2004-11-27
October 25, 2004 Time magazine: Is God in Our Genes?
>Is God in Our Genes?
>Time, 4.10.25
>
>Jeffrey Kluger, Jeff Chu/ London; Broward Liston/ Orlando; Maggie
>Sieger/ Chicago; Daniel Williams/ Sydney
>
> It's not hard to see the divinity behind the water temples that dot
> the rice
>terraces of Bali. It's there in the white-clad high priest presiding in the
>temple at the summit of a dormant volcano. It's there in the 23 priests
>serving
>along with him, selected for their jobs when they were still children by a
>bevy
>of virgin priestesses. It's there in the rituals the priests perform to
>protect
>the island's water, which in turn is needed to nurture the island's rice.
>
> If the divine is easy to spot, what's harder to make out is the
> banal. But
>it's there too--in the meetings the priests convene to schedule their planting
>dates and combat the problem of crop pests; in the plans they draw up to
>maintain aqueducts and police conduits; in the irrigation proposals they
>consider and approve, the dam proposals they reject or amend. "The
>religion has
>a temple at every node in the irrigation system," says David Sloan Wilson,
>professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton,
>N.Y. "The priests make decisions and enforce the code of both religion and
>irrigation."
>
> Ask true believers of any faith to describe the most important thing that
>drives their devotion, and they'll tell you it's not a thing at all but a
>sense--a feeling of a higher power far beyond us. Western religions can get a
>bit more doctrinaire: God has handed us laws and lore, and it's for us to
>learn
>and practice what they teach. For a hell-raising species like ours,
>however--with too much intelligence for our own good and too little discipline
>to know what to do with it--there have always been other, more utilitarian
>reasons to get religion. Chief among them is survival. Across the eons, the
>structure that religion provides our lives helps preserve both mind and body.
>But that, in turn, has raised a provocative question, one that's increasingly
>debated in the worlds of science and religion: Which came first, God or
>the need
>for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above,
>or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather
>into the communities essential to keeping the species going?
>
> Just as a hurricane spins off tornadoes, this debate creates its own
>whirlwind of questions: If some people are more spiritual than others, is it
>nature or nurture that has made them so? If science has nothing to do with
>spirituality and it all flows from God, why do some people hear the divine
>word
>easily while others remain spiritually tone-deaf? Do such ivied-hall debates
>about environment, heredity and anthropology have any place at all in more
>exalted conversations about the nature of God?
>
> Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus,
> there is
>a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it. It's hard
>enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and
>cheating pay such rich dividends. It's harder still when there's no moral cop
>walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to
>have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best
>and, not
>incidentally, give us a sense that there's someone awake in the cosmic house
>when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we're
>here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine.
>And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods--and millenniums of holy wars
>prove that we do--the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely
>outweigh
>the bloodshed.
>
> Far from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a
> crucial
>trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation.
>Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to
>their offspring. Those who didn't risked dying out in chaos and killing. The
>evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one.
>
> Nowhere has that idea received a more intriguing going-over than in the
>recently published book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes
>(Doubleday; 256 pages), by molecular biologist Dean Hamer. Chief of gene
>structure at the National Cancer Institute, Hamer not only claims that human
>spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the
>genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the
>neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of
>spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer's work, may be due to
>little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals
>governed by
>our DNA. "I'm a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we
>feel
>is the result of activity in the brain," Hamer says. "I think we follow the
>basic law of nature, which is that we're a bunch of chemical reactions running
>around in a bag."
>
> Even for the casually religious, such seeming reductionism can
> rankle. The
>very meaning of faith, after all, is to hold fast to something without all the
>tidy cause and effect that science finds so necessary. Try parsing things the
>way geneticists do, and you risk parsing them into dust. "God is not something
>that can be demonstrated logically or rigorously," says Neil Gillman, a
>professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
>City. "[The idea of a God gene] goes against all my personal theological
>convictions." John Polkinghorne, a physicist who is also Canon Theologian at
>England's Liverpool Cathedral, agrees: "You can't cut [faith] down to the
>lowest
>common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist
>thinking."
>
> Is Hamer really guilty of such simplification? Could claims for a
> so-called
>God gene be merely the thin end of a secular wedge, one that risks prying
>spirituality away from God altogether? Or, assuming the gene exists at all,
>could it somehow be embraced by both science and religion, in the same way
>some
>evolutionists and creationists--at least the less radicalized ones--accept the
>idea of a divinely created universe in which evolving life is simply part
>of the
>larger plan? Hamer, for one, hopes so. "My findings are agnostic on the
>existence of God," he says. "If there's a God, there's a God. Just knowing
>what
>brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the
>fact."
>
> Whatever the merits of Hamer's work, he is clearly the heir of a
>millenniums-long search for the wellsprings of spirituality. People have been
>wrestling with the roots of faith since faith itself was first codified into
>Scripture. "[God has] set eternity in the hearts of men," says the Book of
>Ecclesiastes, "yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to
>end."
