People talk about ‘carrying’ the name forward, when there is a single male in the family to preserve the pedigree of a family name. This is largely bogus, because the name line is merely one strand in the exponentially increasing number of routes that extend backwards as a family tree fans out, and it has ever diluted bearing on genetic ancestry.
Partly because of male pedigree beliefs and the one child per family rule, millions of Chinese girls are suspiciously missing. 119 baby boys are born for every 100 girls, something that doesn’t happen naturally or can yet be produced scientifically, at conception. Some girls were abandoned, some aborted and presumably some murdered.
There now aren’t enough prospective brides to go round. There are predicted to be 30 million unmarried young men in China by 2020 and these people are referred to as bare branches. Bare branches, because their genes will never be passed on.
By wanting to preserve the family name, the chances of your genetic lineage dying out increases, if everyone else behaves the same way.
Ironically, to have preserved your lineage in China, the best strategy would have been to have had a girl.
Culture, like religion, is something that people respect, irrationally, and because of this, the Selfish Meme (Family Lineage) has outwitted the Selfish Gene (Genetic Lineage). This is empirical proof, in some small part, that the effects of ideas, memes, can indeed behave like viruses and be damaging to our (genetic) survival.
People have a tendency, possibly through cultural respect, to look for examples of why religion may be a beneficial development for individuals (that reduces stress and makes us live longer, for example). But here we have a very simple concrete example of a cultural idea that is clearly not beneficial to the propagation of the individual’s DNA, being akin to a mind virus.
Since the distinction between culture and religion is not mutually exclusive, we have the possibility that religion too could be an idea that is damaging to an individual’s survival. Perhaps resistance to this notion is itself due to a cultural virus.
Excellent example. Dawkins makes the equally valid point that belief in religion could be a negative side effect from the beneficial value of having gullible children (who by being more likely to learn from their parents have a better chance of survival). Ergo, if their parents follow some religious worldview they will adopt it too, despite any evidence to the contrary, even if genetically damaging.