The Meme Machine

RELIGIONS AS MEMEPLEXES 195
and do survive, often by being passed in an unbroken chain from inspiring and
enlightened teachers to hard-working pupils. Zen Buddhism sticks quite closely
to the simplest teachings and includes no deities or hidden powers; no altruism
nor beauty tricks. One is told to find out the truth for oneself and trained simply
to sit and watch the mind until it becomes clear. These difficult ideas have
survived almost dying out in the East and are now spreading widely in the West
(Batchelor 1994). However, other forms of Buddhism are much more popular
all over the world, such as Tibetan Buddhism, with its numerous powerful
deities, beautiful buildings and paintings, stories of marvellous deeds, reciting of
sutras, chants, and liturgies. Whether or not there are true insights at the heart of
any religion, the fact is that clever memes will tend to beat them in the battle for
replication.
We can now see how and why religions have the power and persistence they
do. I want now to consider two further questions. First, have they played any
part in meme-gene coevolution? And second, how are religions changing now
that memes are being spread by modern technology?
The coevolution of religions and genes
The coevolutionary question is this. Have the religious memes that thrived in
the past had any effect on which genes were successful? If so, this would be
another example of memetic driving. I shall speculate here and hope that some
of the questions I raise may be answered by future research.
We know little of the earliest religions. There is evidence of burial of the
dead from the Neanderthals who lived from 130 000 to 40 000 years ago, but it is
likely that they were not our ancestors. About 50 000 years ago came what is
sometimes called the ‘Great Leap Forward’, characterised by improvements in
toolmaking, the beginnings of art, and the creation of jewellery which was
sometimes buried with the dead. We can only guess at religious beliefs but
burial rites at least suggest tone idea of an afterlife. Modern hunter-gatherer
societies have varied religious beliefs, including ancestor worship, special
powers attributed to the priest or shaman, and belief in an afterlife. So we might
guess that early human religions were something like this.
Early humans lived in bands or tribal societies and only gradually did more
complex stratified societies evolve. In chiefdoms or states there is enough
division of labour for some people to be completely freed from food production;