The Memetic Fallacy

The fight behind climate change is very political in nature, with liberal-leaning and progressives being the main advocates of trying to fight global warming. The battle over evolution has a very religious component to it, with evolution often being advocated by atheists and creation by theists. Anti-smoking campaigns and rhetoric are nearly exclusively political now. The biggest pushers of science-based medicine are corporations whose only interest is their bottom line.

The question of whether or not climate change, or evolution, or the cancerous effects of smoking, or the efficacy of medicine are scientific questions, yet their propagation in wider culture often has very little to do with their scientific evidence. It's true that greenies and tree-huggers use climate change as a political tool to push their agenda, for example, but what does that say about the scientific validity of climate change? Very little...

Yet I have come across the argument that climate change science is an invention of leftists looking to push their political agenda. Just as I have come across that evolution is an atheist lie to deny God as the Creator, and the anti-vaccination movement is rife with claims about the science of vaccines being a Big Pharma scam. But it was a conversation with a friend about smoking that inspired me to write this post.

The notion of memes, as initially coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, is that ideas propagate in a manner akin to genes, so what survives in the realm of ideas are those that are good at being replicated. Whether or not memes are a good scientific construct is another debate, and for the purposes of this post it doesn't matter whether or not memes are a sound concept.

The memetic fallacy is a fallacy of relevance where one mistakes the reasons for its propagation as the reasons for its validity.

That climate change seems to go down a particular ideology is quite far removed from the science of it, which may lead to fabricated or exaggerated claims, but it would be a mistake to not look at where the weight of expertise lies. The propagation method may lead to embellishments or outright falsehoods, but that's not enough to dismiss the original evidence.

Likewise when it comes to evolution, the weight of expertise sits firmly on the side that it is true. That there are prominent atheists that are also evolutionary biologists or that atheists promote evolution doesn't mean that it's an idea created to undermine God and promote atheism. It might be a reason to be atheist, but that atheists promote it isn't the reason why the idea has done so well scientifically.


Perhaps like the concept of meme itself, the mistake is leaving something vital by focusing purely on its delivery. In the case of these arguments, the mistake is to leave out the content itself; that explanation of its propagation is taken as being sufficient to explain the content.

It's with good reason that we are wary of the messengers - the reputation that lawyers, advertisers, and especially politicans have received is not entirely undeserved. When there are ulterior motives, it does call into question how objective the messenger is, but is not in and of itself sufficient to dismiss the message itself as being a product of those same ulterior motives.

Substantiating Memetics

The concept of memes was interesting when I first heard it, became metaphorical the more I learnt about it, and now I consider it as not having any explanatory power. Yet there is still some superficial plausibility to it the idea, and that was highlighted on a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory.

In the episode, two of the characters decided to spread two rumours to see whether or not there was a differential success in the rumour spreading among social groups. One, a hot piece of gossip, the other not. Of course the gossip spreads and memetics is shown to be a success!

If that's all memes are, then it's not really saying much. Meme would be a vague metaphor, useful as a short hand for ideas that spread quickly but little more. It's hardly showing the value of memetics, and especially not of the analogy between memes and genes and the invocation of a Darwinian framework. In other words, if memes are like genes then we should see memes modifying themselves in order to continue to thrive and becoming better replicators.

It's a lot harder to think of examples of the latter case. It's likely that there are examples out there (the term meme itself is probably a good candidate in that it started out as a Darwinian replicator and has changed to become a term for a rapidly-spreading cultural unit) but in terms of what people mean when they say meme, it's not really anything more than a vague metaphor.

It seems that meme has become somewhat of what Dan Dennett calls a deepity. That is an idea or phrase that is true in a trivial sense, and in another sense sounds profound but is intellectually hollow. Of course some ideas spread better than others, but the earth-shattering implications of memes just doesn't pan out.

Morning Scepticism: Dreams

What's not to like about the idea of the American Dream? It's simple, desirable, appeals to the best in people, and hits on the productivity that comes with competition. Unfortunately it drags along the notion that if someone is a failure they deserve to be it. But people seldom get what they deserve, they get what they can negotiate. And while there are always ground-up success stories these exist because they contrast with all those who don't. The limited social mobility is entrenched and because all those who don't succeed in the possibility that they could if only they applied themselves (hah!), are punished for failing to do so. And any ideal that punishes for what is a necessary outcome is a really shitty ideal to hold.

But as far as its memetic success, it's an idea that's able to get people to vote against their own interests for the potential of something better. And that's really impressive, if not somewhat disturbing.

