The Meme Machine

196 THE MEME MACHINE
these are typically rulers of various kinds, together with soldiers and priests.
Diamond (1997) argues that the function of ideologies and religions in
chiefdoms is to justify the redistribution of wealth, the authority of the rulers,
and warfare. Chiefs typically take enormous amounts of wealth from working
people and use some of it to build grand temples or public works as visible signs
of their power. The people may accept their wealth being taken from them, as
they accept taxation in modern societies, if they obtain benefits in return. These
benefits may include the reduction of violence within the society, protection
from enemies, or facilities for public use. Sometimes the ruler and priest are the
same person, but in larger societies separate priests take on the religious
functions. The priests promote and police the religious beliefs; the beliefs are
then used to justify the conquest of other peoples from whom more goods and
power can be stolen.
In memetic terms what this amounts to is that the religious memes are more
likely to survive and replicate than competing memes are. For example,
religions that required no priests, that took no taxes, or that built no impressive
buildings, would have been at a disadvantage. This meant the proliferation of
highly organised and stratified societies and of priests who taught and
maintained the religion. Religious memes have therefore played an important
role in the development of human societies.
The coevolutionary question is whether they have affected the genes along
the way. E. O. Wilson (1978) treated religions as a challenge to his new science
of sociobiology and speculated about the ways in which religious belief could
provide a genetic advantage. For example, religions often include prohibitions
against eating potentially contaminated foods, and against incest and other risky
sexual activities, and encourage believers to have large and well-protected
families. In these and other ways religious belief would benefit the genes of
believers and so be expected to continue. The evolutionary psychologist Steven
Pinker (1997) has argued that religious beliefs are by-products of the brain
modules that were designed to do other things; spirits and gods are based on our
concepts of animals and people; supernatural powers are inferred from natural
powers; the idea of other worlds is based on dreams and trances. As he puts it:
‘religious beliefs are notable for their lack of imagination (God is a jealous man;
heaven and hell are places; souls are people who have sprouted wings)’ (Pinker
1997, p. 557). These authors argue either that religions provide a genetic
advantage, or that they are the by-product of things that once provided genetic
advantage. They do not consider the possibility of memetic advantage, nor of
memes driving genes.