The God Delusion and disproving God's existence: memes and group selection

I have been posting on The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. In this post, I discussed Dawkins' explicit atheist bias.

I now wish to muse about a concept Dawkins uses, namely the concept of a meme, a concept which Dawkins originated, or at least brought to prominence, in his The Selfish Gene. Dawkins says that religion is largely useless, or worse, but acknowledges that the fact that most people subscribe to some sort of religion. If religion gives people a disadvantage, why hasn't natural selection operated against people who have one? Dawkins has an explanation. He says that religion is a meme.

So what is a meme? Well, according to Dawkins, a meme is a unit of culture -- a song, or a way of clothing oneself -- that can be replicated and passed along from person to person. It seems pretty clear that some songs, and some ways of clothing ourselves, can, indeed, be passed along to others, even though they aren't our descendants. Often this is done quite rapidly. Dawkins believes that various religious ideas are memes. He cites some examples: believing in a life after death; being specially blessed if you die a martyr's death for your religion; non-believers should be punished, even killed; belief in a supreme being; and others. (pp. 199-200).

Religious ideas, at least some of them, seem to run counter to what would be expected if natural selection operates as most scientists think it does. For example, being celibate, like Catholic priests are supposed to, or many female Protestant missionaries have done, would seem to work strongly against passing your genes on to the next generation. There is a branch of biology that concerns itself with apparent altruistic behavior. There are several possible explanations for it, all compatible with natural selection, which explain, in one way or another, how sacrificing oneself may really help the sacrificer's genes to be passed on. For example, going to war, and risking death, may make it more likely that your siblings, or other relatives, will survive to pass on genes that they share with you. It is difficult to see how becoming a celibate Protestant missionary helps that person's kin be more successful in passing on genes that they share with her, however.

Dawkins method of dealing with religious behavior that doesn't seem to give an advantage is to explain it as a meme -- something passed on by cultural replication, which can, he believes, be independent of natural selection for genes.

David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist, an expert on group selection. (There doesn't seem to be an article on him in the Wikipedia, but several of the references cited in the meme article in the link above were authored, or co-authored, by Wilson.) He is an atheist, and, therefore, agrees with Dawkins in many things. But he has two problems with Dawkins, as I read him.

The first problem is that Dawkins is not consistent with how he deals with group selection. How does group selection relate to the topic at hand? The Wikipedia article on the subject gives the example of viruses in a rabbit. If there is a group of viruses infecting rabbit A, and a different group infecting rabbit B, and the first group is genetically programmed to be virulent, and kill the rabbit quickly, then few or none of them will get the chance to pass themselves on to other rabbits. The entire group will be selected against, with respect to group B. It is possible that religious ideas are selected for in that way. A group that consistently works together to defend itself would probably be selected for more strongly than a group that doesn't cooperate. A group that is honest with each other might be less prone to stress and injury than one that deceives.

Says Wilson: One of the sleights of hand performed by Dawkins in The God Delusion, which takes a practiced eye to detect, is to first dismiss group selection and then to respectfully cite the work of Richerson and Boyd—without mentioning that their theory of cultural evolution is all about group selection. - Wilson, "Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Dawkins is Wrong About Religion," eSkeptic, July-Dec 2007.

Wilson's second problem is that he has studied religious behavior, and finds that much of it is of considerable practical value.That means that it should be selected for. People practicing, for example, refraining from smoking, for religious reasons, should be more likely to leave offspring than people who smoke.

So, Wilson, an important atheist scientist, has problems with Dawkins' science, and his characterization of religion.

Thanks for reading.

4 x 4 meme

Julana tagged me for this meme.

Here goes.

I'm supposed to list 4 jobs I've had.
I was a bean picker for my parents, at 3 cents a pound. This was while in late grade school and in high school. I could pick 200 pounds a day, and so could two of my brothers.
I was a pigeon and dove sexer (don't ask how this was done) for the Genetics Department of the University of Wisconsin. My research for a doctorate was on the genetics of blood antigens in such birds, and was pretty unimportant, except that I got a doctorate. We had to set up matings to do genetics, and we had to know the sex to do matings.
I was a professor at Southern Wesleyan University for 41 years. I taught biology, and some computer, math, physics, physical science, statistics and research, plus helped with a few inter-disciplinary seminars, and once each I taught health education and science fiction.
I'm currently an assistant babysitter for my grandson. (To my wife)

4 places I've lived:
Rural Sawyer County, Wisconsin. The high school I attended had only 15 members in my graduating class. My first school was a one-room country school. I believe I was the first male who finished that school to ever graduate from high school.
Madison, Wisconsin, while in graduate school. I spent six years there, which is more than most people take, but I wasn't in a hurry. I discovered C. S. Lewis in the children's section of the university library. I was involved in a newly planted church (which closed a few years after I left Madison.)
Dayton, Tennessee, while on a year's sabbatical at Bryan College.
San Diego County, California, while babysitting. (Our daughter has been deployed to a military base six hours away, and our son-in-law travels a lot.)
(I know, that's four, but . . .) We have lived in Pickens County, South Carolina, for most of our lives.

