Remove the Log

I went snowboarding in Tahoe with my fellow medical students last weekend. To begin, let me confess that I am no expert snowboarder. But I generally go a day or two per year, and can hold my own. Anyways, I and a friend got out-boarded by a group that I was trying to keep up with. My friend was a beginner, and was going to go off by herself so as not to hinder me, too. Now if you’ve never learned snowboarding, let me explain: learning to snowboard sucks big time. It pays off in the end because snowboarding is totally awesomer than skiing. But when you’re learning it, it is not fun. Not even a little bit. Especially if you’re doing it all by yourself. So I decided to go with her a few runs and give her the boon of my super-smart expert advice. And so I did that. So under my wise tutelage, she endured many corrections: “Go faster; you’ll have more control.” “Don’t be afraid of falling.”

Then after the two runs of this, I realized something: I kicked my foot out when I turned. I went slow. I was afraid of falling. I knew what was right, but I didn’t do it. My mediocrity that day and the day before was because I did all those things I told my friend not to. I was the biggest snowboard hypocrite on the mountain.

…

In Christianity, there’re a lot of things that God gets angry about. But there is a special place in the wrath of God for hypocrisy. Jesus certainly did not approve of sexual sins, but treated sexual sinners with compassion and forgiveness. He didn’t do that to hypocrites. He proclaimed their doom, shamed them in front of massive crowds, and once, even used physical violence against them. In Matthew 7, Jesus gives a powerful and wise command, and then follows it up with a mocking satire:

1 "Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. 3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

This got me thinking about the Church (big ‘C’, that is, the set of all those who are followers of Jesus). How often do we say things and how often do we actually do them? How much of our own super-smart expert advice do we actually take?

A perfect small example of this is the Jesus fish on cars. To my Nor Cal friends, in other parts of the country, Christians will put a fish on the back of their car, (Ichthus which is an acronym in Greek for “Jesus Christ God’s Son [and] Savior”); the more familiar Darwin fish (and the Flying Sphagetti Monster logo) was a response to this. Imagine if Christians actually were “slow to wrath” and “considered others better than themselves” on the road. I, for one, have certainly not noticed a difference between rude driving by cars with Jesus fish and those without them. Remove the log!

Let’s take a more serious case. We are (in)famous for proclaiming the importance of family values. But we still engage in divorce and adultery. We shout with righteous indignation about how the gays/liberals/perverts/pornographers are ruining marriage, and then we, even the most faithful among us, have a 32% failure rate (among Christians who frequently attend church). It’s no good pointing to the non-Christians with a divorce rate of 48% and saying, “Well at least we’re better than them!” We are to compare ourselves only with God. If we want to be able to proclaim that homosexuality is an abomination, our ranks need to be slightly cleaner than 32% abomination. Remove the log!

Finally, let’s look at the Great Commandment. Jesus asked to summarize the law. #1 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” #2 “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Let’s just look at #2. Do we really love our neighbor as ourselves? The example Christ gives to illustrate is a foreigner helping a Jew who was robbed (“The Good Samaritan”). Do we behave like him? Christians certainly give more to charity than secular people, $2,210 per year, compared to $642 (2). But we are the ones with the “Not of this world” stickers. If we really considered our citizenship in Heaven, would we not be much more liberal in our charity? The cost to prevent the death of a child in Africa is as low as $1 per year of life saved. Did we really need the leather seats, the pool, or the grande caramel macchiato? Will we be able to present our bank statements to Christ on judgment day and hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? How can we tell others to leave the concerns of earth and care only for the things of Heaven? How can we talk to others of eternal life, and yet pay it so little regard ourselves? Remove the log!

If we’re right about theology, we’re sitting on the greatest teachings of the greatest man who ever lived. We have the ability: the philosophy and teachings of Jesus, the example of the saints, the fellowship of the Church, the Power of the Holy Spirit! We can look up from our grey daily struggles identical to those of our non-Christian peers and we can see the multi-colored glory of Christ, who calls us to a life of adventure. But such a life of driving our cars radically differently (that is, politely), making promises that we never break, and giving with abundance and joy is scary. It was the same problem I had on the mountain. I knew exactly what to do, but I didn’t have the courage to do it. I even told someone else how to do it, but I didn’t do it. I was content with my mediocrity.

