An
interesting response to Dawkins's book that actually moves the discussion beyond the religion good/bad argument. Here's what's interesting to me in David Sloan Wilson's discussion:
Consider genetic evolution by itself. When a new mutation arises, the total population consists of one group with a single mutant and many groups with no mutants. There is not much variation among groups in this scenario for group selection to act upon. Now imagine a species that has the ability to socially transmit information. A new cultural mutation can rapidly spread to everyone in the same group, resulting in one group that is very different from the other groups in the total population. This is one way that culture can radically shift the balance between levels of selection in favor of group selection. Add to this the ability to monitor the behavior of others, communicate social transgressions through gossip, and easily punish or exclude transgressors at low cost to the punishers, and it becomes clear that human evolution represents a whole new ball game as far as group selection is concerned.
With culture, mutations can be shared and advantageous new things can benefit everyone and not just the owner. It's like the internet. One computer is useful, a computer attached to other computers on the net is exponentially more powerful. From this perspective, religion is just another word for culture: a way of ordering, structuring, and transmitting the core information that is shared amongst a group of human beings. Basically, memes. Or the blogosphere.
What's missing from Wilson's discussion is that Dawkins considered memes to be just as selfish as genes. Some transmit more easily than others regardless of their usefulness or wisdom. He also ignores the fact a lot of the information that is socially transmitted is just plain bogus, superstitious or wrong. It's also not clear what distinguishes religious beliefs from more useful information like how to hunt, when its good to plant crops, etc. Nor does it explain how societies organize themselves into castes and cliques that determine shares of the wealth or is allowed to marry whom.
In the end religion is reduced to just those things that exist beyond human beings like nature and the after-life, or as a moralistic police force designed to keep the peasants in-line. It's Nietzschean resentment where the weak use memes to rule the strong, and choose the void for their purpose rather than being void of purpose.
Now that I've thought it through a little, the article really begs more questions than it answers. And, as has been said before, we don't need biology to explain how social transmission works. We already have Austen and Tolstoy.