Morning Scepticism: Memes

The idea of memes is intuitively valid, the lateral transmission of cultural ideas from mind to mind has a Darwinian appeal. For memes the brains of individuals are the environment by which they're selected, the ability to spread between minds their fitness. But without digital transmission, the notion of a meme might be little more than a metaphor and not really a solid foundation for adequately describing cultural evolution. Yet even as a metaphor it is a useful way of thinking about culture, to explain differences and commonalities among similar lines of thought in different cultures.

Retailing Information

A couple of years ago I was at the local supermarket with my girlfriend when a stranger asked me for some cooking advice. Maybe he saw my gut and realised I loved food, maybe it was just a shot in the dark that a stranger could help out, but he just happened to ask me a question that I had knowledge on the matter. From memory it was a question about cooking a laksa and what noodles to use, and I was able to give him a recommendation and even a tip on how to cook it. He thanked me and asked if I were a chef. Nope, just an average chump who happened to have slight domain knowledge on the specific point in question.


The vision impaired leading the blind
It just happened to be circumstantial that I was there to give advice, but what else could the man do? Those who work at the store are trained monkeys, and I don't mean that as an insult. Rather that the job is the facilitation between people and product, ultimate choice comes down to the individual. For fundamentals like food, this model works. It is expected that by adulthood that people can know how to cook for themselves. And domain advice is as far away as a bookstore or even in magazines in the supermarket. There are approximately 40 cookbooks in my house with recipes and instructions on cooking for many different styles. Even the internet has scores of pages dedicated to how to cook; there isn't much excuse for that.

This is modern retail, where most people running the store need only knowledge of how to speak to a customer, be able to read off a specification sheet and use a cash register. Have serious questions about a product? Then asking a retail assistant is about as useful as a visit to the manufacturer's website. Having domain knowledge about a product in so many sectors of the market is just not necessary; it's far cheaper that way. We as consumers reap the benefits from not having to pay for the premium of domain knowledge. It may be for most people that it is unnecessary, but what of those who actually need the advice? Recently I was in a pharmacy where there was a shelf full of competing products all doing roughly the same thing and at the same price. I ended up buying a few to test them out because there's really no way I could expect domain knowledge on over-the-counter products.

Yet there are specialisations where domain knowledge is beneficial to the business. Hardware stores are something I see where the employees actually know what they are talking about. It could be a few reasons for this - the DIY market is large enough to require domain knowledge, such a job attracts educated laymen, or that the type of knowledge has a wide communal base. Whatever the reason, having such specialisation somewhat offsets the extra cost of not choosing major discount outlets for hardware supplies. For music supplies, outlets have to contend with eBay and the far lower prices so the business is forced to be advantageous in other areas of the customer experience.

When it comes down to it, ultimately profitability is what matters. Domain expertise costs money, so the less that is needed in order to keep a customer base the less that expertise is worth. The higher percentage of people with domain knowledge, again the less that expertise is worth. The cost / benefit analysis is something that always needs to be taken into account. Working in a computer store would require some knowledge about how to build computers, but it would not take someone with a master’s degree in computer hardware to do so. Hiring a high school drop-out who has never touched a computer in their life, however, is going to be a problem. This is why McDonalds can hire at $5 an hour while hiring to work in a computer store would cost more.


Brand power
Ultimately capitalism is about competition between products competing for your hard earned dollar. Most of us don't live in the luxury of having enough disposable income to be product testers, so there is importance in choosing the right product to begin with. Think of the competing products as memes. For the complete ignoramus looking for a product, without a frame of reference each meme would have equal worth so there needs to be a way to judge between memes. Yet on the shelf there are ways to entice the consumer into which product to buy. The packaging, the product description, the relative cost - all factors we use when buying items. Because for most things we do not know better, it would be expecting a lot for us to know better as there is just so much out there on the market.

Shelf advertising is about trying to part you with your hard earned money, so it does pay to be informed. It doesn't matter so much to waste $20 to try a new wine, but it does matter when laying out $2000 for a new television. Being informed pays, especially when it comes to complex devices where a simple demonstration will not cut it. The bigger the investment, the more informed one should be about the product invested in. The internet is again a great tool, between product reviews by those with domain knowledge and customer reviews that provide in effect a huge testing facility, a product's strengths and flaws can be found without too much hassle.