>
> To theologians in the 3rd century B.C., when Ecclesiastes is thought
> to have
>been written, that passage spoke to the idea that while all of us are divinely
>inspired to look for God, none of us are remotely capable of fully
>comprehending
>what we are seeking. Scientists in the 21st century may not disagree, provided
>that "hearts of men" is replaced with "genes of men." The key for those
>researchers is finding those genes.
>
> Hamer began looking in 1998, when he was conducting a survey on
> smoking and
>addiction for the National Cancer Institute. As part of his study, he
>recruited
>more than 1,000 men and women, who agreed to take a standardized, 240-question
>personality test called the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).
>Among the
>traits the TCI measures is one known as self-transcendence, which consists of
>three other traits: self-forgetfulness, or the ability to get entirely lost in
>an experience; transpersonal identification, or a feeling of connectedness
>to a
>larger universe; and mysticism, or an openness to things not literally
>provable.
>Put them all together, and you come as close as science can to measuring
>what it
>feels like to be spiritual. "This allows us to have the kind of experience
>described as religious ecstasy," says Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at
>Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and the designer of the
>self-transcendence portion of the TCI.
>
> Hamer decided to use the data he gathered in the smoking survey to
> conduct a
>little spirituality study on the side. First he ranked the participants along
>Cloninger's self-transcendence scale, placing them on a continuum from
>least to
>most spiritually inclined. Then he went poking around in their genes to see if
>he could find the DNA responsible for the differences. Spelunking in the human
>genome is not easy, what with 35,000 genes consisting of 3.2 billion chemical
>bases. To narrow the field, Hamer confined his work to nine specific genes
>known
>to play major roles in the production of monoamines--brain chemicals,
>including
>serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, that regulate such fundamental
>functions
>as mood and motor control. It's monoamines that are carefully manipulated by
>Prozac and other antidepressants. It's also monoamines that are not so
>carefully
>scrambled by ecstasy, LSD, peyote and other mind-altering drugs--some of which
>have long been used in religious rituals.
>
> Studying the nine candidate genes in DNA samples provided by his subjects,
>Hamer quickly hit the genetic jackpot. A variation in a gene known as
>VMAT2--for
>vesicular monoamine transporter--seemed to be directly related to how the
>volunteers scored on the self-transcendence test. Those with the nucleic acid
>cytosine in one particular spot on the gene ranked high. Those with the
>nucleic
>acid adenine in the same spot ranked lower. "A single change in a single
>base in
>the middle of the gene seemed directly related to the ability to feel
>self-transcendence," Hamer says. Merely having that feeling did not mean those
>people would take the next step and translate their transcendence into a
>belief
>in--or even a quest for--God. But they seemed likelier to do so than those who
>never got the feeling at all.
>
> Hamer is careful to point out that the gene he found is by no means
> the only
>one that affects spirituality. Even minor human traits can be governed by the
>interplay of many genes; something as complex as belief in God could involve
>hundreds or even thousands. "If someone comes to you and says, 'We've
>found the
>gene for X,'" says John Burn, medical director of the Institute of Human
>Genetics at the University of Newcastle in England, "you can stop them before
>they get to the end of the sentence."
>
> Hamer also stresses that while he may have located a genetic root for
>spirituality, that is not the same as a genetic root for
>religion. Spirituality
>is a feeling or a state of mind; religion is the way that state gets codified
>into law. Our genes don't get directly involved in writing legislation. As
>Hamer
>puts it, perhaps understating a bit the emotional connection many have to
>their
>religions, "Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional."
>
> At least one faith, according to one of its best-known scholars,
> formalizes
>the idea of gene-based spirituality and even puts a pretty spin on it.
>Buddhists, says Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia
>University, have long entertained the idea that we inherit a spirituality gene
>from the person we were in a previous life. Smaller than an ordinary gene, it
>combines with two larger physical genes we inherit from our parents, and
>together they shape our physical and spiritual profile. Says Thurman: "The
>spiritual gene helps establish a general trust in the universe, a sense of
>openness and generosity." Buddhists, he adds, would find Hamer's possible
>discovery "amusing and fun."
>
> The Buddhist theory has never been put to the scientific test, but other
>investigations into the biological roots of belief in God were being conducted
>long before Hamer's efforts--often with intriguing results. In 1979,
>investigators at the University of Minnesota began their now famous twins
>study,
>tracking down 53 pairs of identical twins and 31 pairs of fraternal twins that
>had been separated at birth and raised apart. The scientists were looking for
>traits the members of each pair had in common, guessing that the
>characteristics
>shared more frequently by identical twins than by fraternal twins would be
>genetically based, since identical twins carry matching DNA, and those traits
>for which there was no disparity between the identicals and fraternals
>would be
>more environmentally influenced.
