[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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