richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

T H E R O O T S OF R E L I G I O N 201
exploited and manipulated to the benefit of powerful individuals,
the strong possibility remains that the detailed form of each religion
has been largely shaped by unconscious evolution. Not by genetic
natural selection, which is too slow to account for the rapid
evolution and divergence of religions. The role of genetic natural
selection in the story is to provide the brain, with its predilections
and biases - the hardware platform and low-level system software
which form the background to memetic selection. Given this background,
memetic natural selection of some kind seems to me to
offer a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular
religions. In the early stages of a religion's evolution, before it
becomes organized, simple memes survive by virtue of their
universal appeal to human psychology. This is where the meme
theory of religion and the psychological by-product theory of
religion overlap. The later stages, where a religion becomes
organized, elaborate and arbitrarily different from other religions,
are quite well handled by the theory of memeplexes - cartels of
mutually compatible memes. This doesn't rule out the additional
role of deliberate manipulation by priests and others. Religions
probably are, at least in part, intelligently designed, as are schools
and fashions in art.
One religion that was intelligently designed, almost in its
entirety, is Scientology, but I suspect that it is exceptional. Another
candidate for a purely designed religion is Mormonism. Joseph
Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths
of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon,
inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history,
written in bogus seventeenth-century English. Mormonism, however,
has evolved since it was fabricated in the nineteenth century
and has now become one of the respectable mainstream religions of
America - indeed, it claims to be the fastest-growing one, and there
is talk of fielding a presidential candidate.
Most religions evolve. Whatever theory of religious evolution we
adopt, it has to be capable of explaining the astonishing speed with
which the process of religious evolution, given the right conditions,
can take off. A case study follows.