>
> As it turned out, the identical twins had plenty of remarkable things in
>common. In some cases, both suffered from migraine headaches, both had a
>fear of
>heights, both were nail biters. Some shared little eccentricities, like
>flushing
>the toilet both before and after using it. When quizzed on their religious
>values and spiritual feelings, the identical twins showed a similar
>overlap. In
>general, they were about twice as likely as fraternal twins to believe as
>much--or as little--about spirituality as their sibling did. Significantly,
>these numbers did not hold up when the twins were questioned about how
>faithfully they practiced any organized religion. Clearly, it seemed, the
>degree
>to which we observe rituals such as attending services is mostly the stuff of
>environment and culture. Whether we're drawn to God in the first place is
>hardwired into our genes. "It completely contradicted my expectations," says
>University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard, one of the researchers
>involved in the work. Similar results were later found in larger twin
>studies in
>Virginia and Australia.
>
> Other researchers have taken the science in a different direction, looking
>not for the genes that code for spirituality but for how that spirituality
>plays
>out in the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of
>Pennsylvania School of Medicine has used several types of imaging systems to
>watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood
>flow,
>he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers
>experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg
>found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The
>frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is
>where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing
>is the
>fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important
>region--the parietal lobe at the back of the brain--goes dim. It's this lobe
>that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the
>boundaries of the self fall away, creating the feeling of being at one
>with the
>universe. Combine that with what's going on in the other two lobes, and
>you can
>put together a profound religious experience.
>
> Even to some within the religious community, this does not come as
> news. "In
>India in Buddha's time, there were philosophers who said there was no
>soul; the
>mind was just chemistry," says Thurman. "The Buddha disagreed with their
>extreme
>materialism but also rejected the 'absolute soul' theologians." Michael
>Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University in
>Sudbury, Ont., puts the chemistry argument more bluntly. "God," he says,
>"is an
>artifact of the brain."
>
> Even if such spiritual deconstructionism is true, some scientists--to say
>nothing of most theologians--think it takes you only so far, particularly when
>it comes to trying to determine the very existence of God. Simply
>understanding
>the optics and wiring of the eyes, after all, doesn't mean there's no inherent
>magnificence in the Rembrandts they allow us to see. If human beings were
>indeed
>divinely assembled, why wouldn't our list of parts include a genetic chip that
>would enable us to contemplate our maker?
>
> "Of course, concepts of God reside in the brain. They certainly don't
> reside
>in the toe," says Lindon Eaves, director of the Virginia Institute for
>Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University in
>Richmond. "The question is, To what is this wiring responsive? Why is it
>there?"
>
> Says Paul Davies, professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie
> University in
>Sydney, Australia: "I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking
>that if
>you explain something, you explain it away. I don't see that at all with
>religious experience."
>
> Those religious believers who are comfortable with the idea that God genes
>are the work of God should have little trouble making the next leap: that not
>only are the genes there but they are central to our survival, one of the
>hinges
>upon which the very evolution of the human species turned. It's an
>argument that
>'s not terribly hard to make.
>
> For one thing, God is a concept that appears in human cultures all
> over the
>globe, regardless of how geographically isolated they are. When tribes
>living in
>remote areas come up with a concept of God as readily as nations living
>shoulder
>to shoulder, it's a fairly strong indication that the idea is preloaded in the
>genome rather than picked up on the fly. If that's the case, it's an equally
>strong indication that there are very good reasons it's there.
>
> One of those reasons might be that, as the sole species--as far as we
>know--capable of contemplating its own death, we needed something larger than
>ourselves to make that knowledge tolerable. "Anticipation of our own demise is
>the price we pay for a highly developed frontal lobe," says Persinger. "In
>many
>ways, [a God experience is] a brilliant adaptation. It's a built-in pacifier."
>
> But the most important survival role religion may serve is as the
> mortar that
>holds a group together. Worshipping God doesn't have to be a collective thing;
>it can be done in isolation, disconnected from any organized religion. The
>overwhelming majority of people, however, congregate to pray, observing
>the same
>rituals and heeding the same creeds. Once that congregation is in place, it's
>only a small step to using the common system of beliefs and practices as the
>basis for all the secular laws that keep the group functioning.
>
> One of the best examples of religion as social organizer, according to
>Binghamton University's Wilson, is early Calvinism. John Calvin rose to
>prominence in 1536 when, as a theologian and religious reformer, he was
>recruited to help bring order to the fractious city of Geneva. Calvin, perhaps
>one of the greatest theological minds ever produced by European Christianity,
>was a lawyer by trade. Wilson speculates that it was Calvin's pragmatic genius
>to understand that while civil laws alone might not be enough to bring the
>city
>'s deadbeats and other malefactors into line, divine law might be.
>
> Calvin's catechism included the familiar Ten Commandments--which, with
> their
>injunctions against theft, murder, adultery and lying, are themselves
>effective
>social organizers. Added to that were admonitions to pay taxes, perform civic
>duties, behave in a civil manner and submit to the authority of magistrates.
>"You must understand religions very thoroughly in relation to their
>environments," says Wilson. "And one problem for Calvin was to make his city
>function."