…

Last Sunday, I removed the log. I took my own advice. I rode the lift to the top of the mountain, and pointed the nose downhill. A thrill of adrenaline, and then I was moving fast, faster than I can remember! I nearly fell, but I caught myself because of the control that came with speed. The fear melted away as the thrill of carving down the mountain set in.

I pray that we would overcome our fear and trust God completely. Only when I lost control, did I gain it. Only when we give up our lives, can we save them. I pray that we would remove the log. I pray that we would rise up and live according to the radical teachings of Jesus. I pray that we would lose control, but then realize this was the only way to ever get it.

(1) http://brewright.blogspot.com/2006/12/christian-divorce-rates.html 

(2) Brooks, Arthur “Religious Faith and Charitable Giving.” Hoover Institute. http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6577

Living an Extra Seven Years - Conclusion

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5
What is the conclusion of the matter? Church is good for you. You know it’s good for your soul. But now you also know it’s good for your body. Without looking at other factors, people who don’t go to church have an 87% increased chance of dying every year compared to those who attend more than weekly. This works out to a 7 year increase in life expectancy. Even after adjusting for risk factors, a 50% reduction in risk remains. The presence of this effect has been confirmed by many studies on over a hundred thousand people.

What should you do? If you’re in church, stay there. If you’ve left church, go back! It’s good for you! If you’ve never been to church, give it a try! I’m sure your religious friends would love to take you. Christians believe that God has built us to be in spiritual community. Is it any surprise that we operate better when live as we were made to?

In 1964, a group of doctors came together to critically evaluate the risks of smoking. They published their report and it, "hit the country like a bombshell. It was front page news and a lead story on every radio and television station in the United States and many abroad." News of a common behavior, smoking, increasing mortality by 70% was the public health crisis of our grandparents’ generation. Thousands of lives were saved by this information. Now the mantle falls to us. Our generation will be the one to make public this knowledge about church, to save the lives of thousands alive today and those yet to be born. We look at old movies and snicker because everyone is smoking; our children will look at our movies and snicker at people sitting at home on Sundays.

Living an Extra Seven Years - Medical Implications

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5
Church abstinence is today what smoking was in 1954. Everyone who’s looked at this knows it’s bad for you. There is debate on the mechanism of action, but not on the effect itself. What do we do? Or perhaps a better question is: did the Surgeon General do the right thing in condemning smoking before it was fully understood?

Because this is a behavior and not an opinion or belief, we can, in good conscience, recommend it to everyone. An atheist can go to church without changing a single belief. He can attend church potlucks and volunteer with church members without agreeing to a single point of theology. It wouldn’t be easy; an atheist might get withdrawal symptoms like a smoker, but if this can be pushed through, it’s probably a good thing in the long run. Pushing belief on an unwilling person had ethical implications, but a doctor can push a behavior like attendance with no ethical misgivings.

Even if we don’t care about atheists (or are afraid of their anger at such a reasonable suggestion), doctors should have absolutely no misgivings with asking Christians about church attendance and encouraging them to increase it. We have very solid evidence to support such a recommendation.

In the Hippocratic Oath, Doctors swear to ‘do no harm.’ If you went to your doctor, it would be unethical for the doctor to ignore your smoking habit; he has information that could prevent you harm; withholding it is wrong. How is this information about church attendance different? Can we doctors, in good conscience, withhold this information from our patients? Would this be anything other than harm?

Unfortunately doctors are terrified of religion. An enlightening essay was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on this topic (5). The author (a non-physician) told physicians that they should not talk about religion. Even though 77% of hospitalized patients want physician to consider their spiritual needs and 48% of patients want their physician to pray with them, the authors explain, “Patients often ask for things that are unrealistic or that may not be in their best interests.” After all, “physicians are not trained to engage in in-depth conversations with their patients about their spiritual concerns.” In other words, doctors are so bad at spiritual conversations, they shouldn’t even try. This idea comes straight from the Hippocratic Oath; all doctors swear to, “Never attempt a thing I’m not already good at.”  Actually that’s a lie. We don’t swear silly things like that. And neither should we live by them.