We are social creatures who gain memes largely from others. I could have been dead wrong or deliberately misleading to that man, but for whatever reason he trusted that I knew what I was talking about. It's that issue of trust that allows for one of the more useful means to choose a product and that is brand power. While sticking to certain brands may mean missing out on a superior product, it is at least an indicator of the type of quality that is associated with a product. A brand in this way is a trust between consumer and manufacturer, a voice of approval that needs no more than a fancy graphic in order to gain seed in an individual's mind. However dishonest we know advertising is (after all, it exists to sell a product), we understand that it still works; because it can place a seed in the mind of the audience. Any meme that is positively reinforced - even through artificial reality, has an advantage on a meme that doesn't.


Power to the people
When profitability is the goal, the retail market has no reason to change to help those who aren't in the know. And advertising is going to shape the way how we interact with products - this is the consumer environment we operate in. Ignorance is unavoidable, but it is something to move away from at any given opportunity. Knowing where to look for information is vitally important, something that requires planning. Going into a store completely ignorant of the wanted product is leaving yourself vulnerable to the knowledge of those selling you the product. Asking a random stranger for advice is no guarantee of success, after all not everyone has ruined a laksa by trying to cook the noodles in the sauce only to find that they absorbed all the coconut milk.

A post script: when I was first at university, I was boarding with a middle aged man and his mother. When he would cook pasta, he would boil it for an hour. When he asked how I was able to cook my pasta so well, I replied that I followed the instructions on the back of the pack. He once tried that and it failed, so instead of cooking for a couple of minutes longer, his solution was to boil it for 5 or 6 times what was recommended. The phrase 'read the fucking manual' not only for technology, which ironically for an IT student he failed at as well.

The Meme of Religion

Atheists, as well as secularists, receive a lot of criticism for speaking out on religion. The sacredness of belief is such that blasphemy is one thing that isn't tolerated. When Bill Maher went on The Daily Show to promote his new movie Religulous, Jon Stewart asked "doesn't [religion] fill that purpose of comfort and aid?" [for the full interview, part 1 part 2] It's a question that seems to come up again and again, and it really seems to be a sticking point. From an evolutionary perspective there must be some benefit to having religion, either on an individual or a group level. What purpose does the meme serve, how did it come to be this way, and what is it's future?


Constructing the construct
Like in biology, to look at religion now we look at the end product of thousands of years of memetic evolution. Ideas on the nature of reality have come and gone, always adapting and evolving where it's needed. As a result, religion is very much like a biological organism; it can become irreducibly complex over time. It's absurd to think that religion is now as it always was, and what is needed is to understand how a religion can be built from the ground up and come to the form it takes now. Of course there is more than one way religion works, there's plenty of different memes out there that are religion. Now it would be logical to assume that all these concepts would stem from a common ancestor, a precursor to religious belief.

In the beginning there were homo sapiens, upright apes who had little idea about the reality they lived in. The hunter gatherers spent much of their time looking for food and shelter, the basic necessities for survival. They migrated from area to area in search of food. They were also social creatures where children needed constant support in order to survive. These creatures also had big brains, imaginative brains that worked at a higher level. The perception of perception, that understanding of self, they had the capacity to think about the world. Herein lies the parameters in which the meme was born.

It could be inferred that the basics of religion was born out of human uncertainty: uncertainty about safety, uncertainty about food, uncertainty about nature itself. The beliefs were order in a chaotic world. As society progressed the meme changed, organised religion came not long after the birth of civilisation. The larger the group, the more necessity for control. Now food was secure, group safety and social cohesion were more important facets of the meme. Now either a new meme can come in and fill the void or the old meme can evolve. The new memes build on what's already there, just as our eye evolved from what is already there. Redundant parts can be lost and the meme becomes irreducibly complex. For many there can be no Christianity without the literal Genesis account, the idea of God is irreducibly linked to the Garden of Eden.

In the modern day we are left with a construct that can not easily be disassembled, the meme itself has evolved to be an integral part of the human condition so just removing it will not work. It has benefits to the individual and that individuals interaction in society. The church is still a place for social cohesion, the words of the priest are still a guide for better living, there's still great uncertainty of the great unknown (death) and ignorance of how reality works in the first place. All these factors need to be replaced before the idea will be given up. In effect the meme has evolved a defence mechanism: it's perceived necessity.


Deconstructing the construct
As I wrote earlier, although difficult the meme can be broken up into a series of components that work together to make the whole. In the last 200 years the rise of the scientific method has etched away at the historical merit of the memes, there's more and more who now see their holy texts are spiritual guides as opposed to a guide for history and science. Secularism is another idea that has challenged religion, morality is not the absolute it once was and liberal democracy has laid the foundation for a more progressive society where there is freedom of choice. The exchange of ideas alongside prosperity has vastly reduced the amount of conflict between rival groups, violent crime is at record lows.