>
> The heirs to Calvinism today--Presbyterians, many Baptists and
> believers in
>the Reformed tradition in general--see the roots of their faith as
>something far
>more divine than merely good civic management. But even some theologians
>seem to
>think that a deep belief in the laws of God can coexist with the survival
>demands of an evolving society. "Calvin had a reverence for the Scriptures,
>which then became institutionalized," says James Kay, professor of practical
>theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary. "The Bible is concerned about
>justice for the poor, equity and fairness, and all of those things were
>seen to
>in Calvin's Geneva."
>
> Other struggling cultures have similarly translated godly law into earthly
>order and in doing so helped ensure their survival. The earliest Christians
>established a rough institutional structure that allowed them to transmit
>their
>ideas within a generation of Christ's death, and as a result succeeded in
>living
>through the Roman persecution; the Jews of the Diaspora moved as a cultural
>whole through the nations of Europe, finding niches wherever they could but
>maintaining their identity and kinship by observing the same rites. "All
>religions become a bit secular," says Wilson. "In order to survive, you
>have to
>organize yourselves into a culture."
>
> The downside to all this is that often religious groups gather not into
>congregations but into camps--and sometimes they're armed camps. In a
>culture of
>Crusades, Holocausts and jihads, where in the world is the survival
>advantage of
>religious wars or terrorism? One facile explanation has always been herd
>culling--an adaptive way of keeping populations down so that resources aren't
>depleted. But there's little evolutionary upside to wiping out an entire
>population of breeding-age males, as countries trying to recover from wars
>repeatedly learn. Why then do we so often let the sweetness of religion curdle
>into combat?
>
> The simple answer might be that just because we're given a gift, we don't
>necessarily always use it wisely. Fire can either light your village or burn
>down the one next door, depending on your inclination. "Religions
>represent an
>attempt to harness innate spirituality for organizational purposes--not always
>good," says Macquarie University's Davies. And while spiritual
>contemplation is
>intuitive, says Washington University's Cloninger, religion is dogmatic; dogma
>in the wrong hands has always been a risky thing.
>
> Still, for every place in the world that's suffering from religious
> strife,
>there are many more where spirituality is doing its uplifting and civilizing
>work. A God who would equip us with the genes and the smarts to cooperate in
>such a clever way is a God who ought to be appealing even to religious
>purists.
>Nonetheless, sticking points do remain that prevent genetic theory from going
>down smoothly. One that's particularly troublesome is the question of why
>Hamer
>'s God gene--or any of the others that may eventually be discovered--is
>distributed so unevenly among us. Why are some of us spiritual virtuosos,
>while
>others can't play a note? Isn't it one of the central tenets of religion that
>grace is available to everybody? At least a few scientists shrug at the
>question. "Some get religion, and some don't," says Virginia Commonwealth
>University's Eaves.
>
> But this seeming inequity may be an important part of the spiritual
> journey.
>It would be easy for God simply to program us for reverence; it's more
>meaningful when the door is opened but you've got to walk through on your
>own--however hard those steps may be for some. "I have never had a Big Bang
>conversion experience," says the Jewish Theological Seminary's Gillman. "My
>sense is that slowly and gradually, out of a rich experience of the world, one
>builds a faith."
>
> Such experiences may ultimately be at least as important a part of our
>spiritual tool kit as the genes we're born with. A poor genetic legacy but
>lucky
>spiritual circumstances might mean more than good genes and bad experiences.
>"Fortune includes the possibility of divine grace as well as environmental
>influences," says Cloninger.
>
> No matter how the two factors balance out, scientists may eventually find
>that trying to identify the definitive cluster of genes that serves as our
>spiritual circuit board is simply impossible--like trying to draw a genetic
>schematic of love. Still, they're likely to keep trying. "I am personally
>convinced that there is a scheme of things," says Davies of Macquarie
>University, "that the universe is not just any ragbag of laws." In the end,
>genes may prove to be a part of that scheme--but clearly one of very many.
>--With reporting by Jeff Chu/ London, Broward Liston/ Orlando, Maggie Sieger/
>Chicago and Daniel Williams/ Sydney
>
>
> "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
>--ALBERT EINSTEIN
>
> "With all your science, can you tell me how it is that light comes
> into the
>soul?" --HENRY DAVID THOREAU
>
> "Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its
> readiness to
>fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses." --SIGMUND FREUD
>
> "All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods."
>--WILLIAM JAMES
>Time, 4.10.25
>
>Jeffrey Kluger, Jeff Chu/ London; Broward Liston/ Orlando; Maggie
>Sieger/ Chicago; Daniel Williams/ Sydney
>
> It's not hard to see the divinity behind the water temples that dot
> the rice
>terraces of Bali. It's there in the white-clad high priest presiding in the
>temple at the summit of a dormant volcano. It's there in the 23 priests
>serving
>along with him, selected for their jobs when they were still children by a
>bevy
>of virgin priestesses. It's there in the rituals the priests perform to
>protect
>the island's water, which in turn is needed to nurture the island's rice.
