Richard Dawkins - The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

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I. The Science of Religion
II. The Religion of Science
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Delivered at
Harvard University
November 19 and 20, 2003

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Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Under-
standing of Science at the University of Oxford. He was born in Kenya,
educated in England, and took his D.Phil under the Nobel Prize winner
Niko Tinbergen at Oxford. He was an assistant professor at Berkeley
before returning to Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the
recipient of the Michael Faraday Award, the Nakayama Prize, the Inter-
national Cosmos Prize, the Kistler Prize, and the Bicentennial Kelvin
Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, among others.
His numerous publications include The Selfish Gene (1976); The Blind
Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without
Design (1982), which won both the Royal Society of Literature Award
and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize; River Out of Eden: A Darwinian
View of Life (1995); Climbing Mount Improbable (1996); Unweaving the
Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (1997); A Devil’s
Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (2003); and The Ances-
tor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (2004).

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I. THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
It is with trepidation and humility that I come, from the oldest univer-
sity in the English-speaking world to what must surely be the greatest.
My trepidation is not lessened by the titles that, perhaps unwisely, I gave
the organizers all those months ago. Anybody who publicly belittles
religion, however gently, can expect hate mail of a uniquely unforgiving
species. But the very fact that religion arouses such passions catches a
scientist’s attention.
As a Darwinian, the aspect of religion that catches my attention is its
profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.
Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the
clock, punishing the smallest waste.1 If a wild animal habitually per-
forms some useless activity, natural selection will favour rival indivi-
duals who devote the time, instead, to surviving and reproducing.
Nature cannot afford frivolous jeux d’esprits. Ruthless utilitarianism
trumps, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.
I am a Darwinian student of animal behaviour—an ethologist and fol-
lower of Niko Tinbergen. You won’t be surprised, therefore, if I talk
about animals (nonhuman animals, I should add, for there is no sensible
definition of an animal that excludes ourselves). The tail of a male bird of
paradise, extravagant though it seems, would be penalised by females if it
were less so. The same for the time and labour that a male bower bird puts
into making his bower. Anting is the odd habit of birds, such as jays, of
“bathing” in an ant’s nest and apparently inciting the ants to invade the
feathers. Nobody knows for sure what the benefit of anting is: perhaps
some kind of hygiene, cleansing the feathers of parasites. My point is that
uncertainty as to detail doesn’t—nor should it—stop Darwinians from
believing, with great confidence, that anting must be for something.
Such a confident stance is controversial—at Harvard if nowhere else—
and you may be aware of the wholly unwarranted slur that functional
1. Natural selection, as Charles Darwin said, “is daily and hourly scrutinizing, through-
out the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and
adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportu-
nity offers, at the improvement of each organic being. . .” (On the Origin of Species [London:
John Murray, 1859]).
[43]

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hypotheses are untestable “Just So Stories.” This is such a ridiculous
claim that the only reason it has come to be widely accepted is a certain
style of bullying advocacy originating, I reluctantly have to say, at Har-
vard. All you have to do to test a functional hypothesis of a piece of
behaviour is to engineer an experimental situation in which the behav-
iour doesn’t happen, or in which its consequences are negated. Let me
give a simple example of how to test a functional hypothesis.
Next time a housefly lands on your hand, don’t immediately brush it
off; watch what it does. You won’t wait long before it brings its hands
together as if in prayer, then wrings them in what seems like ritual fas-
tidiousness. This is one of the ways in which a fly grooms itself. Another
is to wipe a hind leg over the same side wing. They also rub middle and
hind feet together, or middle and front. Flies spend so much time self-
grooming that any Darwinian would immediately guess that it is vital
for survival.2 And this is a testable hypothesis.
An appropriate experimental design is the “Yoked Control.” Put a
matched pair of flies in a small arena and watch them. Every time Fly A
starts to groom itself, scare both into flight. After two hours of this
regime, Fly A will have done no grooming at all. Fly B will have
groomed itself a lot. It will have been scared off the ground as many
times as A, but at random with respect to its grooming. Now put A and
B through a battery of comparison tests. Is A’s flying performance
impaired by dirty wings? Measure it and compare it with B’s. Flies taste
with their feet, and it is a reasonable hypothesis that “foot washing”
unclogs their sense organs. Well-tried methods for measuring the taste
threshold of flies have been published. Compare the threshold sugar
concentration that A and B can taste. Compare their tendency to disease.
As a final test, compare the two flies’ vulnerability to a chameleon.
Repeat the trial with lots of pairs of flies and do a statistical analysis
comparing each A with its corresponding B. I would put my shirt on the
A flies’ being significantly impaired in at least one faculty vitally affect-
ing survival. The reason for my confidence is purely the Darwinian con-
viction that natural selection would not have allowed them to spend so
2. The more so because—this is less paradoxical than it sounds—grooming is often
instantly fatal. When a chameleon, for example, is around, grooming is very likely to be the
last thing the fly does. Predatory eyes often lock onto movement. A motionless target goes
unnoticed. A flying target is difficult to hit. A grooming fly’s shuttling limbs stimulate the
predator’s movement-detectors, but the fly as a whole is a sitting target. The fact that flies
spend so much time grooming, in spite of its being so dangerous, argues for a very strong
survival value.

