Re: [asa] An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong

On 10/31/06, Pim van Meurs <pimvanmeurs@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I
>
> Any references to Dawkins denying a genetic component to morality and vice
> versa a Hauser rejecting a memetic component?
>

From the NY Times review of the God Delusion:

Dawkins's own attempt at a natural history is Darwinian, but not in the way
> you might expect. He is skeptical that religion has any survival value,
> contending that its cost in blood and guilt outweighs any conceivable
> benefits. Instead, he attributes religion to a "misfiring" of something else
> that is adaptively useful; namely, a child's evolved tendency to believe its
> parents. Religious ideas, he thinks, are viruslike "memes" that multiply by
> infecting the gullible brains of children. (Dawkins coined the term "meme"
> three decades ago to refer to bits of culture that, he holds, reproduce and
> compete the way genes do.) Each religion, as he sees it, is a complex of
> mutually compatible memes that has managed to survive a process of natural
> selection. ("Perhaps," he writes in his usual provocative vein, "Islam is
> analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.")
> Religious beliefs, on this view, benefit neither us nor our genes; they
> benefit themselves.

Dawkins's gullible-child proposal is, as he concedes, just one of many
> Darwinian hypotheses that have been speculatively put forward to account for
> religion. (Another is that religion is a byproduct of our genetically
> programmed tendency to fall in love.) Perhaps one of these hypotheses is
> true. If so, what would that say about the truth of religious beliefs
> themselves? The story Dawkins tells about religion might also be told about
> science or ethics. All ideas can be viewed as memes that replicate by
> jumping from brain to brain. Some of these ideas, Dawkins observes, spread
> because they are good for us, in the sense that they raise the likelihood
> of our genes getting into the next generation; others — like, he claims,
> religion — spread because normally useful parts of our minds "misfire."Ethical values, he suggests, fall into the first category. Altruism, for
> example, benefits our selfish genes when it is lavished on close kin who
> share copies of those genes, or on non-kin who are in a position to return
> the favor. But what about pure "Good Samaritan" acts of kindness? These,
> Dawkins says, could be "misfirings," although, he hastens to add,
> misfirings of a "blessed, precious" sort, unlike the nasty religious ones.
> [Emphasis mine]
>

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Received on Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:45:55 -0700