[extropy-chat] Religious fanatic? Blame it on 'god gene'

Damien Broderick thespike at satx.rr.com
Mon Nov 15 18:10:27 UTC 2004


At 03:09 AM 11/15/2004 -0800, Zero wrote:

>If this is true,

Ahem. Try these sensible reviews, from amazon:

==============

The God Gene : How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes
by Dean Hamer

 From Publishers Weekly
This book's title is more rhetorical effect than factual accuracy: Hamer, 
who discovered the controversial "gay gene" in the 1990s, reports that he 
has now found a gene that may correlate in some people with their level of 
spirituality­not with belief in a being we would call God or with the 
performance of traditional religious practices, but with what psychiatrist 
Robert Cloninger called "self-transcendence." This trait is a capacity to 
feel at one with all life and with the universe as a whole, and Cloninger 
measured it with personality testing. The so-called "God gene" is a 
particular location in the human genome known as VMAT2, which affects the 
brain's neurotransmitters. Hamer admits that the gene probably accounts for 
less than 1% of the total variance in human spirituality. The book's later 
chapters become still more speculative, as Hamer, a molecular biologist at 
the National Cancer Institute, considers the scanty evidence of health 
benefits of spirituality, which would make faith an adaptive evolutionary 
trait. Hamer emphasizes that the existence of a "God gene" would neither 
prove nor disprove the reality of God. However, this gracefully written 
book may intrigue people of all faiths­or no faith­who wonder about the 
ultimate connection between science and religion.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All 
rights reserved.

 From Scientific American
By page 77 of The God Gene, Dean H. Hamer has already disowned the title of 
his own book. He recalls describing to a colleague his discovery of a link 
between spirituality and a specific gene he calls "the God gene." His 
colleague raised her eyebrows. "Do you mean there's just one?" she asked. 
"I deserved her skepticism," Hamer writes. "What I meant to say, of course, 
was 'a' God gene, not 'the' God gene." Of course. Why, the reader wonders, 
didn't Hamer call his book A God Gene? That might not have been as catchy, 
but at least it wouldn't have left him contradicting himself. Whatever you 
want to call it, this is a frustrating book. The role that genes play in 
religion is a fascinating question that's ripe for the asking. 
Psychologists, neurologists and even evolutionary biologists have offered 
insights about how spiritual behaviors and beliefs emerge from the brain. 
It is reasonable to ask, as Hamer does, whether certain genes play a 
significant role in faith. But he is a long way from providing an answer. 
Hamer, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, wound up on his quest 
for the God gene by a roundabout route. Initially he and his colleagues set 
out to find genes that may make people prone to cigarette addiction. They 
studied hundreds of pairs of siblings, comparing how strongly their shared 
heredity influenced different aspects of their personality. In addition to 
having their subjects fill out psychological questionnaires, the 
researchers also took samples of DNA from some of them. Hamer then realized 
that this database might let him investigate the genetics of spirituality. 
He embarked on this new search by looking at the results of certain survey 
questions that measured a personality trait known as self-transcendence, 
originally identified by Washington University psychiatrist Robert 
Cloninger. Cloninger found that spiritual people tend to share a set of 
characteristics, such as feeling connected to the world and a willingness 
to accept things that cannot be objectively demonstrated. Analyzing the 
cigarette study, Hamer confirmed what earlier studies had found: heredity 
is partly responsible for whether a person is self-transcendent or not. He 
then looked at the DNA samples of some of his subjects, hoping to find 
variants of genes that tended to turn up in self-transcendent people. His 
search led him to a gene known as VMAT2. Two different versions of this 
gene exist, differing only at a single position. People with one version of 
the gene tend to score a little higher on self-transcendence tests. 
Although the influence is small, it is, Hamer claims, consistent. About 
half the people in the study had at least one copy of the 
self-transcendence-boosting version of VMAT2, which Hamer dubs the God 
gene. Is the God gene real? The only evidence we have to go on at the 
moment is what Hamer presents in his book. He and his colleagues are still 
preparing to submit their results to a scientific journal. It would be nice 
to know whether these results can withstand the rigors of peer review. It 
would be nicer still to know whether any other scientists can replicate 
them. The field of behavioral genetics is littered with failed links 
between particular genes and personality traits. These alleged associations 
at first seemed very strong. But as other researchers tried to replicate 
them, they faded away into statistical noise. In 1993, for example, a 
scientist reported a genetic link to male homosexuality in a region of the 
X chromosome. The report brought a huge media fanfare, but other scientists 
who tried to replicate the study failed. The scientist's name was Dean 
Hamer. To be fair, it should be pointed out that Hamer offers a lot of 
details about his study in The God Gene, along with many caveats about how 
hard it is to establish an association between genes and behavior. But 
given the fate of Hamer's so-called gay gene, it is strange to see him so 
impatient to trumpet the discovery of his God gene. He is even eager to 
present an intricate hypothesis about how the God gene produces 
self-transcendence. The gene, it is well known, makes membrane-covered 
containers that neurons use to deliver neurotransmitters to one another. 
Hamer proposes that the God gene changes the level of these 
neurotransmitters so as to alter a person's mood, consciousness and, 
ultimately, self-transcendence. He goes so far as to say that the God gene 
is, along with other faith-boosting genes, a product of natural selection. 
Self-transcendence makes people more optimistic, which makes them healthier 
and likely to have more kids. These speculations take up the bulk of The 
God Gene, but in support Hamer only offers up bits and pieces of research 
done by other scientists, along with little sketches of spiritual people he 
has met. It appears that he has not bothered to think of a way to test 
these ideas himself. He did not, for example, try to rule out the 
possibility that natural selection has not favored self-transcendence, but 
some other function of VMAT2. (Among other things, the gene protects the 
brain from neurotoxins.) Nor does Hamer rule out the possibility that the 
God gene offers no evolutionary benefit at all. Sometimes genes that seem 
to be common thanks to natural selection turn out to have been spread 
merely by random genetic drift. Rather than address these important 
questions, Hamer simply declares that any hypothesis about the evolution of 
human behavior must be purely speculative. But this is simply not true. If 
Hamer wanted, he could have measured the strength of natural selection that 
has acted on VMAT2 in the past. And if he did find signs of selection, he 
could have estimated how long ago it took place. Other scientists have been 
measuring natural selection this way for several years now and publishing 
their results in major journals. The God Gene might have been a 
fascinating, enlightening book if Hamer had written it 10 years from 
now--after his link between VMAT2 and self-transcendence had been confirmed 
by others and after he had seriously tested its importance to our species. 
Instead the book we have today would be better titled: A Gene That Accounts 
for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological 
Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, 
Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing 
in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.






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