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much time on an activity if it were not useful. This is not a “Just So
Story”; the reasoning is thoroughly scientific, and it is fully testable.
Religious behaviour in bipedal apes occupies large quantities of
time. It devours huge resources. A medieval cathedral would consume
hundreds of man-centuries in the building. Sacred music and devotional
paintings largely monopolised medieval and renaissance talent. Thou-
sands, perhaps millions, of people have died, often accepting torture
first, for loyalty to one religion rather than a scarcely distinguishable
alternative. Devout people have died for their gods, killed for them,
fasted for them, whipped blood from their backs, undertaken a lifetime
of celibacy, sworn themselves to lonely silence for the sake of religion.
Nobody does this kind of list better than Steven Pinker, and I’m going
to quote How the Mind Works on the peculiar problems you face in the
United States—whether in spite of or because of the constitutional sep-
aration of church and state I do not know:
According to polls, more than a quarter of today’s Americans believe
in witches, almost half believe in ghosts, half believe in the devil,
half believe that the book of Genesis is literally true, sixty-nine per-
cent believe in angels, eighty-seven percent believe that Jesus was
raised from the dead, and ninety-six percent believe in a God or uni-
versal spirit.
More generally, Pinker remarks,
In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after
death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the
truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by
spirits, ghosts, saints, fairies, angels, demons, cherubim, djinns, dev-
ils and gods.3
Though the details differ across cultures, no known culture lacks
some version of the time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-
provoking, fecundity-forfeiting rituals of religion. All this presents a major
puzzle to anyone who thinks in a Darwinian way. We guessed why jays
ant; my old maestro Niko Tinbergen did an experimental test of why
seagulls remove empty eggshells from the nest (eggshells are conspicu-
ous and attract predators). Isn’t religion a challenge, an a priori affront
to Darwinism, demanding similar explanation? Why do we pray and
3. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997).

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indulge in costly practices that, in many individual cases, more or less
totally consume our lives?
Of course the caveats must now come tumbling in. Religious behav-
iour is Darwinian business only if it is widespread, not some weird
anomaly. Apparently it is universal, and the problem won’t go away just
because the details differ across cultures. As with language, the underly-
ing phenomenon is universal, though it plays out differently in different
regions. Not all individuals are religious, as most of this educated audi-
ence will testify. But religion is a human universal: every culture, every-
where in the world, has a style of religion that even nonpractitioners rec-
ognize as the norm for that society, just as it has a style of clothing, a
style of courting, and a style of meal-serving.
Could it be a recent phenomenon, sprung up since our genes under-
went most of their natural selection? Its ubiquity argues against any
simple version of this idea. Nevertheless there is a version of it that it
will be my main purpose to advocate today. The propensity that was
naturally selected in our ancestors was not religion per se. It had some
other benefit, and it only incidentally manifests itself as religious behav-
iour. We’ll understand religious behaviour only after we have renamed
it. Once again, it is natural for an ethologist to use an example from non-
human animals.
The “dominance hierarchy” was first discovered as the “pecking
order” in hens. Each hen learns which individuals she can beat in a fight,
and which beat her. In a well-established dominance hierarchy, little
overt fighting is seen. Stable groupings of hens, who have time to sort
themselves into a pecking order, lay more eggs than hens in coops whose
membership is continually changed. This might suggest an “advantage”
to the phenomenon of the dominance hierarchy. But that’s not good
Darwinism, because the dominance hierarchy is a group-level phenome-
non. Farmers may care about group productivity, but natural selection
doesn’t.
For a Darwinian, the question “What is the survival value of the
dominance hierarchy?” is an illegitimate question. The proper question
is “What is the individual survival value of deferring to stronger hens?
And of punishing lack of deference from weaker ones?” Darwinian ques-
tions have to direct attention toward the level at which genetic varia-
tions might exist. Tendencies to aggression or deference in individual
hens are a proper target because they either do or easily might vary
genetically. Group phenomena like dominance hierarchies don’t in
themselves vary genetically, because groups don’t have genes. Or at least

