April 18, 20101220 Cleveland Ave.
3900 Vermont Street
San Diego, CA 92103
619-646-2191The Joyce Beers Community Center
Potluck. Bring a dish to share if you like.
Craig James author of the book The Religion Virus discusses Why Humans believe in God.
Have you ever wondered…
Who thought up heaven and hell, and why?
Why is guilt so critical to Christians?
Why doesn’t God have a wife?
Why is teaching religion to children critical to all churches?
And how can evolution answer all of these questions?
Cultural Evolution – Understanding Religion with the New Science of Memes
From the book (Chapter 1)…
“Why did the chicken cross the road?” What a dumb joke. But you’ve heard it, right? And you know the retort. Why is this stupid joke one of the most pervasive and reliable bits of verbal information ever passed from one human to another? Why is it passed, with extreme accuracy, to virtually every child? What makes children tell it to each other, year after year, generation after generation?
This is not a trivial question; it illustrates a deep and profound insight into human culture, that some ideas can be passed verbally and with high fidelity, but additionally, that these facts are passed along whereas other ideas fade into history. Something about the chicken joke causes it to reproduce itself. The joke itself contains the means for its own survival – it makes children want to repeat it.
The chicken joke is a perfect example of a self-replicating idea, an idea that makes you want to repeat it to someone else. Whether it’s a joke, an urban myth, a great story, or a hard lesson you’ve learned that you want to tell your children, each of these things carries within it the “seed” that causes it to be retold, to be copied from one human brain to another. In other words, each of these carries more than just the message itself; it also carries a motivation that makes you want to retell it. The message is the obvious, overt part of the joke, urban myth or lesson. The motivation is a consequence of the message’s contents, yet it is equally important. Without the motivation, the idea would die out.
Notice that this is a lot like how our genes work: Genes carry information, just as a joke carries information … your DNA shares a fascinating trait with jokes, urban myths and hard-learned lessons: They all contain a message and a motivation to reproduce.
Richard Dawkins was the first to recognize the parallels between ideas and genes, but he didn’t think it was just an amusing analogy. Dawkins realized there was something deeper, that even though biological life and ideas are radically different, there is an important underlying theory that ties the two together. Because these self-replicating ideas were so much like genes, Dawkins coined the term meme (a “mnemonic gene”).
… When I tell you a joke, I am essentially carrying out the joke’s version of sex: I am using your brain to make a copy of the joke meme that was in my brain. It uses your brain’s resources to keep itself alive (stored in your neurons), and if it’s funny enough, you’ll want to repeat the joke to someone else, thereby increasing the joke’s population by one more. This sounds a lot like a virus, doesn’t it?
Books will be on sale from Craig