It is clear to me that doctors ought to recommend church attendance to every one of his patients. It is likely that patients will ignore him as they do with smoking. But if he truly cares about their wellbeing, he must at least mention the risk his patient is taking by staying at home on Sundays.

Consider the magnitude of this public health problem. Every year in the US, 2.5 million people die; if we consider the frequency of church attendance and adjust robustly, the number of deaths that can be attributed to missing church is 568,000 (9, 11, 12, 13). Every year, half a million people die because they missed church. This is one-fifth of the total mortality rate. In 2004, a paper was published to try to calculate the actual causes of death in the US (14). They tabulated that smoking causes 435,000 deaths per year. Church attendance is more important than smoking. Inactivity and poor diet cause 400,000 deaths per year. Church attendance is more important than diet and exercise. Deaths attributable to car crashes, alcohol, illicit drugs, sexual behavior, microbes, and incidents involving firearms together add up to 324,000 deaths per year. Church attendance is more important than all of these combined. Church abstinence is the single strongest association with mortality in the United States, but it doesn’t even get mentioned in a paper on the subject.

[All references are listed under the first post]

Living an Extra Seven Years - Clarifications

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5
This effect is very interesting because it is so tightly linked to behavior, not belief. It doesn’t matter how ‘spiritual’ you feel or how religious you say you are (6). You only live longer when you actually go to church (though there is some suggestion that private religious practice counts). It’s very much like the behavior of smoking: people who do X, die. People who smoke, die. People who stay home on Sunday, die. It’s as simple as that.

Because the models have been adjusted, we can’t recommend anything other than the thing itself. For example, if it were the case that church only worked by reducing smoking, then we could say: either go to church OR quit smoking (if you can...). When they found out smoking was bad, they didn’t know entirely what parts of the cigarette caused the cancer; they could only recommend quitting altogether (today they understand the mechanisms better and sell ‘smokeless’ cigarettes). One day, that might be possible for church; but for today, we can recommend nothing but simply attending church.

It is important to note that we don’t have final ‘proof’ that church causes lower mortality. ‘Proof’ in a modern medical sense demands a particular kind of study called a Randomized Control Trial. Correlation is not causation (4). We cannot be absolutely certain that this effect is caused by church. That is to say, if a doctor recommends a non-churchgoer to go to church, we are not certain that the effect would remain.

The skeptic might say that there might be some other effect (maybe a yet-unobserved healthiness factor) which makes people go to church and also makes them live a long time. But it’s also possible that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer, but that there is some yet-undiscovered sickness factor which makes people who smoke get lung cancer (we could certainly have argued this in 1950). To silence the skeptic, we’d have to get a big group of people and have them each flip a coin. Heads gets treatment 1 (smoking/no church); tails gets treatment 2 (no smoking/church). The problem is that we have good reason to suspect that treatment group 1 is going to die, and for better or worse, we decided killing people for science advancement was generally a bad idea. And even if we weren’t sure, nobody objecting to recommendations on church attendance would support an experiment randomly assigning people to church or no church. The experiment is ethically impossible. We package cigarettes with a warning label and doctors push patients into smoking cessation programs without ever having done a perfect study on their deadliness. How is church abstinence different?

[All references are listed under the first post]

Living an Extra Seven Years - Adjustment

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5
My grandfather came to California from Oklahoma at 18 with a nickel in his pocket. He got a blue collar job working at Ralphs. It was good work that paid well enough, but the hours were long. The managers, wanting to be kind to their employees, gave them a smoke break. My grandfather, a nonsmoker, tried to take a break with his coworkers, only to be told that it was a smoke break, not a do-whatever-you-like break. So he took up smoking.

Imagine a researcher asked, “Does working at Ralphs cause lung cancer?” There are two ways to answer the question. You could say yes: working at Ralphs causes smoking, and smoking causes cancer. Statistically, this is called “un-adjusted risk.” Un-adjusted risks tend to be a less specific and so less convincing answer. The 87% increase in risk of dying from never going to church is unadjusted.