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you’ll have your work cut out arguing some peculiar sense in which a
group phenomenon could be subject to genetic variation. You might
contrive it via some version of what I have called the Extended Phenotype,
but I am too sceptical to accompany you on that theoretical journey.
My point, of course, is that religion may be like the dominance hier-
archy. “What is the survival value of religion?” may be the wrong ques-
tion. The right question may have the form, “What is the survival value
of some as yet unspecified individual behaviour, or psychological charac-
teristic, which manifests itself, under appropriate circumstances, as reli-
gion?” We have to rewrite the question before we can sensibly answer it.
I must first acknowledge that other Darwinians have gone straight
for the unrewritten question and proposed direct Darwinian advantages
of religion itself—as opposed to psychological predispositions that acci-
dentally manifest themselves as religion. There is a little evidence that
religious belief protects people from stress-related diseases. The evi-
dence is not good, but it would not be surprising. A non-negligible part
of what a doctor can provide for a patient is consolation and reassurance.
My doctor doesn’t literally practise the laying on of hands. But many’s
the time I have been instantly cured of some minor ailment by a reassur-
ingly calm voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope.
The placebo effect is well documented. Dummy pills, with no pharma-
cological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why drug
trials have to use placebos as controls. It’s why homeopathic remedies
appear to work, even though they’re so dilute that they have the same
amount of the active ingredients as the placebo control—zero molecules.
Is religion a medical placebo, which prolongs life by reducing stress?
Perhaps, although the theory is going to have to run the gauntlet of
sceptics who point out the many circumstances in which religion
increases stress rather than decreases it. In any case, I find the placebo
theory too meagre to account for the massive and all-pervasive world-
wide phenomenon of religion. I do not think we have religion because
our religious ancestors reduced their stress levels and hence survived
longer. I don’t think that’s a big enough theory for the job.
Other theories miss the point of Darwinian explanations altogether.
I mean suggestions such as “Religion satisfies our curiosity about the
universe and our place in it.” Or “Religion is consoling. People fear
death and are drawn to religions that promise we’ll survive it.” There
may be some psychological truth here, but it’s not in itself a Darwinian
explanation. As Steven Pinker has said,

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. . .it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find com-
fort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no
comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is
not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.4
A Darwinian version of the fear-of-death theory would have to be of the
form, “Belief in survival after death tends to postpone the moment when
it is put to the test.” This could be true or it could be false—maybe it’s
another version of the stress and placebo theory—but I shall not pursue
the matter. My only point is that this is the kind of way in which a Dar-
winian must rewrite the question. Psychological statements—that
people find some belief agreeable or disagreeable—are proximate, not
ultimate explanations.
Darwinians make much of this distinction between proximate and
ultimate. Proximate questions lead us into physiology and neuroana-
tomy. There is nothing wrong with proximate explanations. They are
important, and they are scientific. But my preoccupation today is with
Darwinian ultimate explanations. If neuroscientists, such as the Cana-
dian Michael Persinger, find a “god centre” in the brain, Darwinian sci-
entists like me want to know why the god centre evolved. Why did those
of our ancestors who had a genetic tendency to grow a god centre survive
better than rivals who did not? The ultimate Darwinian question is not
a better question, not a more profound question, not a more scientific
question than the proximate neurological question. But it is the one I
am talking about today.
Some alleged ultimate explanations turn out to be—or in some cases
avowedly are—group selection theories. Group selection is the controver-
sial idea that Darwinian selection chooses among groups of individuals, in
the same kind of way as it chooses among individuals within groups. The
Cambridge anthropologist Colin Renfrew, for example, suggests that
Christianity survived by a form of group selection because it fostered the
idea of in-group loyalty and brotherly love. The American evolutionist
D. S. Wilson has made a similar suggestion in Darwin’s Cathedral.
Here’s a made-up example, to show what a group-selection theory of
religion might look like. A tribe with a stirringly belligerent “god of
battles” wins wars against a tribe whose god urges peace and harmony, or
a tribe with no god at all. Warriors who believe that a martyr’s death will
send them straight to paradise fight bravely and willingly give up their
4. Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 555.

