Science vs. religion: a battle of the memes

David Deutsch

A book you might like to read: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30—or borrow it from your local university library).
    I'll entice you with one of the more intriguing paragraphs from David Albert's August 12 review (Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe") in The New York Times:

[Deutsch] also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for meme-­replication, one he calls "rational" and the other he calls "anti-rational." Rational memes—the sort that Deutsch imagines will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies—are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world actually works. Irrational memes—which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-Enlightenment societies—reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas.

That parenthetical about fear, does it remind you of anything? It reminds me of what passes for much (or at least one side) of "political discourse" in this country, with its mean-spirited, dogged anti-rationality.

Richard Dawkins

And what is a "meme"—a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his first book, The Selfish Gene (1976)?
    Albert explains it this way:

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items—languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions—in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. They are called "memes," and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

Albert elaborated on Deutsch's view of anti-rational memes. I'm not sure that I've quite understood it yet. Maybe you can help me:

And one particular subcategory of memes—about which Deutsch has very clever things to say—succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: "Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem functional would be told 'because I say so,' and in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its holders do not believe it.)"

    Or maybe I do understand it, if "the full explanation" is simply that it's true: the only reason the children are to do as they are told is that...they are told. Does that explanation "pretend not to tell the truth" by being so outlandish that we at first can't believe that it could possibly be the full explanation?

David Albert

Anyway, the reviewer, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, concludes:

[Deutsch, an Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford] is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.