But maybe it wasn’t Ralphs’ smoke-break policies, but some other factor which causes lung cancer (maybe they used dangerous chemicals in the canning process). How could you tell the difference? You’d look at the non-smokers. Were non-smokers getting lung cancer, too? If so, you’d suspect that there was some other factor at the cannery. Using the data from the nonsmokers, you can “subtract” the effect of smoking from the smokers and find out for someone like my grandpa, if there was any “adjusted” risk of working at Ralphs. That is, you can find out if there is any effect outside of the known effect of smoking.

So can we tell if the 87% increase in life expectancy is just from Christians reducing known risk factors? The researchers in the papers subtracted the effects of age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, social support (e.g. marital status, number of friends, relatives), health risks (e.g. smoking, alcohol consumption). If church improved health by working through these things, after we’d subtracted the effects of bad behavior, there would be no difference between the churchgoers and the abstainers. We would conclude that the church is a really good way of changing unhealthy behaviors. But even after these risk factors were taken out, the effect remains. Church does indeed lead to healthier lifestyles (less smoking, drinking, etc.). After subtracting all these from the 87%, someone who never goes to church still has a 50% higher chance of dropping dead compared to a frequent churchgoer (6, 15). Church attendees live longer and we don’t know why.

There is speculation, but no solid data to support them. It might be volunteerism. Maybe it’s a more positive outlook on life. Perhaps there is some unidentified good of being in community (“psychosocial effect”). Or maybe there is actually something supernatural going on in church (7). For all we know, it could be the potlucks. But does it matter how it works? Or more accurately, for whom does it matter? Certainly researchers ought to pursue the Truth wherever it goes. But for the average American, mechanism is much less important. And for the average physician, an understood mechanism rarely comes before a treatment.

We have a very strong case for church attendance. Our case for church attendance today is stronger than our case against smoking was in 1950. Our statistical sophistication and our data collection have improved a lot since the 1950’s. But for the family practice physician, does it matter? To the policy makers, does it matter? We started lecturing patients and slapping warning labels on cigarettes before we knew how they were bad.

[All references are listed under the first post]

Living an Extra Seven Years - Introduction

Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5
In 1912, Dr. Isaac Alder suggested that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer. Immediately everyone stopped smoking. Actually, that’s not true at all. He was promptly and almost universally ignored. It took another four decades before anyone really listened. By 1957, the evidence had accumulated and the Surgeon General declared that smoking caused cancer. One year after this announcement, 44% of Americans believed smoking caused lung cancer. In 1964, “Smoking and Health” was published, and laws started getting passed restricting smoking, from advertisements to taxes (8). In 1968, 78% of Americans believed smoking caused lung cancer. Unfortunately, knowing something is good for you is not the same thing as doing what’s good for you.

For decades we didn’t know for sure if smoking was bad for you. Movie stars and cool kids pushed the habit, and when we found out it was bad, it was too late. People were already addicted. For those who did quit, severe damage was already done. The slowness of the research, the industry lobbying, and the lack of will on the part of the government and public cost countless lives.

Smoking remains to be one of the most important risk factors for heart disease and cancer. It’s not just hypothetical risk. Life insurance, an industry which bets on your life and death, is keenly aware of this risk and charges smokers much more because of this high risk. A smoker has a 70% higher annual risk of death than a nonsmoker (8). Smoking is the single best observable factor in determining your risk of dying. Or at least it was. What if I told you that there’s another behavior that is even better at tracking with lifespan than smoking is?

People who don’t demonstrate this behavior have an 87% higher annual risk of than those who do (9). A 20 year old who did engage in this behavior throughout his life would live 7 years longer than one who didn’t (for blacks, it’s even better: 14 years longer). You might be thinking you know what it is: exercise! Nope. Exercise is good, but not that good. Those who do what the American Medical Association tells them to do (1400 calories per week of exercise; 30 minutes daily) (2) have a 29% lower annual risk of death(1). What about losing weight? Those who are normal weight (BMI <24) have a 25% lower annual risk of death compared to those who are overweight (BMI >26) (1). What could this behavior be? What could be more important than what our doctors talk about when we visit? What’s more important than smoking? What’s more important than exercise? What’s more important than weight loss?