4 vacations I've taken:
For our twenty-fifth anniversary, we drove from Michigan to near Toronto, where we caught a train to Nova Scotia, where we spent several days. That was a good vacation. On the way back to Michigan, we happened upon Stratford, Ontario, and fell in love with the flowers, etc., there. Since then, all of our immediate family have spent a few days there, sometimes seeing a play or two (there is a Shakespeare festival there, nearly year around) and sometimes not. That's two vacations.
For our retirement, our daughters and sons-in-law planned, and helped finance, a trip to Washington and Oregon, with side trips to near Victoria, BC, and to extreme NW California.
Since my family lived in the Midwest, we didn't take vacations of any length, except to see my parents and whoever was living near them for several years after we married. But the four of us did go to Florida once, and, among other things, visited the Everglades and saw a coral reef from a glass-bottomed boat.

4 vehicles I have owned.
See here for more information on this matter.
My first car was a 1964 GMC Handi-van, with no A/C, and manual transmission.
We have owned a couple of Taurus station wagons, and three Honda sedans, plus a few other cars, mostly Chrysler products.

If anyone wants to do this, because of reading this, please do so. If you would be so kind, comment that you have, giving the URL if possible. If you want to, tag four other persons to do the same.

Thanks for reading.

Seven Sevens

Bonnie has mentioned my name as a person she'd like to have post on seven sevens. She didn't tag me. I'm responding, more or less, anyway.


Seven things to do before I die:
1. know that my relatives all are believers
2. see my children and their husbands happy with their work, etc.
3. believe that my local church is in a position to grow, not spectacularly necessarily, but healthily, spiritually, financially, and numerically
4. see alligators and moose again, a cougar (from a car) for the first time, and a mountain goat/sheep, all in the wild
5. attend a performance of most of Elijah or Messiah
6. learn how to edit videos taken with our video camera
7. believe that the government (all branches) is willing to honestly and seriously address (not necessarily solve) the problems of health care, poverty, ignorance, peace, the environment, justice, immigration and racism as a priority higher than getting re-elected



Seven things I cannot do:
1. Play in the NBA
2. cook like my wife or sons-in-law or daughters
3. understand most of what our 13-month-old grandson is saying
4. love other people as I should
5. get evangelicals to understand that the Bible does not make a rock-solid case that the world is only thousands of years old, and that claiming too strongly that it is makes Christianity look foolish in the eyes of some, to say nothing of denying some of what God reveals to us in nature
6. really sing well
7. organize my time as well as I should



Seven good things about my wife:
1. She is deeply compassionate
2. She tries hard to understand things that she doesn't
3. She loves me, our grandson, her daughters and sons-in-laws, our brothers, their wives and their kids and . . . you get the idea
4. She is a strong believer
5. She is willing to put up with, and occasionally enjoy, classical music
6. She helped me lose about 30 pounds, and keep it off
7. She is a wonderful companion on trips



Books or series important to me:
1. The Bible
2. Watership Down
3. Mere Christianity
4. Tolkien's Ring trilogy plus the Silmarillion
5. Le Guin's Earthsea books and short stories
6. If I ever teach again, the text for the course
7. Other works by George Macdonald, C. S. Lewis, Patricia McKillip, A. A. Milne, and many others.



Movies I like:
1. Hoosiers
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
3. The Mission
4. the recent Pride and Prejudice
5. Fried Green Tomatoes
6. Ever After
7. Anything that makes my wife happy to watch


Things I say most often:
1. "It's OK."
2. "Don't worry about it."
3. In response to how I am: "Better than I deserve."
4. "He/she/it/they can't help it."
5. "I/we can do it."
6, and 7. No doubt there are aggravating things I say that others would fill in here for me.


Seven people I'd like to join in on this, but I'm not going to ask them:
1. Drew
2. Jason
3. Laura
4. Brandy
5. Anyone else from my family, my church, or SWU
6. Katherine Fodor
7. some of my Flickr contacts


Thanks for reading!