Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final Day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to “hasten the inevitable,” not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice—and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of them are prepared to lie and even to kill, to do whatever it takes to help bring what they consider celestial justice to those they consider the sinners. Are they a lunatic fringe? They are certainly dangerously out of touch with reality, but it is hard to know how many they are.16 Are their numbers growing? Apparently. Are they attempting to gain positions of power and influence in the governments of the world? Apparently. Should we know all about this phenomenon? We certainly should.

  Hundreds of Web sites purport to deal with this phenomenon, but I am not in a position to endorse any of them as accurate, so I will not list any. This in itself is worrisome, and constitutes an excellent reason to conduct an objective investigation of the whole End Times movement, and particularly the possible presence of fanatical adherents in positions of power in the government and the military. What can we do about this? I suggest that the political leaders who are in the best position to call for a full exposure of this disturbing trend are those whose credentials could hardly be impugned by those who are fearful of atheists or brights: the eleven senators and congressmen who are members of the “Family” (or the “Fellowship Foundation”), a secretive Christian organization that has been influential in Washington, D.C., for decades: Senators Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), Conrad Burns (R., Mont.), and Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.).17 Like the nonfanatical Muslim leaders in the Islamic world on whom the world is counting to cleanse Islam of toxic excess, these nonfanatical Christians have the influence, the knowledge, and the responsibility to help the nation protect itself from those who would betray our democracy in pursuit of their religious agendas. Since we certainly don’t want to relive McCarthyism in the twenty-first century, we should approach this task with maximal public accountability and disclosure, in a bipartisan spirit, and in the full light of public attention. But of course this will require that we break the traditional taboo against inquiring so openly and searchingly about religious affiliations and convictions.

  So, in the end, my central policy recommendation is that we gently, firmly educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives.18 Ignorance is nothing shameful; imposing ignorance is shameful. Most people are not to blame for their own ignorance, but if they willfully pass it on, they are to blame. One might think this is so obvious that it hardly needs proposing, but in many quarters there is substantial resistance to it. People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children—especially, apparently, their daughters. We are going to have to persuade them that there are few pleasures more honorable and joyful than being instructed by your own children. It will be fascinating to see what institutions and projects our children will devise, building on the foundations earlier generations have built and preserved for them, to carry us all safely into the future.

  APPENDIX A The New Replicators

  [For context, see p. 81. Reprinted, with permission, from The Encyclopedia of Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).]

  It has long been clear that in principle the process of natural selection is substrate-neutral—evolution will occur whenever and wherever three conditions are met:

  replication

  variation (mutation)

  differential fitness (competition)

  In Darwin’s own terms, if there is “descent [1] with modification[2]” and “a severe struggle for life” [3], better-equipped descendants will prosper at the expense of the competition. We know that a single material substrate, DNA (with its surrounding systems of gene expression and development), secures the first two conditions for life on earth and the third condition is secured by the finitude of the planet as well as more directly by uncounted environmental challenges. But we also know that DNA won out over early variations that have left their traces and ongoing exemplars, such as the RNA viruses and prions. Are there on this planet any other completely different evolutionary substrates that have arisen? The best candidates are the brainchildren, planned or unplanned, of one species, Homo sapiens.

  Darwin himself proposed words as an example: “The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection” (Descent of Man, 1871, p. 61). Billions of words are uttered (or inscribed) every day, and almost all of them are replicas—in a sense to be discussed below—of earlier words perceived by their utterers. Replication is not perfect, and there are many opportunities for variation or mutation in pronunciation, inflection, or meaning (or spelling, in the case of written words). Moreover, words are roughly segregated into lineages of replication chains; for instance, we can trace a word’s descendants from Latin to French to Cajun. Words compete for airtime and print space in many media, with words going obsolete and dropping out of the word pool, while other words spring up and flourish. We discover conTROVersy going to fixation in some regions and CONtroversy going to fixation in others, while the original meaning of “begs the question” is supplanted in some quarters by a variant. The detectable historical changes in languages have been studied from one Darwinian perspective or another since Darwin’s own day, and a great deal is known about patterns of replication, variation, and competition in the processes that have yielded the diverse languages of today. Indeed, some of the investigative methods of modern evolutionary biology, in bio-informatics, for instance, are themselves descended from pre-Darwinian researches conducted by paleographers and other early scholars of historical linguistics. As Darwin noted, “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously the same” (1871, p. 59).