Church attendance. People who never go to church(3) have an 87% increased chance of dropping dead compared to those that attend more than weekly. Statistically speaking, never going to church is worse for your health than smoking a pack a day for the rest of your life (9). I’m not joking. This is an effect that has been seen in dozens of studies over the last thirty or so years. Scientists really don’t like it, but it’s there, and it’s real.

We have lots of evidence that church attendees have a lower risk of dying. We have so much data in these studies, we can even ‘pool’ it, adding up the results of many studies into one “meta” analytic study. The best meta study that did this found, after looking at a total of over 125,000 people in 42 separate investigations, the odds of a churchgoer surviving were better than a non-churchgoer (10).

But how can this be? Perhaps churchgoers are just goody-two-shoes who never smoke or drink or cuss. To evaluate that theory, I need to tell a story.

[Note: this is the first of a 5-part post. The references for all 5 will be posted here in the first post]

References

(1) Paffenbarger, RS; Hyde, RT; Wing, AL; Lee, IM; Jung, DL; Kampert, JB. The Association Of Changes In Physical-Activity Level And Other Life-Style Characteristics With Mortality Among Men. NEJM, 328 (8): 538-545 Feb 25 1993.

(2) Pate RR; Pratt M; Blair SN; Wilmore JH; et. al. Physical Activity and Public Health: A Recommendation From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine. JAMA. 1995;273(5):402-407.

(3) Most of the studies are representative US populations and so are literally measuring church attendance. Others look at ‘religious service attendance’ and find the same thing. I will use ‘church attendance’ in this article as these results do not have enough data to religious services of other faiths (though it is my belief that this would be true).

(4) Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there' – xkcd.com/552/ . Also, I am among those who are not happy about the monopoly that the Randomized Control Trial has on science. It’s a good technique, but not the only good technique.

(5) Sloan, RP. Should physicians prescribe religious activities? NEJM 342(25): 1913-1916 JUN 22 2000

(6) Powell, LH; Shahabi, L; Thoresen, CE. Religion and spirituality - Linkages to physical health. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 58 (1): 36-52 JAN 2003

(7) I say supernatural not to give up the search, but to focus it. The effect might be mediated through an undiscovered non-classical mechanism; perhaps it is a hyper-dimensional effect, perhaps it is quantum mechanical. With regard to unsolved mysteries, we must always be ready for a paradigm shift to be hiding underneath it.

(8) “The Reports of the Surgeon General” <http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/NN/Views/Exhibit/narrative/smoking.html>

(9) Hummer RA; Rogers RG; Nam CB; Ellison CG. Religious Involvement and U.S. Adult Mortality. Demography 36(2): 273-285 May 1999

(10) McCullough ME, Hoyt WT, Larson DB, Koenig HG, Thoresen C. Religious involvement and mortality: a meta-analytic review. Health Psychol.19(3):211-22 2000 May

(11) FASTSTATS. Accessed on 10/23/2010. Centers for Disease Control. <http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm>

(12) American FactFinder. Accessed on 10/23/2010. US Census Bureau. <http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en>

(13) US Population: 310,546,653. US Mortality rate: 803.6 per 100,000.

(14) Mokdad AH; Marks JS; Stroup DF; Gerberding JL . Actual Causes of Death in the United States, 2000 JAMA. 2004;291:1238-1245

(15) This trend is supported by the meta-study (reference 10) but with a smaller magnitude. It reports that the increased chance of survival for those who attend is 25% after adjustment. The difference is probably because of a dose-effect in the Hummer paper (reference 9); they didn’t just measure attender/non-attender, but the frequency of attendance. Running 50 minutes every day is better for you than running 5 minutes, and so it seems that going to church more than weekly is better for you than going only on Christmas and Easter. The data in the Hummer paper does appear to agree with the more modest 25% if you ignore the dose-effect and pool all church attenders together.

Role of Women in the Church

I had a very good discussion with a classmate which has caused me to begin to rethink my position on women in the church.

