Saffron wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:DWill wrote:I didn't realize that by "evolutionary" you weren't referring to natural selection, but to cultural evolution.
Are you suggesting that cultural evolution does not obey natural selection? Dawkins and Darwin rightly see natural selection as the universal law of life. Wright, including with the very title of his book, accepts this scientific premise. Culture is part of nature and obeys its laws. The evolution of God is memetic rather than genetic. It may seem that humans have escaped the confines of nature, but this is an illusion.
Robert, I do have a problem with the concept that culture evolves in the same way as natural selection. The whole idea of memes in the way that you present them is problematic for me. The way I have seen the idea of meme used is more of a descriptor of how an idea spreads -- very simular to how a virus spreads through a community or even the world. I just can not make the leap that you make, that memes are the method that culture replicates itself.
Hi Saffron, I think this issue of memes is at the nub of the radicality in Wright's thesis in
The Evolution of God. He offers a materialist natural scientific explanation for religion. This is something that religious people who see religion as derived from divine revelation cannot accept on principle. For all his politeness, Wright is an atheist, explaining cognition in terms that are logically cognate with physics.
DWill and I have debated memes for several years. It is worth looking into the logical framework of the memetic thesis to investigate at what point people find it problematic. The two contrasting lines of attack are the religious argument that memes are unacceptable because culture transcends nature, and the scientific argument that memes are wrong because culture does not evolve by natural selection.
According to the index, Wright mentions memes on pages 15, 66 and 462-476. The first mention, in The Primordial Faith, says according to "cultural evolutionism ... 'memes' - rituals, beliefs and other basic elements of culture - spread by appealing to non-rational parts of human nature" (p15). I think Wright identifies himself as a cultural evolutionist, so he is endorsing the meme theory here.
My view is that part of why this idea is disturbing is that we naturally can and must assume that culture transcends nature as a basis of our freedom, but this assumption is ultimately wrong. When our culture takes off down a path that is in some way physically incompatible with our material survival, then eventually this cultural path will prove unsustainable and will stop. You cannot do things that are not possible. Natural selection exists as a correcting and regulating mechanism for culture.
Another feature of memetics that I find intuitively attractive is the evolutionary theme of cumulative adaptation as an explanation for cultural change. Evolution progresses by precedent, taking small steps which build upon what has gone before. Just as large mutations always fail, large cultural shifts are problematic. Cultural change is evolutionary, so any new idea must establish continuity if it is to succeed. This memetic view is still compatible with Hegel's theory of cultural evolution as proceeding by thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Ideas for change naturally produce a reaction, and then the idea and its opposite eventually combine in some way as a synthesis which becomes a new higher thesis.
The meme of God has proven extraordinarily adaptive over the last few thousand years as a strategy for cultural evolution, including by making people think they are above nature. The god meme produced the atheist antithesis, and we are now seeing emergence of a synthesis in natural explanations for the evolution of God.
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