  Words, and the languages they populate, are not the only culturally transmitted variants that have been proposed, however. Other human acts and practices that spread by imitation have been identified as potential replicators, as have some of the habits of nonhuman animals. The physical substrates of these media are various indeed, including sounds and all manner of visible, tangible patterns in the behavior of the vector organisms. Moreover, behaviors often produce artifacts (paths, shelters, tools, weapons,…signs or symbols) that may serve as better exemplars for the purposes of replication than the behaviors that produce them, being relatively stable over time, and hence in some regards easier to copy, as well as being independently movable and storeable—like seeds in this regard. One human artifact, the computer, with its prolific copying ability, has recently provided a distinctly new substrate, in which both deliberate and inadvertent experiments in artificial evolution are now burgeoning, taking advantage especially of the emergence of gigantic networks of linked computers that permit the swift dispersal of propagules made of nothing but bits of information. These computer viruses are simply sequences of binary digits that can have an effect on their own replication. Like macromolecular viruses, they travel light, being nothing more than information pack
ets including a phenotypic overcoat that tends to gain them access to replication machinery wherever they encounter it. And, finally, researchers in the new field of Artificial Life aspire to generate both virtual (simulated, abstract) and real (robotic) self-replicating agents that can take advantage of evolutionary algorithms to explore the adaptive landscapes they are situated in, generating improved designs by processes that meet the three defining conditions while differing from carbon-based life-forms in striking ways. While at first glance these phenomena may appear to be only models of evolving entities, thriving in modeled environments, the boundary between an abstract demonstration and an application in the real world is more easily crossed by these evolutionary phenomena than by others, precisely because of the substrate-neutrality of the underlying evolutionary algorithms. Artificial self-replicators can escape from their original environments on researchers’ computers and take on a “life” of their own in the rich new medium of the Internet.

  It can be seen that all these categories of new replicators are dependent, like viruses, on replicative machinery that is built and maintained directly or indirectly by the parent process of biological evolution. Were all DNA life-forms to go extinct, all their habits and metahabits, their artifacts and meta-artifacts, would soon die with them, lacking the wherewithal (both the machinery and the energy to run the machinery) to reproduce on their own. This might not be a permanent feature of the planet. For the time being, our computer networks and robot fabrication and repair facilities require massive supervision and maintenance by us, but it has been suggested by the roboticist Hans Moravec (1988) that silicon-based electronic (or photonic) artifacts could become entirely self-sustaining and self-replicating, weaning themselves from their dependence on their carbon-based creators. This improbable and distant eventuality is not a requirement for evolution, however, or for life itself. After all, our own self-replication and self-maintenance is entirely dependent on the billions of bacteria without which our metabolisms would fail, and if our artifactual descendants similarly have to enslave armies of our biological descendants to keep their systems up and running, this would not detract from their claim to be a new branch on the tree of life.

  As with many taxonomies in evolutionary theory, there are controversies and puzzles about how to draw the branchings, and how to name them. Some of these puzzles are substantive and some are merely disagreements about which terms to use. The zoologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in a chapter of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and the term has caught on. He opened his discussion of these “new replicators” with a discussion of birdsong, but others who have adopted the term have wanted to restrict memes to human culture. Should such evolving animal traditions as alarm calls, nest-building methods, and chimpanzee tools also be called memes? Researchers concentrating on cultural transmission in animals, such as John Tyler Bonner (1980) and Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka (2000), have resisted the term, and others writing on human cultural evolution, such as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (1981), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson(1985), have also chosen to use alternative terms. But since the word “meme” has secured a foothold in the English language, appearing in the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition “an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means,” we may conveniently settle on it as the general term for any culturally based replicator—if such there are. Those who are squeamish about using a term whose identity conditions are still so embattled should remind themselves that similar controversies continue to swirl around how to define its counterpart, “gene,” a term that few would recommend abandoning altogether.