I had previously taken Paul's instructions on female pastors literally, and not seriously considered the possibility that those sections were cultural (in the category of "greet one another with a holy kiss"). The slippery hermeneutic slope is a very real danger, but it at least deserves more consideration on my part than I've given it.

I never had a problem with women leading or even preaching. The only position that I was uncomfortable with was the head pastor's position. But what of that? Clearly God chose Deborah to exercise executive leadership (Judges 4) even to the point of shaming the courage of the man under her (Barak). I re-listened to a sermon that struck me years ago where the pastor (Myles McPherson of The Rock in San Diego) said, "God was trying to send a message: 'Don't be trippin'!" And he's right. God uses who he uses, even in extremely paternal societies. Should we set up structures which prevent people like Deborah from leading?

I don't know... this deserves more thought for sure.

Church for Atheists

Along the lines of the entry earlier this week, I have been thinking about the spiritual health of non-Christians. They have the same needs as any Christian has. They need community. They need opportunities for service. They need places to express joy and thanksgiving (even if it’s directed to the universe in general). I think it’s clearly biblical to try to bring them to church. Unfortunately, all the talk about Jesus and miracles is terrifying for a staunch materialist.

When we see a man who has been beaten by robbers and left for dead, what ought we to do? Put him on our own donkey. Sure. But what if he refuses our help on the grounds that he is terrified of donkeys? He will not accept the best thing for him: to be carried to a place of rest. So do we throw up our hands and give up? After all, he had his chance and he blew it. Or do we try to pull he and the donkey together, much to the protestation of both man and beast? We know for a fact that his riding the donkey will be for his own good; coercion may be the most merciful thing.

Moreover, when we offer him wine, and he refuses, saying he doesn’t believe in the power of alcohol to dull pain. Do we force the wine upon him?

In my little rip-off of Jesus great parable, the robbers are Humanism and Materialism, the man is the atheist, and we’re in the role of the good Samaritan. Our donkey is church and the wine is prayer. For many of us, we can think of nothing else but the donkey and the wine. And in part it’s right; the church is indeed the best community on Earth and prayer is the best way man can commune with God. But the man has a deathly fear of the donkey and will not ride it; he does not believe in the wine, and will not drink it.

I propose that we consider another approach: give him all he is willing to take. He’s hurting, so let’s let him lean on us and walk towards the inn, albeit it at an excruciatingly slow pace. He won’t take wine; let’s offer him water. There is no question that he’s thirsty, almost to death for any liquid.

What is the leaning and what is the water? I’m not quite sure, because Christians haven’t quite figured out what spiritual practices are tolerable for Atheists. An Atheist would not come to a prayer meeting; would he come to a lesser communion of God by quiet meditation? Or perhaps stargazing? An atheist would not sing about Jesus; would he sing about the beauty of nature?

I am not thinking about this in typical Evangelical terms (though I think those approaches also are valid). What first motivated this was the question: how do I heal the spirits of my atheist patients? Even assuming that total spiritual healing would never come through Christ, did I not still have an obligation to heal as much as I could? So how can an atheist who is starving to death for community and parched for spiritual practice be healed in part?

I am also not talking about watering down the Gospel. The Gospel must be preached with power and authority at Church; the effort to seek and save the lost must continue unabated. But just like international work, long-term solutions are ideal, but people are starving to death today. Evangelicals have done a superb job at the long-term (eternal even) solution for the soul, but what keeps the soul of an Atheist from starving today?

I pose this question particularly to church people. I don’t know the answer. I see terrible spiritual affliction, and though the church is fighting it systemically, there are too many suffering without relief today who feel too uncomfortable to come to church. Should we have 'church' for atheists?

How can we be a Good Samaritan and give relief to the soul of the bruised and beaten Atheist today?

Evolution of Christianity

While in class, we learned about the mechanisms of evolution of life. There are four ways that life develops. Anyways, I got the idea that maybe the same mechanisms apply to ideas. I will describe each mechanism, how it applies to life, and the analogy to ideas using Christianity as a particular example of an idea.