In a lot of ways many components of religion are redundant, they have been replaced by more specific and better memes. But there are still some areas where the components of religion are not adequately replaced. The meaning of life is one. It's often asked that without religion how can there be meaning? Of course, this is confusing the necessity of meaning in us for there to actually be meaning to be given. Like morality, meaning isn't something objective to find. It's derived from our thoughts and character, built up based on our understanding of the world and limited by the genes and environment we live in. The need for God is not proof of God, just as the need for meaning is not proof of universal meaning.

In all of us there is a sense of fairness, of right and wrong. This is again a basis of social interaction and a necessity for law. Many do wrong and get away with it, our sense of fairness wants them to be punished for their misgivings. By taking away this element of religion, be it the eternal judge guarding the pearly gates or reincarnation as an earthworm (personally I'm hoping for gibbon), universal justice is lost. This also has the unfortunate side effect of people having to take personal responsibility for their actions with no God to absolve them of their sins. Bush praying to God before invading Iraq is a supreme act of moral cowardice, but it's one of comfort - for his act was God's plan.

Death is another factor. The materialist answer to the problem of death is incredibly unsatisfying. That's it, that's the end, hope you enjoyed the ride. In the words of the band Regurgitator:

All that I am and all I'll ever be is a brain in a body
Live 'till I die and then rot away, it's a beautiful story

Ideas like Pascal's Wager use this as the cornerstone of persuasion. Why choose mortality when there is a chance at immortality? Surely this line of thinking can at best be a rationalisation for those who already belief rather than a reason to in the first place. Indeed a lot of the justifications for belief like morality, justice, eternal life, love, etc. are all rationalisations not reasons.


Ignorance is bliss
To most people, there's no need at all for understanding the precise nature of reality in order to operate. One doesn't need meticulous knowledge of how a car works in order to drive it, the operation is abstracted enough that a few simple commands successfully operate a complex machine. Same goes for a computer, most people wouldn't have a clue how a computer works on any layer other than the most basic I/O yet they can operate it. People don't need to understand that the world is 4.5 billion years old to live on it, nor do they need to understand that they are the end product of 4 billion years of adaptation and change in order to survive.

The explanation may even be detrimental, explaining seemingly miraculous processes with material explanations. Love, consciousness, happiness, life, the universe, everything, all of which had mystique and meaning. It is perplexing to me that people need intent on a phenomenon in order to find meaning in it. That feeling is extraordinary so it needs a extraordinary explanation. There are explanations out there now, yet require a sophisticated understanding of the nature of reality in order to appreciate. Saying "Goddidit" is far easier to do, and that is why the meme of religion will carry on regardless of how far materialism takes us.

Elitist Memes

I want to delve into the speculative for a moment, and highlight my inner struggle over the role of society & culture. The struggle exists in how ideas are to be preserved throughout time. Memes have a propagating tool of their own, but I sometimes wonder if commercialism is pushing society towards an idiocracy where memes previously of cultural significance will be starved by their aggressively pushed counterparts; where feeding the selfish gene on a most basic level will do away with the complex yet subtle landmarks of our time. My personal struggle is reconciling the notion that the population decides it's culture with the value of elitism.

The culture explosion
A look back at culture over the last 500 or so years is a monument to the creativity of the human race. The Da Vincis, the Shakespeares, the Bachs & Beethovens, the legacy of those few who shaped our cultural landscape will be immortal as long as western society survives. We've even gone beyond that and preserved their legacy in digital code, thanks to possibly the most important cultural legacy of all: science. Now while science has done it's best to preserve the past, the mechanisms which it has used are now the fundamental way that society as a whole communicates. The method of preservation that once only catered for the most elite ideas is now recording every piece of cultural significance. In effect, while the preservation culture for centuries has been at the discretion of the societal elites, now it's in the hands of the masses.

From this point of view I can see the merits to post-modern thought on culture. The worth is in the eye of the beholder, and art becomes equally valid. If someone asked me to name what I felt the most significant music of the current decade, my answer would be different to most other peoples. Of course I could feel what I chose is better, and I could give reasons that justify that position. Ultimately my choice is subjective, just as all the choices of others are. In that sense it's all equally valid, but ultimately there are winners and losers on the culture front. Some memes survive long after others, they can transcend cultural boundaries and time-frames. Where in a consumer model everything has a shelf-life, the memes survive well beyond their allotted lifespan.

