route E-mail is this: minds neverswallow raw information to serve it to
others in the same raw state. Minds invariably do a lot of work on
available information, especially so when transmission is faithful. For
instance, I can sing Land of Hope and Glory in (roughly) the same way
as others before me. This is because hugely complex mental processes
shaped my memories of the different versions I heard. In human com-
munication, good transmission requires as much work as does distortion.
This is why the notion of "memes," although a good starting point,
is only that. The idea of "replication" is very misleading. People's
ideas are sometimes roughly similar to those of other people around
[40] them, not because ideas can be downloaded from mind to mind but
because they are reconstructed in a similar way. Some ideas are good
enough that you will entertain them even though your elders did not
give you much material to work with, and so good again that your cul-
tural offspring will probably hone in on them even though you too are
an incompetent transmitter! Against our intuitions, there is nothing
miraculous in the fact that many machines have similar text in mem-
ory although the connections between them are terrible, when the
machines in question are human minds and the channel is human
communication.
HOW TO CATCH CONCEPTS
WITH TEMPLATESPeople have religious notions and beliefs because they acquired them
from other people. Naturally, nothing in principle prevents an inge-
nious Sicilian Catholic from reinventing the Hindu pantheon or
imaginative Chinese from re-creating Amazonian mythology. On the
whole, however, people get their religion from other members of
their social group. But how does that occur? Our spontaneous expla-
nation of transmission is quite simple. People behave in certain ways
around a child and the child assimilates what is around until it
becomes second nature. In this picture, acquiring culture is a passive
process. The developing mind is gradually filled with information
provided by cultural elders and peers. This is why Hindus have many
gods and Jews only one; this is why the Japanese like raw fish and the
Americans toast marshmallows. Now this picture of transmission has
a great advantage—it is simple—and a major flaw—it is clearly false.
It is mistaken on two counts. First, children do not assimilate theRELIGION EXPLAINED