Tag Archives: bha

Darwin, Dennett and Dumbo’s Magic Feather

Since I  posted this blog, the BHA have issued a video of the whole event. So for a summary – read the blog; for the whole smash…here it is!

Disney’s Dumbo the Elephant got rid of his magic feather.   He realised it was  just a temporary crutch that gave him the courage to be all that he could be.

For philosopher Daniel Dennett, speaking on ‘A Darwinian Perspective on Religions’ , religion is just like Dumbo’s feather – a crutch we can do without.   This is a summary of the British Humanist Association (BHA) event I  joined earlier this month at South Place Ethical Society’s Conway Hall in London.

Daniel Dennett speaking at the BHA event at Conway Hall
Daniel Dennett speaking at the BHA event at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)

Chairing this second lecture in the BHA’s  Darwin 200 special lecture series, Richard Dawkins  introduced  Daniel Dennett as the scientists’ philosopher; someone who takes time out to keep up to date with the scientific literature.  And strangely perhaps, it is Dennett the philosopher, not Dawkins the scientist, of these two champions of atheism, who tends to take the more studious, less obviously attacking,  line on religion.

Daniel Dennett with Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)
Daniel Dennett with Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)

Taking to the podium in cheerful good humour, prompted in part by the obvious similarity between his own bearded visage and that of the cardboard Darwin cut-out standing stage left, Dennett launched enthusiastically into the reverse engineering of religion.

What was in store for the world’s religions?  Would they sweep the planet?  Would they die out rapidly or drift out of fashion –  like the smoking habit ?  Or would they transform themselves into creedless moral entities – keeping up the good work but without the mumbo-jumbo?    Whatever the future holds  for religion, Dennett’s mantra is that if we are going to have any steer over it, we had better  understand it – from a scientific point of view.

A Darwinian Perspective on Religion (Photo Tim Jones)
A Darwinian Perspective on Religion (Photo Tim Jones)

Dennett treats religion as a Darwinian phenomenon.  Human beings put a lot of energy into it – so what’s the biological justification behind it?

Religions, Dennett argues,  are the inevitable product of word evolution.   He see words simply as memes that can be pronounced.  Memes – the name coined by Dawkins  to describe units of cultural information transfer that are  in some ways similar to genes.   Further, words and letters represent a digitisation of language, meaning they can be accurately replicated – even without understanding, because of their consistency with a semantic alphabet.  So however crazy an idea expressed in words might be, it can still multiply irrespective of its meaning being understood or making rational sense.

How might the first word memes have come about?   Using a Darwinian analogy,  Dennett likened the first word memes  to wild animals evolving through natural selection in which “evolution is the amplification of something that almost never happens” .   As such, it would only have taken someone to give an arbitrary  name to a strange noise in the woods one day (fairy, goblin, monster etc.), for that name to eventually get around a wider community.  The seeds of superstition would have been sown.   Some  notable memes, by virtue of a special repulsiveness  or  attractiveness, would have survived into folklore.   It is these memes, Dennett said, that are “the ancestors of the gods” at the core of the world’s religions.

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (Photo Sven Klinge)
Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (Photo Sven Klinge)

But that was only phase one.  When these ‘wild memes’ are purposefully looked at, studied, and manipulated by people, they become more powerful.  Some humans (e.g.priests) might dedicate themselves to keeping such memes alive and thriving,  even when by themselves they are no longer very convincing.   The modern religions resulting from this process and  that still survive today represent a tiny fraction of all past religions, and are analogous to surviving languages or species.

Good design means these husbanded memes have inbuilt mechanisms for survival.  For example, many religions make man a ‘slave to the meme’ – it’s called subservience.

Dennett described an interesting possible influence of the placebo effect in our cultural religious development.  Human susceptability to ritual may be a result of our reproductively successful ancestors being the ones who – through receptiveness to placebo – enjoyed the health benefits of shaman ritual.   Other self-maintenance devices built into  modern religions include the glorification of incomprehensibility, warnings not to engage with reasonable criticism (on the basis that you’re talking to the Devil, and he’s a better debater than you), and the idea that a belief in a god is a pre-condition for morality.

And that brought Dennett near to his close, and us full circle to Dumbo, and the argument that we have religion because we need it.  Dennett argued we no longer need the crutch represented by Dumbo’s feather.   Indeed, it’s harmful to hang on to religion, what with the likes of cult suicides and  death sentences for blasphemy.   But religion is most harmful  as a threat to a rational world view.   And how does religion differ from other factors that disable rationality, such as drugs or alcohol?  Only religion, Dennett said, “honours the disability”.