Now a meme's ability to survive is itself a gauge of it's worth. While some memes can propagate very successfully and rapidly, the longevity is the key. Ideas with worth will survive longer, the cultural imprints that have either a representative quality of their era or a timeless characteristic will be ultimately successful and therefore of cultural worth. This is not the only gauge of it's worth, and there is room for that one nefarious character in our society: the expert.


The importance of being elitist
Sam Harris recently wrote an excellent article on the role of elitism and politics, it seems that being elitist is something as a society we explicitly reject on a personal level yet strive towards on a daily basis. By and large people do realise the important role that the experts play, just look at the creationists who will appeal to any scientist who will validate their position. Where the role of the expert comes in is where there is a realisation that some people know more than others about a subject. While most people could tell the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and a $5 cask, there are only a few with trained palettes that can describe in great depth of the balance between flavours and assess the comparative quality of similar wines. Same goes for critics of all cultural phenomena, their time and dedication into learning the intricacies of their particular field puts their views as being worth more.

This does not mean that the elitists are authoritative or dictating culture, their views come from an educated background but are still subjective. One doesn't have to agree with an expert, it's opinion (educated opinion) and not science. What it does is set up a separate rung for memes to sit on, and gives an option for culture that the elites consider worthwhile a chance to survive in a marketplace where it would go over the heads of most people. Now this is the difference that the last 100 years has to the 450 before it; before it was purely those in the know; the elites of society, who would decide culture. The memes existed purely in upper class circles, where education and resources meant only a select few were the culture of propagation. Now the mass-market decides the worth.

So often art these days has to go after the lowest common denominator. It's a product, and it's one that must sell in order to sustain itself. So much of commercial television these days is mediocre at best, I struggle to see how people can watch these shows of no style or substance. Even the shows with something often descend into predictability and resorting to gimmicks. I wonder how much it's on the back of every artist's mind that when creating a work of art it has to be sellable. Does this have an effect on the final product even before the producers get their hands on it? Gaming since it's a new artform can give insight into this. As the market has exploded and the audience is now mainstream, companies that want to stay afloat have to target the main market. While Bioshock was a great game in it's own right, many of the elements from it's spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2, were either simplified or cut out to make the game more accessible to the general audience. It made for a more streamlined game, though less of an immersive world.

It's now hard to think of art as anything other than entertainment, it's ability to sell is the propagation tool. The role of the expert is to take that entertainment and determine what is worthy of preservation given it's content, context and competition. Is the content of the art groundbreaking or profound? Is it contextual and symbolic of the time it was made? Does it stand above the competition and what makes it so? There is still art, while being entertainment, that has the memetic traits to compete in the environment of the experts. While this market is maintained, culture should preserve memes both popular and the profound. The danger is that in a society where everyone rates themselves an expert that the voices of those who are truly in the know will be drowned out.

Science vs Religion

I have advocated the position on nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) for a long time in the science / religion debate, the two ideas should not be in conflict. But taking a diplomatic position on what ought to be should not take away from the reality of what is. There is a huge conflict between science and religion, there has been since the beginning of science and there will be until the end of our species. It's not really so much about the two concepts on their own, rather it's that there are opposing ideas that do indeed overlap.


A war of ideas
It needs to be said that there are many theists who have no problem having a scientific worldview and a religious worldview together. Likewise there are many atheists who reject a scientific worldview on some level. This is not directed at them, rather it's at those theists who do put religion as an ultimate truth ahead of empiricism and those atheists who refuse to recognise that there can ever be such a reconciliation between the two different ideas.

I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it's a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

Richard Dawkins (in that quotation above) is spot on is showing the folly of NOMA, he's picked apart exactly why the position cannot be taken on it's own in the current war of ideas. It must be understood that religion did have first domain over the workings of the world. It's with great strides over many centuries that our investigative nature as yielded a holistic and plausible worldview that can adequately explain the natural workings of the universe. From there, our society has come to regard science as the tool in which to explain natural phenomena. So it's not so much that religion is treading on science turf, it's that science has pulled the turf from under religion and expecting them to leave without hostility.

Science does have claim to that domain, however. An unbiased method of understanding reality that transcends culture and can bring about progress is needed for liberal democracy to survive. In a pluralist society there needs to be a means of discerning one idea from another, having a single authoritative point of knowledge won't satisfy a diverse crowd. With many men and women fascinated by the natural world gathering knowledge, it was only inevitable that the Church's role in historical truth would eventually be usurped. To cut a long story short, the reason I can write this from a desk in Australia and have it instantly broadcast all over the world is thanks to the scientific progress in the last 300 years. How the natural world works is now firmly under the scientific domain.