>
> If the divine is easy to spot, what's harder to make out is the
> banal. But
>it's there too--in the meetings the priests convene to schedule their planting
>dates and combat the problem of crop pests; in the plans they draw up to
>maintain aqueducts and police conduits; in the irrigation proposals they
>consider and approve, the dam proposals they reject or amend. "The
>religion has
>a temple at every node in the irrigation system," says David Sloan Wilson,
>professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton,
>N.Y. "The priests make decisions and enforce the code of both religion and
>irrigation."
>
> Ask true believers of any faith to describe the most important thing that
>drives their devotion, and they'll tell you it's not a thing at all but a
>sense--a feeling of a higher power far beyond us. Western religions can get a
>bit more doctrinaire: God has handed us laws and lore, and it's for us to
>learn
>and practice what they teach. For a hell-raising species like ours,
>however--with too much intelligence for our own good and too little discipline
>to know what to do with it--there have always been other, more utilitarian
>reasons to get religion. Chief among them is survival. Across the eons, the
>structure that religion provides our lives helps preserve both mind and body.
>But that, in turn, has raised a provocative question, one that's increasingly
>debated in the worlds of science and religion: Which came first, God or
>the need
>for God? In other words, did humans create religion from cues sent from above,
>or did evolution instill in us a sense of the divine so that we would gather
>into the communities essential to keeping the species going?
>
> Just as a hurricane spins off tornadoes, this debate creates its own
>whirlwind of questions: If some people are more spiritual than others, is it
>nature or nurture that has made them so? If science has nothing to do with
>spirituality and it all flows from God, why do some people hear the divine
>word
>easily while others remain spiritually tone-deaf? Do such ivied-hall debates
>about environment, heredity and anthropology have any place at all in more
>exalted conversations about the nature of God?
>
> Even among people who regard spiritual life as wishful hocus-pocus,
> there is
>a growing sense that humans may not be able to survive without it. It's hard
>enough getting by in a fang-and-claw world in which killing, thieving and
>cheating pay such rich dividends. It's harder still when there's no moral cop
>walking the beat to blow the whistle when things get out of control. Best to
>have a deity on hand to rein in our worst impulses, bring out our best
>and, not
>incidentally, give us a sense that there's someone awake in the cosmic house
>when the lights go out at night and we find ourselves wondering just why we're
>here in the first place. If a God or even several gods can do all that, fine.
>And if we sometimes misuse the idea of our gods--and millenniums of holy wars
>prove that we do--the benefits of being a spiritual species will surely
>outweigh
>the bloodshed.
>
> Far from being an evolutionary luxury then, the need for God may be a
> crucial
>trait stamped deeper and deeper into our genome with every passing generation.
>Humans who developed a spiritual sense thrived and bequeathed that trait to
>their offspring. Those who didn't risked dying out in chaos and killing. The
>evolutionary equation is a simple but powerful one.
>
> Nowhere has that idea received a more intriguing going-over than in the
>recently published book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes
>(Doubleday; 256 pages), by molecular biologist Dean Hamer. Chief of gene
>structure at the National Cancer Institute, Hamer not only claims that human
>spirituality is an adaptive trait, but he also says he has located one of the
>genes responsible, a gene that just happens to also code for production of the
>neurotransmitters that regulate our moods. Our most profound feelings of
>spirituality, according to a literal reading of Hamer's work, may be due to
>little more than an occasional shot of intoxicating brain chemicals
>governed by
>our DNA. "I'm a believer that every thought we think and every feeling we
>feel
>is the result of activity in the brain," Hamer says. "I think we follow the
>basic law of nature, which is that we're a bunch of chemical reactions running
>around in a bag."
>
> Even for the casually religious, such seeming reductionism can
> rankle. The
>very meaning of faith, after all, is to hold fast to something without all the
>tidy cause and effect that science finds so necessary. Try parsing things the
>way geneticists do, and you risk parsing them into dust. "God is not something
>that can be demonstrated logically or rigorously," says Neil Gillman, a
>professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York
>City. "[The idea of a God gene] goes against all my personal theological
>convictions." John Polkinghorne, a physicist who is also Canon Theologian at
>England's Liverpool Cathedral, agrees: "You can't cut [faith] down to the
>lowest
>common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist
>thinking."
>
> Is Hamer really guilty of such simplification? Could claims for a
> so-called
>God gene be merely the thin end of a secular wedge, one that risks prying
>spirituality away from God altogether? Or, assuming the gene exists at all,
>could it somehow be embraced by both science and religion, in the same way
>some
>evolutionists and creationists--at least the less radicalized ones--accept the
>idea of a divinely created universe in which evolving life is simply part
>of the
>larger plan? Hamer, for one, hopes so. "My findings are agnostic on the
>existence of God," he says. "If there's a God, there's a God. Just knowing
>what
>brain chemicals are involved in acknowledging that is not going to change the
>fact."