Also Interesting – Dennett’s debate last year with Robert Winston

“Very Little Can Stop The Train” Sir David King On Media Reporting and MMR

I’ve just returned from the annual British Humanist Association Darwin Day Lecture, this year delivered by Sir David King at a session chaired by Richard Dawkins.

Sir David King and Professor Richard Dawkins at the BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2009 (photo Tim Jones)
Sir David King and Professor Richard Dawkins at the BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2009 (photo Tim Jones)

King is a former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, and now heads up a multi-disciplinary organisation tackling climate change – The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment- at Oxford University.

His talk entitled  ‘Can British Science Rise to the New Challenges of the Twenty First Century?’ was very similar in content to one I watched him give at a PAWS event in November, and dealt less with British Science, and more with the complexities of tackling global climate change.   There were some new angles, but I’d refer you to my previous blog HERE – inspired by Sir David’s earlier talk – rather than repeat myself.   I believe a podcast of tonight’s event will appear on the BHA site in due course.

So perhaps, given the greater relevance to current debate over poor media reporting of science, and particularly that related to MMR (and the Goldacre/LBC radio encounter), you’d like to hear what Sir David volunteered tonight on that subject.  It came up in response to a question from the floor about the Daily Mail.  Sir David’s transposed response:

We’ve now got a measles epidemic growing in this country, and the measles epidemic is the result directly of a very poor piece of science from John Wakefield, somehow being published in the Lancet – should never have been published – the database was far too small.  And then gaining momentum in the media, and it’s not only the Daily Mail, John Humphreys was one of those pushing that… that the connection between MMR and autism raised real questions, and the take-up of the MMR vaccine began to fall very dramatically.  And my prediction a few years ago was that we would approach something like a hundred deaths a year from, amongst children, from measles as a measles outbreak occured, inevitably.

If you do models and you drop below 80% uptake of the vaccine, the measles must come back.  Of course the Daily Mail’s campaign was one of the instruments that got people very worried about that particular issue.  So I think that was an example where the science was so clear.  Let me tell you.  There was a Danish study of all the children born in Denmark over ten years of whom 15% had not had the MMR vaccine, and 85% had.  The statistical incidence of autism in the two groups was the same.   Now just to be on the…on the…..when I say the same within statistical error.  The nice thing was, from the point of view of those who were sceptics, that amongst the group who didn’t have the vaccine, there was a slight larger number- larger percentage – with autism.  Now any parent worrying about the situation, just needs surely to be given that set of statistics, and yet the Daily Mail wouldn’t publish it when I went to them.   What am I saying, [finding his words]well, it rarely gets their story right.  There is…there is a sort of disbelief, but I’m afraid when a newspaper is running a campaign, there’s very little can stop the train

To which Richard Dawkins, with a look of amazement and with apparent reference to the Daily Mail not printing the Denmark evidence, said – “I’m shocked


What’s On

Early warning of three events into the new year that folk might like to consider joining. The Darwin related talks will sell out fast for sure – so think ahead – like me.

‘Weird Science’, Saturday 17th January 2009, London

Organised by the Centre for Inquiry, this all-day event promises to explore ‘Weird Science – science of the weird, and weird and flaky science’ . So pretty weird.

Expect presentations from Ben Goldacre, Richard Wiseman, Chris French and Steven Law. The venue is Conway Hall, Red Lion Square. Details at Centre for Inquiry.

Darwin Day Lecture, 12th February 2009, London

Prof Sir David King

You’ll be aware from previous posts that Darwin will be a bigger deal than usual next year, and appreciate the need to book early for events like the NSS lunch on 7th February. An event guaranteed to be even more popular is the BHA’s annual Darwin Day Lecture, given by Professor Sir David King on ‘Can British Science Rise to the New Challenges of the Twenty First Century?’ Good question. The event will be held at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1 on Thursday 12th February at 6.30pm. Attendance at the lecture is £5 for members of the BHA and £7 for others. Tickets are available from the British Humanist Association on 020 7079 3580 or by email on info@humanism.org.uk

Dan Dennett Lecture, 19th March 2009, London

Dan Dennett

I’m not alone in tagging Dan Dennett as the more philosophical, patient, and possibly more persuasive member of the media-branded atheist quartet of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris.

On 19th March we will get to hear what will doubtless be an insightful and balanced analysis on ‘A Darwinian Perspective on Religions: Past, Present and Future’. Who better to deliver that than the author of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Penguin Science)
The location, prices, and contact details are as for the Darwin Day Lecture above.