The Meme Machine

202 THE MEME MACHINE
may explain the persistence of religion in scientifically literate societies and in
societies in which political dogma has tried to erase all religious behaviour – and
failed. Perhaps our brains and minds have been moulded to be naturally
religious and it really is difficult to use logic and scientific evidence to change
the way we think – difficult, but not impossible.
Science and religion
I have implied that science is, in some sense, superior to religion, and I want to
defend that view. Science, like religion, is a mass of memeplexes. There are
theories and hypotheses, methodologies and experimental paradigms,
intellectual traditions and long-standing false dichotomies. Science is full of
ideas that are human inventions, and have arbitrary conventions and historical
quirks built into them. Science is not ‘The Ultimate Truth’ any more than any
other memeplex. However, memetics can provide a context in which to see why
science offers a better kind of truth than religion.
‘We are designed by natural selection to be truth-seeking creatures. Our
perceptual systems have evolved to build adequate models of the world and
predict accurately what will happen next. Our brains are designed to solve
problems effectively and to make sound decisions. Of course, our perception is
partial and our decision-making less than brilliant – but it is a lot better than
useless. If we had no memes, that would be that; we would have the best
understanding of the world that could be acquired in the circumstances. But we
do have memes, and with memes come not only new ways of controlling and
predicting the world, but meme tricks and free-loading memes, misleading
memes and false memes.
Science is fundamentally a process; a set of methods for trying to distinguish
true memes from false ones. At its heart lies the idea of building theories about
the world and testing them, rather like perceptual systems do. Science is not
perfect. Scientists occasionally cheat to gain power and influence, and their
false results can survive for decades, misleading scores of future scientists.
False theories thrive within science as well as within religion, and for many of
the same reasons. Comforting ideas are more likely to last than scary ones;
ideas that exalt human beings are more popular than those that do not.
Evolutionary theory faced enormous opposition because it provided a view of
humans that many humans do not like. The same will probably be true of