>
> Whatever the merits of Hamer's work, he is clearly the heir of a
>millenniums-long search for the wellsprings of spirituality. People have been
>wrestling with the roots of faith since faith itself was first codified into
>Scripture. "[God has] set eternity in the hearts of men," says the Book of
>Ecclesiastes, "yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to
>end."
>
> To theologians in the 3rd century B.C., when Ecclesiastes is thought
> to have
>been written, that passage spoke to the idea that while all of us are divinely
>inspired to look for God, none of us are remotely capable of fully
>comprehending
>what we are seeking. Scientists in the 21st century may not disagree, provided
>that "hearts of men" is replaced with "genes of men." The key for those
>researchers is finding those genes.
>
> Hamer began looking in 1998, when he was conducting a survey on
> smoking and
>addiction for the National Cancer Institute. As part of his study, he
>recruited
>more than 1,000 men and women, who agreed to take a standardized, 240-question
>personality test called the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).
>Among the
>traits the TCI measures is one known as self-transcendence, which consists of
>three other traits: self-forgetfulness, or the ability to get entirely lost in
>an experience; transpersonal identification, or a feeling of connectedness
>to a
>larger universe; and mysticism, or an openness to things not literally
>provable.
>Put them all together, and you come as close as science can to measuring
>what it
>feels like to be spiritual. "This allows us to have the kind of experience
>described as religious ecstasy," says Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist at
>Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and the designer of the
>self-transcendence portion of the TCI.
>
> Hamer decided to use the data he gathered in the smoking survey to
> conduct a
>little spirituality study on the side. First he ranked the participants along
>Cloninger's self-transcendence scale, placing them on a continuum from
>least to
>most spiritually inclined. Then he went poking around in their genes to see if
>he could find the DNA responsible for the differences. Spelunking in the human
>genome is not easy, what with 35,000 genes consisting of 3.2 billion chemical
>bases. To narrow the field, Hamer confined his work to nine specific genes
>known
>to play major roles in the production of monoamines--brain chemicals,
>including
>serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, that regulate such fundamental
>functions
>as mood and motor control. It's monoamines that are carefully manipulated by
>Prozac and other antidepressants. It's also monoamines that are not so
>carefully
>scrambled by ecstasy, LSD, peyote and other mind-altering drugs--some of which
>have long been used in religious rituals.
>
> Studying the nine candidate genes in DNA samples provided by his subjects,
>Hamer quickly hit the genetic jackpot. A variation in a gene known as
>VMAT2--for
>vesicular monoamine transporter--seemed to be directly related to how the
>volunteers scored on the self-transcendence test. Those with the nucleic acid
>cytosine in one particular spot on the gene ranked high. Those with the
>nucleic
>acid adenine in the same spot ranked lower. "A single change in a single
>base in
>the middle of the gene seemed directly related to the ability to feel
>self-transcendence," Hamer says. Merely having that feeling did not mean those
>people would take the next step and translate their transcendence into a
>belief
>in--or even a quest for--God. But they seemed likelier to do so than those who
>never got the feeling at all.
>
> Hamer is careful to point out that the gene he found is by no means
> the only
>one that affects spirituality. Even minor human traits can be governed by the
>interplay of many genes; something as complex as belief in God could involve
>hundreds or even thousands. "If someone comes to you and says, 'We've
>found the
>gene for X,'" says John Burn, medical director of the Institute of Human
>Genetics at the University of Newcastle in England, "you can stop them before
>they get to the end of the sentence."
>
> Hamer also stresses that while he may have located a genetic root for
>spirituality, that is not the same as a genetic root for
>religion. Spirituality
>is a feeling or a state of mind; religion is the way that state gets codified
>into law. Our genes don't get directly involved in writing legislation. As
>Hamer
>puts it, perhaps understating a bit the emotional connection many have to
>their
>religions, "Spirituality is intensely personal; religion is institutional."
>
> At least one faith, according to one of its best-known scholars,
> formalizes
>the idea of gene-based spirituality and even puts a pretty spin on it.
>Buddhists, says Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia
>University, have long entertained the idea that we inherit a spirituality gene
>from the person we were in a previous life. Smaller than an ordinary gene, it
>combines with two larger physical genes we inherit from our parents, and
>together they shape our physical and spiritual profile. Says Thurman: "The
>spiritual gene helps establish a general trust in the universe, a sense of
>openness and generosity." Buddhists, he adds, would find Hamer's possible
>discovery "amusing and fun."
>
> The Buddhist theory has never been put to the scientific test, but other
>investigations into the biological roots of belief in God were being conducted
>long before Hamer's efforts--often with intriguing results. In 1979,
>investigators at the University of Minnesota began their now famous twins
>study,
>tracking down 53 pairs of identical twins and 31 pairs of fraternal twins that
>had been separated at birth and raised apart. The scientists were looking for
>traits the members of each pair had in common, guessing that the
>characteristics
>shared more frequently by identical twins than by fraternal twins would be
>genetically based, since identical twins carry matching DNA, and those traits
>for which there was no disparity between the identicals and fraternals
>would be
>more environmentally influenced.