The position of "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" is disturbing beyond words; well my linguistic capacity anyway. It's telling people not to think, not to understand, because the answer is already there: Goddidit. As a cause (the whole point of science) it's the intellectual equivalent of saying "aliens did it", it tells us nothing of how aliens did it. The brief description given in Genesis is not a scientific guide, it's not even consistent with itself. It's a spiritual guide shaping God's relationship with mankind. So it surprises me that people take the clay golem story so literally. The sad thing is that any admission of fallibility in the scriptures means that God is too infallible. And even though the bible is riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies and absurdities, to question the inerrant nature of the scripture is to question God. Yet if God's creation is fallible, then surely the book that his creation made is fallible too. If God is perfect, then man should be as perfect as any text subscribed to God. This is not to show that God doesn't exist, just to highlight why those causing conflict between science and scripture have broken thinking.

While religion still carries the burden of dogma, it's safe to say the conflict between science and religion will remain. In very simple term, science answers the how, religion (or philosophy) answers the why. By trying to answer the how the dogma puts the religious belief into a falsifiable state; something that is easily done with evidence. Where some atheists fail in thinking is precisely the same, seeing dogma as incompatible with science. If God is taken out of that dogmatic structure and put in a supernatural position, it's completely unfalsifiable. It also leaves the belief as nothing more than speculation, but that's what faith is in the first place. The greatest mistake an atheist could make is to deny that people can take this transcendental view of the workings of God, that he works through nature as opposed to against it. There may be nothing to the argument philosophically, but beliefs are always going to exist about the dualist nature of reality. It's best to recognise that they can be (and have been) reconciled with a wholly scientific view of the world.

Our evolved brains empower us to rebel against our selfish genes. - Richard Dawkins

Just as we can rebel against our selfish genes, surely a theist can rebel against the dogma of their religion and still encompass a view of God. The belief itself may be absurd, but the position is exactly what NOMA encompasses. There is no need to kill religion to advance a scientific view of the world, there are so many theists these days who have found a means to keep their God and look to science to explain reality that it's unhelpful to go after religion in that manner.


The selfish meme
It's probably best to look at religion in the way we look at organisms. It was even Dawkins who proposed this back in the 1970s. Humans, like all other creatures, are individuals. Yet we can be broken down into the summation of our parts. We have arms, legs, head, torso, etc. Now those can be broken down into parts, like the face can be broken down into eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, etc. Now we can take the eye and break that down into smaller parts: iris, lens, cornea, pupil, optic nerve and so on. If we go down far enough, we get to the building blocks of cells: our chromosomes, genes and ultimately DNA. This is not to demonstrate the complexity of the body, rather to show that an individual is a collection of other individuals all the way back if you will to subatomic particles.

A meme can be viewed this way as well. So in this sense, we can look at smaller parts of religion itself that make up the whole. Dogma is just one of those parts, and that itself can be reduced to a collection of stories. In this sense, maybe dogma is the memetic equivalent to junk DNA. It once had a purpose, but it's largely been superseded by more specialised functionality. Upon replication, the dogma still remains, but the meme itself has little need for it anymore to propagate. Rather, it can be a hindrance at times. The religions in this modern age that adapt to the social environment it needs to propagate in will survive better than those that don't. So a religion can survive perfectly well because it offers more than just a mythology for the planet. It has meaning, purpose, morality, a guide to better living. While there are surely better philosophical guides out there, the works of David Hume barely reach the masses. It's not propagating anywhere near as successfully as the message of Jesus, so while that message may be coupled with the dogma that is no longer relevant, it still survives as per the environment.

I'm trying to say here that it's not wise to throw the baby out with the bathwater. While religion in it's most extreme can give rise to dangerous fundamentalists that lead innocent well-meaning people down the path of intolerance, an explicit rejection of the very notion of religion as being completely incompatible is going against the very science we look to. If an organism can adapt to it's environment in order to survive, then surely an idea that propagates has to do the same. Natural selection will take dogma away as long as there is pressure on the dogma itself. It's a formidable organism to try and starve completely, why not work to creating an environment where the unfavourable parts don't propagate but the more favourable parts do? Direct hostility from atheists is not going to endear believers to science, it's unnecessary. Instead, make memes that individually are more successful than religion is for the same task. Soon religion will have to adapt to survive. Darwinian selection at finest.