[extropy-chat] Transhumanism: Diehard de Chardon - Truth

[rick]

CurtAdams at aol.com wrote:

It's not "stupid genes".  I'll try to find the reference when I'm back
at the University Monday.  Basically somebody did the classic twin
study, measuring degree of religious belief.  I think it was 3 levels;
something like devout, churchgoing, and uncharted.  Identical twins
raised separately had about an 80% concordance while fraternal twins had
only about 50%.  Specific religious beliefs were not particularly
correlated.  The large differences between identical and fraternal twins
indicates that genetics makes a big difference in the degree of
religious belief. 

Rick (aperick at centurytel.net) responds:

I would need to see the raw data. I suspect that the samples size may be
fairly small and that there are several uncontrolled or overlooked
factors which could be at play. Twins in general, and identical ones in
particular, may tend to be adopted into similar sorts of families. Until
I see the raw data I cannot discount the possibility that stupid genes
may yet be at work -- somewhere. In any case, surely there must be
goggles of tendencies determined by genes. Are we really all that
certain that the tendency towards religious faith is coded in genes to a
higher degree than most other tendencies are? I have observed persons
from very religious families revert to atheism -- apparently due to
enlightenment. There seem to be many different types of atheism, that is
to say different sets of goings that lead to godless views. I've got
mine, and mine can beat the pants off yours:)