>
> As it turned out, the identical twins had plenty of remarkable things in
>common. In some cases, both suffered from migraine headaches, both had a
>fear of
>heights, both were nail biters. Some shared little eccentricities, like
>flushing
>the toilet both before and after using it. When quizzed on their religious
>values and spiritual feelings, the identical twins showed a similar
>overlap. In
>general, they were about twice as likely as fraternal twins to believe as
>much--or as little--about spirituality as their sibling did. Significantly,
>these numbers did not hold up when the twins were questioned about how
>faithfully they practiced any organized religion. Clearly, it seemed, the
>degree
>to which we observe rituals such as attending services is mostly the stuff of
>environment and culture. Whether we're drawn to God in the first place is
>hardwired into our genes. "It completely contradicted my expectations," says
>University of Minnesota psychologist Thomas Bouchard, one of the researchers
>involved in the work. Similar results were later found in larger twin
>studies in
>Virginia and Australia.
>
> Other researchers have taken the science in a different direction, looking
>not for the genes that code for spirituality but for how that spirituality
>plays
>out in the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of
>Pennsylvania School of Medicine has used several types of imaging systems to
>watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood
>flow,
>he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers
>experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg
>found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The
>frontal lobe is the seat of concentration and attention; the limbic system is
>where powerful feelings, including rapture, are processed. More revealing
>is the
>fact that at the same time these regions flash to life, another important
>region--the parietal lobe at the back of the brain--goes dim. It's this lobe
>that orients the individual in time and space. Take it off-line, and the
>boundaries of the self fall away, creating the feeling of being at one
>with the
>universe. Combine that with what's going on in the other two lobes, and
>you can
>put together a profound religious experience.
>
> Even to some within the religious community, this does not come as
> news. "In
>India in Buddha's time, there were philosophers who said there was no
>soul; the
>mind was just chemistry," says Thurman. "The Buddha disagreed with their
>extreme
>materialism but also rejected the 'absolute soul' theologians." Michael
>Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University in
>Sudbury, Ont., puts the chemistry argument more bluntly. "God," he says,
>"is an
>artifact of the brain."
>
> Even if such spiritual deconstructionism is true, some scientists--to say
>nothing of most theologians--think it takes you only so far, particularly when
>it comes to trying to determine the very existence of God. Simply
>understanding
>the optics and wiring of the eyes, after all, doesn't mean there's no inherent
>magnificence in the Rembrandts they allow us to see. If human beings were
>indeed
>divinely assembled, why wouldn't our list of parts include a genetic chip that
>would enable us to contemplate our maker?
>
> "Of course, concepts of God reside in the brain. They certainly don't
> reside
>in the toe," says Lindon Eaves, director of the Virginia Institute for
>Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University in
>Richmond. "The question is, To what is this wiring responsive? Why is it
>there?"
>
> Says Paul Davies, professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie
> University in
>Sydney, Australia: "I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking
>that if
>you explain something, you explain it away. I don't see that at all with
>religious experience."
>
> Those religious believers who are comfortable with the idea that God genes
>are the work of God should have little trouble making the next leap: that not
>only are the genes there but they are central to our survival, one of the
>hinges
>upon which the very evolution of the human species turned. It's an
>argument that
>'s not terribly hard to make.
>
> For one thing, God is a concept that appears in human cultures all
> over the
>globe, regardless of how geographically isolated they are. When tribes
>living in
>remote areas come up with a concept of God as readily as nations living
>shoulder
>to shoulder, it's a fairly strong indication that the idea is preloaded in the
>genome rather than picked up on the fly. If that's the case, it's an equally
>strong indication that there are very good reasons it's there.
>
> One of those reasons might be that, as the sole species--as far as we
>know--capable of contemplating its own death, we needed something larger than
>ourselves to make that knowledge tolerable. "Anticipation of our own demise is
>the price we pay for a highly developed frontal lobe," says Persinger. "In
>many
>ways, [a God experience is] a brilliant adaptation. It's a built-in pacifier."
>
> But the most important survival role religion may serve is as the
> mortar that
>holds a group together. Worshipping God doesn't have to be a collective thing;
>it can be done in isolation, disconnected from any organized religion. The
>overwhelming majority of people, however, congregate to pray, observing
>the same
>rituals and heeding the same creeds. Once that congregation is in place, it's
>only a small step to using the common system of beliefs and practices as the
>basis for all the secular laws that keep the group functioning.
>
> One of the best examples of religion as social organizer, according to
>Binghamton University's Wilson, is early Calvinism. John Calvin rose to
>prominence in 1536 when, as a theologian and religious reformer, he was
>recruited to help bring order to the fractious city of Geneva. Calvin, perhaps
>one of the greatest theological minds ever produced by European Christianity,
>was a lawyer by trade. Wilson speculates that it was Calvin's pragmatic genius
>to understand that while civil laws alone might not be enough to bring the
>city
>'s deadbeats and other malefactors into line, divine law might be.