Natural Selection
Natural selection is generally what you think of when you hear "survival of the fittest." The main idea is that the fit organisms reproduce, passing their genes to the next generation while the others don't. In the case of a finch, those with the stoutest beaks on an island of hard nuts wouldn't starve as often and so have more stout-beaked finches. Also, a fit animal must produce offspring that can themselves reproduce. An animal that has sterile offspring has no fitness.

"Fitness" then is defined generally by the ability to pass on genes. Actual survival value is not always necessary. For example, peacocks are very poor fliers because of their huge tails; but those with big tails mate better, so flight is sacrificed for appearance.

For ideas, 'fit' ideas are those which are passed on. The Gospel, for example, has excellent fitness, as it has been passed on from a single individual to now around 2 billion. Gnosticism went extinct because of the superior fitness of Christianity. The "fitness" of a Christian, then, is his or her ability to transmit that faith to others. Also, if these converts do not themselves convert others (are 'sterile'), then the Christian is not fit.

Truth is like survival value; truth increases believer's ability to live fulfilled lives (e.g. people who believe in loving their neighbor as themsleves lead more fulfilled lives than those who don't). Like survival value, it is not necessary for a fit idea to be true; like exaggerated tail feathers, false ideas that look good may transmit despite the detriment to the believer.

Genetic Drift
Genetic drift is the natural variations in the expected based on chance. It's like how a blue eyed woman and a brown eyed man may have four blue-eyed children. It's most likely they would have two blue-eyed and two brown-eyed children, but it just didn't turn out that way. In a population, the incidence of blue eyed individuals may be like this family and go up simply due to chance. This is genetic drift.

The effects of genetic drift are increased when populations are small. In the case of the family (initial population size of 2), the brown-eye gene was completely eliminated in the next generation simply by chance. This is much less likely with large populations; the population's genetics don't drift as far when the population is large.

Ideas can also vary greatly from any initial starting point. Christianity has strayed, greatly at times, from the original teachings of Jesus. It could be said that the idea of justification by faith completely disappeared in the Western European population of Christians in the early middle ages.

This effect is pronounced when populations are small. Cults form when too few people isolate themselves from the rest of the population. Early in the church when the population was tiny, heresy abounded in the Gnostics and Judiazers.

Gene Flow
Gene flow is transfer of genetic material between populations. It's like a brown eyed person moving to Holland to get married. A brown-eye gene will be transferred to the Dutch population which doesn't have very much of it. Gene flow works to limit genetic drift. In other words, it makes populations seem bigger (genetically) than they are. There are more genes available, so drift is lessened.

Like genes, humans can exchange information through writing. With ideas, collaboration keeps ideas from drifting. Paul's letters allowed isolated and small populations of believers in Ephesus to limit their tendency to drift towards heresy. Likewise with science, the Literature and the peer-review process prevents the flow of ideas from drifting.

Mutation
Here is the fun one. Mutation is a random change in the genes of an organism. It may be caused by a mutagen (like in Ninja Turtles), or even something as simple as sunlight (UV is particularly nasty to DNA). This process eventually leads to the creation of new genetic material and thus new adaptations which, if they increase the fitness of an organism, would be maintained in the population. Mutations, however, are almost always detrimental and usually are eliminated in the first generation. Mutation is the only mechanism that can actually create new genetic information; all other processes only manage or modify existing information.

In ideas, mutation seems to correlate with revelation or epiphany. Most of human interaction is exchanging old ideas (gene flow). It is very rare that anyone thinks of anything novel. Rather, it is rare that a novel idea is actually fit (people pass it on) or true. There are many, many new ideas that are wrong and stupid that people have but no one repeats.

Focusing again on Christianity, Jesus was the first to introduce this new idea to the world; it turned out to be very fit and very true so survived and was passed on. It can be said that people like Paul, Aquinas and Luther may have all added information and ideas to Christianity that were truly novel and passable. In Luther's case, he caused an insertion of information that had been lost due to the "genetic drift" of the Catholic church during the Middle Ages.


Anyways, it was a fun thing to think about. I have not thought out the implications or further applications of this idea as yet.