Tom Yager, in his 2002 column “Losing My Religion”, called it technology attachment disorder: “an unshakable, impractical devotion to a brand, platform, product line, or programming language.” Such devotion is a kind of religion argument, like Windows vs Linux or Christian vs Muslim. It doesn’t have to be so, surely, but sometimes it gets aggro. John Udell comments on this subject (starting with the Mac vs PC debate) in his Infoworld blog and brings the philosopher Daniel Dennett into the story. Dennett’s recently been exploring religion as a product of evolutionary processes in the domains of biology (genes) and culture (memes).

As Udell notes, group performance of ritual song and dance is a central feature of religious activity. This may be rooted in oral culture, as Dennett apparently points out, where there was only such majority consensus available to provide any sort of accurate transmission of messages. To avoid the ‘Chinese Whispers’ effect. However I would suggest that the Greek and Roman orators had their own tricks in order to preserve stories intact – look at the story of Ulysses as just one example. It’s been handed down to us by word of mouth over many generations before being committed to the written word. It’s not necessarily just religion that needs or solves this problem. Indeed, all of our technology, our entire civilisation, was passed down the line in some oral way for thousands of years before writing was even developed or popularised. It wasn’t just religion that solved the accuracy problem.

Anyway, Dennett apparently builds upon Richard Dawkins’ thinking. Dawkins’ books have pushed the line that evolution can be usefully regarded as competition among genes as well as competition among the organisms they encode and that ideas, beliefs, or behaviors – also called memes – are the cultural analogs of genes. Dennett’s extension apparently – I’m relying upon Udell here – considers that the meme pool survives in the face of relentless selective pressure, just as does every gene and its phenotype. Thus every idea, belief or behavior must deliver an adaptive benefit or be lost. And whilst these memes may assist us, as in generating a fully formed living ‘religion’ and successfully passing on moral precepts generation after generation, sometimes only the memes benefit.

Udell likens this to successful marketing spin. For example where Macs are seen to “suck” and PCs are seen to be “cool.” It’s important to understand, he says, how this all works – it could be useful at least to unravel some of these meme-driven myths. Linux vs Windows. ID vs Evolution. Ford vs GM. Newtonian vs quantum physics. 11 or 13 dimension string theory? Our sometimes feral and driven attachment to ideas can seem pretty illogical at times. Is it our memes at work?