Are we now confusing morality and religion? Seems that Dawkins
accepts that ethical values may spread because they are good for us.
Back to the original question: Is Dawkins denying any role for
genetics in morality (and religion) and is Hauser denying any role
for memetics?
After all the original claim of Rich is what I would like to explore.
On Oct 31, 2006, at 3:45 PM, Rich Blinne wrote:
>
>
> 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 Oct 31 18:53:34 2006
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