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lives. So tribes with certain kinds of religion are more likely to survive in
intertribal selection, steal the conquered tribe’s cattle, and seize their
women as concubines. Such successful tribes spawn daughter tribes who
go off and propagate more daughter tribes, all worshipping the same
tribal god. Notice that this is different from saying that the idea of the
warlike religion survives. Of course it will, but in this case the point is
that the group of people who hold the idea survive.
There are formidable objections to group selection theories. A parti-
san in the controversy, I must beware of riding off on a hobby horse far
from today’s subject. There is also much confusion in the literature
between true group selection, as in my hypothetical example of the God
of Battles, and something else that is called group selection but turns out
to be either kin selection or reciprocal altruism. Or there may be a con-
fusion of “selection between groups” and “selection between individuals
in the particular circumstances furnished by group living.”5
Those of us who object to group selection have always admitted that
in principle it can happen. The problem is that, when it is pitted against
individual-level selection—as when group selection is advanced as an
explanation for individual self-sacrifice—individual-level selection is
likely to be stronger. In our hypothetical tribe of martyrs, a single self-
interested warrior, who leaves martyrdom to his colleagues, will end up
on the winning side because of their gallantry. Unlike them, however, he
ends up alive, outnumbered by women and in a conspicuously better
position to pass on his genes than his fallen comrades.
This is an oversimplified toy example, but it illustrates the peren-
nial tension between group selection and individual selection. Group-
selection theories of individual self-sacrifice are always vulnerable to
subversion from within. If it comes to a tussle between the two levels of
selection, individual selection will tend to win because it has a faster
turnover. Mathematical models arguably come up with special condi-
tions under which group selection might work. Arguably, religions in
human tribes set up just such special conditions. This is an interesting
line of theory to pursue, but I shall not do so here.
Instead, I shall return to the idea of rewriting the question. I previ-
ously cited the pecking order in hens, and the point is so central to my
thesis that I hope you will forgive another animal example to ram it
home. Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an
5. All these confusions are exemplified by D. S. Wilson’s lifelong crusade in favour of
what he calls group selection.

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accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of them-
selves. We could label it “self-immolation behaviour” and wonder how
Darwinian natural selection could possibly favour it. My point, again, is
that we need to rewrite the question before we can even attempt an intel-
ligent answer. It isn’t suicide. Apparent suicide emerges as an inadver-
tent side-effect.
Artificial light is a recent arrival on the night scene. Until recently,
the only night lights were the moon and the stars. Because they are at
optical infinity, their rays are parallel, which makes them ideal com-
passes. Insects are known to use celestial objects to steer accurately in a
straight line. They can use the same compass, with reversed sign, for
returning home after a foray. The insect nervous system is adept at set-
ting up a temporary rule of thumb such as “Steer a course such that the
light rays hit your eye at an angle of 30˚.” Since insects have compound
eyes, this will amount to favouring a particular ommatidium.
But the light compass relies critically on the celestial object being at
optical infinity. If it isn’t, the rays are not parallel but diverge like the
spokes of a wheel. A nervous system using a 30˚ rule of thumb to a can-
dle, as though it were the moon, will steer its moth, in a neat logarith-
mic spiral, into the flame.
It is still, on average, a good rule of thumb. We don’t notice the hun-
dreds of moths who are silently and effectively steering by the moon or a
bright star, or even the lights of a distant city. We see only moths hurl-
ing themselves at our lights, and we ask the wrong question. Why are all
these moths committing suicide? Instead, we should ask why they have
nervous systems that steer by maintaining an automatic fixed angle to
light rays, a tactic that we notice only on the occasions when it goes
wrong. When the question is rephrased, the mystery evaporates. It never
was right to call it suicide.
Once again, apply the lesson to religious behaviour in humans. We
observe large numbers of people—in many local areas it amounts to 100
percent—who hold beliefs that flatly contradict demonstrable scientific
facts as well as rival religions. They not only hold these beliefs but devote
time and resources to costly activities that flow from holding them.
They die for them, or kill for them. We marvel at all this, just as we mar-
velled at the “self-immolation behaviour” of the moths. Baffled, we ask
why. Yet again, the point I am making is that we may be asking the
wrong question. The religious behaviour may be a misfiring, an unfor-
tunate manifestation of an underlying psychological propensity that in
other circumstances was once useful.

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