  Memes include not just animal traditions, then, but also computer-based replicators, for two reasons: not only do computers and their maintenance and operation depend on human culture, but the boundaries between computer viruses and more traditional human memes have already been blurred. Simple computer viruses in effect carry the instruction copy me, which is directed to the computer, in machine language, and is entirely invisible to the computer’s user. Like the toxins unwittingly ingested by people who catch and eat freshwater fish, such a computer virus, while an element of the users’ environment, is arguably not part of their cultural environment. However, at least as widespread and virulent as such “proper” computer viruses are bogus computer-virus warnings, directed to the computer-user, in natural language. These, which depend directly on a comprehending (but duped) human vector to get themselves replicated on the Internet, are definitely within the intended understanding of memes, and intermediate cases are the computer viruses that depend on enticing human users to open attachments (thereby triggering the invisible copying instruction) by promising some amusing or titillating contents. These, too, depend on human comprehension; one written in German will not spread readily to the computers of monoglot English speakers. (This pattern may change if users avail themselves regularly of on-line translation services.) In the arms race between virus and antivirus, ever more elaborate exploitations of human interests are to be expected, so it seems best to include all these replicators under the rubric of memes, noting that some of them make only indirect use of human vectors, and hence are only indirectly elements of human culture. We are beginning to see this porous boundary crossed in the other direction as well: it used to be true that the differential replication of such classic memes as songs, poems, and recipes depended on their winning the competition for residence in human brains, but now that a multitude of search engines on the Web have interposed themselves between authors and their (human) audiences, competing with one another for reputation as high-quality sources of cultural items, significant fitness differences between memes can accumulate independently of any human appreciation or cognizance at all. The day may soon come when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliché, without anybody human having read the original book.

  Problems of classification and individuation

  Some problems of classification are substantive, depending in part on historical facts that are not well established, and others are tactical problems for the theorist: what divisions of the phenomena will prove most perspicuous? Are all computer viruses properly descended from the earliest forays into Artificial Life, or should at least some of them be shown as arising independently of that intellectual movement? Not all computer hackers are A-Life hackers, but there is also the unanswered tactical question of how to characterize what is copied. If one hacker gets the general idea of a computer virus from somebody else and then goes on to make an entirely new kind of computer virus, is that new virus properly a descendant with modifications of the virus that inspired its creation? What if the hacker adapts elements of the original virus’s design in the new type? How much sheer mindless copying must there be, or, alternatively, how much comprehending inspiration may there be, in an instance of replication? (More on this question below.) Is there cross-species meme-copying in the animal world? Polar bears build a den that includes a raised snow shelf that permits cold air to drain out the depressed opening of the den. Is this wise trend in arctic technology entirely innate (now) or do bear cubs have to copy their mother’s example? The same snow shelf is found in an Inuit’s igloo or quincy. Did the Inuit copy this tradition from the polar bear, or was it an independent invention? Does it ever happen that one species begins attending to the alarm calls of another and then develops an alarm-call tradition of its own? Does the alarm-call meme spread from species to species, or should we consider the intraspecific alarm calls and their variants as entirely independent lineages?

  Exacerbating these problems are other problems of meme individuation. Should the (English) word “windsurfing” be seen as distinct from the (language-neutral) windsurfing meme? Are these two memes or one? Do styles, such as punk and grunge, count as memes before they have names? Why not
? Joining forces with a name-meme is no doubt an excellent fitness advantage for almost any meme. (An exception could be a meme that depends on spreading insidiously; the coining of a name-meme, such as male chauvinism, may actually hinder the spread of male chauvinism by sensitizing something like an immune reaction in potential vectors.) It is probably true that as soon as any human meme becomes salient enough in the environment to be discerned, it will thereupon be named by one of its discerners, tightly linking the two memes thereafter: the name and the named, which typically have a shared fate, but not always. (The musical characteristics identifiable as the blues include many robust instances that are not called the blues by those who play and listen to them.) Undiscerned memes can also flourish. For instance, changes in the pronunciation or meaning of a word can move to fixation in a large community before any sharp-eared linguist or other cultural observer takes note. There are more than a few people—comedians as well as anthropologists and other social scientists—who earn their living detecting and commenting on evolving trends in cultural patterns that have heretofore been at best dimly appreciated.