Afterlife Beliefs as Catchy Memes
Afterlife Beliefs as Catchy Memes
Part 3 of my series on evolutionary explanations for afterlife beliefs
This is the third and final part of my three-part series on the origins of belief in an afterlife. The series tackles the topic from an evolutionary perspective. You can access the full collection here.
In this part, we’ll explore the idea that afterlife beliefs are a product not of biological evolution but of cultural evolution. Note that the full post is available only to paid subscribers. If you’re not a paid subscriber already, you can check out the benefits of a paid subscription here.
III. Afterlife as Cultural Adaptation
Cultural evolutionary theory is an up-and-coming approach to understanding the human mind and human culture. Several distinct schools of thought fall under this umbrella, but all have in common the assumption that Darwinian principles can shed light on the origins and nature of culture. Most notably, they all include the idea that culture is shaped, at least in part, by natural selection.
The suggestion, to be clear, is not that natural selection shapes culture by acting on genes (although that may be true as well). The suggestion is that natural selection shapes culture by acting on culture itself.
As I argue in my book The Ape That Understand the Universe, there are four main ideas about how this process might work:
The Adaptive Culture Hypothesis: Cultural elements are selected to the extent that they enhance their bearer’s genetic fitness.
Cultural Group Selection: Cultural elements are selected to the extent that they’re good for the group.
Memetics: Cultural elements are selected to the extent that they’re good for themselves – that is, to the extent that they have properties that cause them to stick in people’s minds and spread throughout the culture.
Gene-Culture Coevolution: Culture creates new selection pressures on our species. This leads to biological evolution, which in turn makes possible more new culture, which then creates new selection pressures - and so on.
As with byproduct hypotheses, these propositions are not mutually exclusive - and each has potential implications for the scientific understanding of afterlife beliefs.