{"id":3043,"date":"2009-03-29T09:58:45","date_gmt":"2009-03-29T09:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/?p=3043"},"modified":"2013-10-04T23:43:06","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T22:43:06","slug":"darwin-dennett-and-dumbos-magic-feather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/2009\/03\/29\/darwin-dennett-and-dumbos-magic-feather\/","title":{"rendered":"Darwin, Dennett and Dumbo’s Magic Feather"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since I \u00a0posted 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!<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Disney’s Dumbo the Elephant got rid of his magic feather.\u00a0\u00a0 He realised it was\u00a0 just a temporary crutch that gave him the courage to be all that he could be.<\/p>\n

For philosopher Daniel Dennett, speaking on ‘A Darwinian Perspective on Religions’ , religion is just like Dumbo’s feather – a crutch we can do without.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a summary of the British Humanist Association (BHA) event I\u00a0 joined earlier this month at South Place Ethical Society’s Conway Hall in London.<\/p>\n

\"Daniel
Daniel Dennett speaking at the BHA event at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Chairing this second lecture in the BHA’s\u00a0 Darwin 200 special lecture series, Richard Dawkins\u00a0 introduced\u00a0 Daniel Dennett as the scientists’ philosopher; someone who takes time out to keep up to date with the scientific literature.\u00a0 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,\u00a0 line on religion.<\/p>\n

\"Daniel
Daniel Dennett with Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (photo Tim Jones)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What was in store for the world’s religions?\u00a0 Would they sweep the planet?\u00a0 Would they die out rapidly or drift out of fashion –\u00a0 like the smoking habit ?\u00a0 Or would they transform themselves into creedless moral entities – keeping up the good work but without the mumbo-jumbo? \u00a0\u00a0 Whatever the future holds\u00a0 for religion, Dennett’s mantra is that if we are going to have any steer over it, we had better\u00a0 understand it – from a scientific point of view.<\/p>\n

\"A
A Darwinian Perspective on Religion (Photo Tim Jones)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dennett treats religion as a Darwinian phenomenon.\u00a0 Human beings put a lot of energy into it – so what’s the biological justification behind it?<\/p>\n

Religions, Dennett argues,\u00a0 are the inevitable product of word evolution.\u00a0\u00a0 He see words simply as memes that can be pronounced.\u00a0 Memes – the name coined by Dawkins\u00a0 to describe units of cultural information transfer that are\u00a0 in some ways similar to genes. \u00a0 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.\u00a0 So however crazy an idea expressed in words might be, it can still multiply irrespective of its meaning being understood or making rational sense.<\/p>\n

How might the first word memes have come about?\u00a0\u00a0 Using a Darwinian analogy,\u00a0 Dennett likened the first word memes\u00a0 to wild animals evolving through natural selection in which “evolution is the amplification of something that almost never happens” .\u00a0\u00a0 As such, it would only have taken someone to give an arbitrary\u00a0 name to a strange noise in the woods one day (fairy, goblin, monster etc.), for that name to eventually get around a wider community.\u00a0 The seeds of superstition would have been sown. \u00a0 Some\u00a0 notable memes, by virtue of a special repulsiveness\u00a0 or\u00a0 attractiveness, would have survived into folklore. \u00a0 It is these memes, Dennett said, that are “the ancestors of the gods” at the core of the world’s religions.<\/p>\n

\"Richard
Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (Photo Sven Klinge)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But that was only phase one.\u00a0 When these ‘wild memes’ are purposefully looked at, studied, and manipulated by people, they become more powerful.\u00a0 Some humans (e.g.priests) might dedicate themselves to keeping such memes alive and thriving,\u00a0 even when by themselves they are no longer very convincing.\u00a0\u00a0 The modern religions resulting from this process and\u00a0 that still survive today represent a tiny fraction of all past religions, and are analogous to surviving languages or species.<\/p>\n

Good design means these husbanded memes have inbuilt mechanisms for survival.\u00a0 For example, many religions make man a ‘slave to the meme’ – it’s called subservience.<\/p>\n

Dennett described an interesting possible influence of the placebo effect in our cultural religious development.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Other self-maintenance devices built into\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Dennett argued we no longer need the crutch represented by Dumbo’s feather.\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed, it’s harmful to hang on to religion, what with the likes of cult suicides and\u00a0 death sentences for blasphemy. \u00a0 But religion is most harmful\u00a0 as a threat to a rational world view. \u00a0 And how does religion differ from other factors that disable rationality, such as drugs or alcohol?\u00a0 Only religion, Dennett said, “honours the disability”.<\/p>\n

Also Interesting – Dennett’s debate last year with Robert Winston<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I \u00a0posted 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.\u00a0\u00a0 He realised it was\u00a0 just a temporary crutch that gave him the courage to be all … Continue reading Darwin, Dennett and Dumbo’s Magic Feather<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[175,449,13],"tags":[275,276,507,1390,33,1399,64],"class_list":["post-3043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biology","category-philosophy-of-science","category-religion","tag-bha","tag-british-humanist-association","tag-conway-hall","tag-daniel-dennett","tag-darwin","tag-religion","tag-richard-dawkins"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/dennet.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkpOr-N5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3043"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18275,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3043\/revisions\/18275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communicatescience.com\/zoonomian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}