) Moreover, if Mr. Austin hadn't released the rabbits, someone else surely would have. Mr. Austin just happened to be the one history recorded as the perpetrator of this ecological catastrophe.
The story of rabbits in Australia is just one of the thousands of incidents of an "alien" (non-native) species that is introduced, causing untold ecological damage. The Mediterranean Fruit Fly destroyed the once-bountiful Hawai'ian fruit crops, while the tropical caulerpa algae is destroying the entire ecosystem of the Mediterranean Sea. Zebra mussels from Russian lakes are taking over America's Great Lakes. Water hyacinth from the Amazon River are suffocating fish and destroying water quality in Africa, costing African governments hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The list is distressingly long.
Culture and society are subject to the forces of evolution, just like rabbits and coyotes, as we've seen through our study of memes. Memes mutate, compete, and reproduce. It should be no surprise to find that there are "invasive alien species" in the world of memes, just like the rabbits of Australia. When a "foreign" meme is suddenly introduced into a culture, it can be just as devastating to the culture's established memes as the rabbits were to Australia's ecology.
The specific memeplex that interests us is, of course, religion. Consider the start of the seventeenth century, when the colonialist expansion period gained serious momentum. All of the major European powers were using their technological superiority to conquer and subjugate the rest of the world, primarily for economic gain. Along with the political and economic dominance came European religions – that is, Christianity.
The various Christian churches had been shaped and sharpened by sixteen centuries of inter- and intra-faith competition between the memes that make up the Christian religion viruses. And the memeplex didn't start with Jesus – we have studied extensively how the god Yahweh evolved and changed over thousands of years prior to the start of Christianity, and how even before Yahweh the religion memes were evolving. The competition among the various religious memes was fierce, and only the best, the ones that were the most appealing and had the best ability to reproduce, survived. Christianity was a highly evolved set of memes, filtered and improved by ten thousand or more years of the harshest meme competition in the history of the world.
The aboriginal religions of places like the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand never had a chance. Although their religions were old, and were venerated by their people, they simply didn't have the "sharp teeth and claws" of the highly evolved Christian religion's memes. They weren't as fit. The concepts of heaven, hell, guilt, intolerance and all the others we've discussed, were fully mature by the seventeenth century, and they made short work of the local religion memes.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Walter Clement Noel, a Caribbean man of African descent, was born on the island of Grenada in 1884. Because of changing race relations in the United States, blacks could be accepted at some universities and professional schools, although it was rare. Noel was an exceptional young man from a well-to-do Barbados family, with a solid education. His dream was realized when he was accepted at the Chicago College of Dental Surgery in 1904.
Unfortunately, before he even arrived in the United States, Mr. Noel already had serious health problems. He had bad skin lesions, joint pain, and shortness of breath. Not long after reaching Chicago, he was admitted to Presbyterian Hospital, where Dr. Ernest E. Irons, a twenty-seven-year-old intern working under the direction of Professor James B. Herrick, discovered something quite odd about Noel's blood – he had "peculiar elongated and sickle shaped" red blood cells. Over the next three years, Noel was readmitted to Presbyterian Hospital several times suffering from "muscular rheumatism" and "bilious attacks."
Walter Clement Noel graduated from dental school in 1907, and settled in Grenada where he became the second professionally trained dentist to practice in the capital city of St. Georges. But for Noel, like many others of African descent, his life was all too short. He practiced dentistry for the next nine years, but his symptoms persisted and worsened. Noel, the "first sickle cell anemia patient" died in 1916 at the age of thirty-two. Although his cause of death was listed as pneumonia, doctors today who are familiar with sickle cell anemia are virtually certain it was undetected pulmonary hypertension, caused by his disease.
Sickle cell anemia presented a paradox to scientists. The disease was well known to sub-Saharan Africans long before western medicine treated Walter Clement Noel. The Africans knew that it ran in families, and doctors who studied sickle cell anemia quickly learned that it was a genetic disease. Scientists and evolutionists were perplexed: Normally, a genetic disease that kills people such as Walter Clement Noel at a young age, and causes such severe illness, would quickly be eliminated by the inexorable filtering of natural selection. So why was sickle cell anemia so prevalent among the sub-Saharan Africans?
It turns out that in addition to its fatal effects, the deformed sickle-shaped red-blood cells are resistant to malaria. Malaria is widespread in the tropics, and particularly in the sub-Saharan Africa where sickle-cell anemia is common. When researchers put these two facts together, the "paradox" of sickle cell anemia was solved. The genetic disease was both harmful and beneficial, but the beneficial effects only help where malaria is common. Even though sickle cell anemia kills many people, more are saved by their resistance to malaria.
In other words, a genetic trait can be good and bad at the same time; the gene's survival depends on the net effect, not on just the good or the bad. Sickle cell anemia is only useful where malaria is present, and even there, the price of protection from malaria is paid for by much suffering and early death.
Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
– Edward Teller
The evolution of language, of your ability to receive memes from others and pass them on, had nothing to do with religion; language and memes evolved because they were hugely important to our survival and adaptability. But just as a virus can hijack the cells of your body to reproduce itself, human language can be hijacked for a different purpose by a "virus," in this case, the Religion Virus. The influenza virus doesn't "care" how or why all that cool biochemistry in your body's cells came into existence, it just uses it. Likewise, the Religion Virus doesn't care how human language came into existence, it just hijacks it for its own reproduction.
In this chapter, we learned that there are several reasons why harmful genes, and harmful memes, are not necessarily filtered out by evolution.
These four evolutionary principles are the solution to the atheist's paradox. Even though religion may be a net burden on society, this does not necessarily guarantee that evolution will filter it out. Our ability to speak, to pass memes from one generation to the next, gives us a huge evolutionary advantage over all other creatures on earth. When weighed against that, the religion virus could indeed be detrimental to society, and still survive.
The satirist Becky Garrison and her ilk, who try to turn Evolution Science against itself to "prove" that religion must be beneficial to humans, simply aren't educated enough in the beautiful and subtle details of Darwin's Evolution Science.