>
> Calvin's catechism included the familiar Ten Commandments--which, with
> their
>injunctions against theft, murder, adultery and lying, are themselves
>effective
>social organizers. Added to that were admonitions to pay taxes, perform civic
>duties, behave in a civil manner and submit to the authority of magistrates.
>"You must understand religions very thoroughly in relation to their
>environments," says Wilson. "And one problem for Calvin was to make his city
>function."
>
> The heirs to Calvinism today--Presbyterians, many Baptists and
> believers in
>the Reformed tradition in general--see the roots of their faith as
>something far
>more divine than merely good civic management. But even some theologians
>seem to
>think that a deep belief in the laws of God can coexist with the survival
>demands of an evolving society. "Calvin had a reverence for the Scriptures,
>which then became institutionalized," says James Kay, professor of practical
>theology at the Princeton Theological Seminary. "The Bible is concerned about
>justice for the poor, equity and fairness, and all of those things were
>seen to
>in Calvin's Geneva."
>
> Other struggling cultures have similarly translated godly law into earthly
>order and in doing so helped ensure their survival. The earliest Christians
>established a rough institutional structure that allowed them to transmit
>their
>ideas within a generation of Christ's death, and as a result succeeded in
>living
>through the Roman persecution; the Jews of the Diaspora moved as a cultural
>whole through the nations of Europe, finding niches wherever they could but
>maintaining their identity and kinship by observing the same rites. "All
>religions become a bit secular," says Wilson. "In order to survive, you
>have to
>organize yourselves into a culture."
>
> The downside to all this is that often religious groups gather not into
>congregations but into camps--and sometimes they're armed camps. In a
>culture of
>Crusades, Holocausts and jihads, where in the world is the survival
>advantage of
>religious wars or terrorism? One facile explanation has always been herd
>culling--an adaptive way of keeping populations down so that resources aren't
>depleted. But there's little evolutionary upside to wiping out an entire
>population of breeding-age males, as countries trying to recover from wars
>repeatedly learn. Why then do we so often let the sweetness of religion curdle
>into combat?
>
> The simple answer might be that just because we're given a gift, we don't
>necessarily always use it wisely. Fire can either light your village or burn
>down the one next door, depending on your inclination. "Religions
>represent an
>attempt to harness innate spirituality for organizational purposes--not always
>good," says Macquarie University's Davies. And while spiritual
>contemplation is
>intuitive, says Washington University's Cloninger, religion is dogmatic; dogma
>in the wrong hands has always been a risky thing.
>
> Still, for every place in the world that's suffering from religious
> strife,
>there are many more where spirituality is doing its uplifting and civilizing
>work. A God who would equip us with the genes and the smarts to cooperate in
>such a clever way is a God who ought to be appealing even to religious
>purists.
>Nonetheless, sticking points do remain that prevent genetic theory from going
>down smoothly. One that's particularly troublesome is the question of why
>Hamer
>'s God gene--or any of the others that may eventually be discovered--is
>distributed so unevenly among us. Why are some of us spiritual virtuosos,
>while
>others can't play a note? Isn't it one of the central tenets of religion that
>grace is available to everybody? At least a few scientists shrug at the
>question. "Some get religion, and some don't," says Virginia Commonwealth
>University's Eaves.
>
> But this seeming inequity may be an important part of the spiritual
> journey.
>It would be easy for God simply to program us for reverence; it's more
>meaningful when the door is opened but you've got to walk through on your
>own--however hard those steps may be for some. "I have never had a Big Bang
>conversion experience," says the Jewish Theological Seminary's Gillman. "My
>sense is that slowly and gradually, out of a rich experience of the world, one
>builds a faith."
>
> Such experiences may ultimately be at least as important a part of our
>spiritual tool kit as the genes we're born with. A poor genetic legacy but
>lucky
>spiritual circumstances might mean more than good genes and bad experiences.
>"Fortune includes the possibility of divine grace as well as environmental
>influences," says Cloninger.
>
> No matter how the two factors balance out, scientists may eventually find
>that trying to identify the definitive cluster of genes that serves as our
>spiritual circuit board is simply impossible--like trying to draw a genetic
>schematic of love. Still, they're likely to keep trying. "I am personally
>convinced that there is a scheme of things," says Davies of Macquarie
>University, "that the universe is not just any ragbag of laws." In the end,
>genes may prove to be a part of that scheme--but clearly one of very many.
>--With reporting by Jeff Chu/ London, Broward Liston/ Orlando, Maggie Sieger/
>Chicago and Daniel Williams/ Sydney
>
>
> "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
>--ALBERT EINSTEIN
>
> "With all your science, can you tell me how it is that light comes
> into the
>soul?" --HENRY DAVID THOREAU
>
> "Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its
> readiness to
>fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses." --SIGMUND FREUD
>
> "All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods."
>--WILLIAM JAMES
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