Could natural selection have led to religion?

Kaldayen

Kaldayen

Spiritual ronin
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I recently stumbled upon a Robert Winston's theory about religion in his book "Human instinct". In my words :

Nature would have selected the "religious' mutants" (people who had developped a sense of the divine) because this thought favoured a stronger sense of community, thus, a safer place to procreate.

A starter for discussion, as Brian would say. ;)

Kal
 
A scientist, TV presenter and politician's opinion about religion ? Mmm ? I wouldn't count on it !
 
Kal,

There are no "religious' mutants". Did Winston use this term in his book ? I don't know why, but I don't like the connotation of this expression.
 
Hehe, no that's my own words.. Let me try to clarify what I meant :

Every so often, a mutation will happen in living beings. It could be positive or negative. Most often it will be negative and will create disorders (i.e. hereditary troubles) but sometimes it will make the new "mutant" more adapted to his environment (i.e. a brown butterfly vs a yellow butterfly in a forest).

What I meant by "religious mutant" is a mutation that would have created a sense of the divine in the human conciousness.

Kal
 
Hi Kal,

Oh, I see you are caught up with genetic studies !;)

If I understand you right, in your opinion, there are some people born with the sense of the divine.

What about those who become religious only after a very traumatical experience in their lives ?

Regards,

Alexa
 
It is an interesting question - the particular danger I see with it is that to some of Dawkin's following, to argue that there was an evolutionary disposition for religion is to argue that relgion is entirely a material phenomena that has no "divine fraction". In short, that "man invented God" as per Nietsche, but simply adding a sociobiological "but nature made him do it".

Certainly religion is highly tied up in the social order of our animal - but it is also quite possible that just as the human species has realised other abstract concepts - maths, music, literature, and storytelling - so with concepts of theology.

So rather than restrict the argument to religion being a product of evolution, I'd make the point that it is a set of tools for abstract realisation that have been favoured in our species. And among those tools has come bothe science and religion. After all, both are simply different ways of attributing causality in our perception of reality - but both work from a different set of founding principles from which to explore the same events.

Hope that helps. And a good starter for discussion indeed. :)
 
I said:
After all, both are simply different ways of attributing causality in our perception of reality - but both work from a different set of founding principles from which to explore the same events.
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I agree.
 
Kindest Regards, Kaldayen!

I don't recall if we've met, but welcome just the same!

Kaldayen said:
Nature would have selected the "religious' mutants" (people who had developped a sense of the divine) because this thought favoured a stronger sense of community, thus, a safer place to procreate.
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I love chicken and egg puzzles: which came first, awareness of spirit, or rational thought?
 
Hi Alexa, yes indeed. I'm studying anthropology. I must say that sometimes, the texts I'm reading are quite rough on one's beliefs!

Brian, I agree too... it all comes up to how you look at it : many possibilities, no real answer...

Hi juantoo3, yes we have met already in a not-quite-succesful way there :
http://www.comparative-religion.com/forum/showthread.php?t=835 I've been roaming in the shadows for some time now ;)

Kal
 
Kindest Regards, Kaldayen!
Kaldayen said:
Hi juantoo3, yes we have met already in a not-quite-succesful way there :
http://www.comparative-religion.com/forum/showthread.php?t=835 I've been roaming in the shadows for some time now ;)
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Ah, thank you for the reminder. :) If you have been roaming in the shadows for a while, then you know I mean no harm, even when I disagree! ;)

Might I ask if your original question in this thread is implying a connection or link of some type from this physical existence to a spiritual existence or plane or something? And whether or not this connection is an evolutionary development of chance and circumstance? Just curious...:)
 
Hi Juantoo3, I know you mean no harm ;)

As for your question : no, my question doesn't imply any connection to a spiritual existence. Whether the link has always been there, that we imagined it at some time, that our consciousness awoke to it sometime, or that no such divine exists.. I have no idea.

This thread is simply another possible answer to The question, a very pessimist one I must say... I wish it was false but many other known people agree with it (i.e. Dawkins).

I guess we'll never know.

Kal
 
Hello lunamoth,

Can you do a copy of the article here, please ? It seems you need to be a Time magazine subscriber to read it.

Greetings from my corner of woods ! ;)
 
Good Evening, Alexa,

Well, first of all, I would have to type it in since I am not a subscriber and so only have a "hard" copy. Second, I would worry about copyright issues--perhaps I, Brian can give us some guidance about this.

However, I read the article and the gist of it is that in one study a scientist (Dean Hamer, Chief of gene stucture at the National Cancer Institute)originally studying smoking and addiction included some questions related to spiritual experiences (self transcendence) in his survey. So, he got a lot of data and used these to find linked genes (no details on how this was done--I assume they used linked markers to identify candidate genes; he does say he took a guess at looked at the family of genes known to affect brain chemistry). He came up with a gene VMAT2--vesicular monoamine transporter--which affects the brain chemicals that regulate mood and motor control (oh, shock!).

"...more than 1000 men and women, who agreed to take a standardized, 240-question personality test called the Temperament and Character Inventory."

...which consists of the 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."

Anyway, he found a correlation between high ranking on the self-transcendence questions and a mutation in this particular gene.

Hamer says, "My findings are agonostic on the existence of God. 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."

There is some interesting commentary, mostly from religionists, some from other scientists. Of note:

Michael Persinger, professor of behavioral neuroscience at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont. "God (he says) is an artifact of the brain."

Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies at Columbia University discusses the idea that we "inherit a spirituality gene from the person we were in a previous life." "Buddhists, he adds, would find Hamer's possible discovery 'amusing and fun.'" Thurman says further "In India in Buddha's time, there were philosophers who said there was no soul; the mind was just chemistry," "the Buddha disagreed with their extreme materialism, but also rejected the 'absolute soul' theologians."

Of course there is pontification over the idea that a Creator would certainly plan for his creatures to be wired to search for and experience Him (my words). There is also quite a lot of commentary about divine law and the societal usefulness of such a gene. Persinger says "In many ways, [a God experience] is a brialliant adaptation; It's a built-in pacifier."

All-in-all, quite on point for the discussions that we've seen lately here.

There is 20-question quiz called How Spiritual Are You?, adapted from the personality inventory used in the study. However, this is something I hesitate to reproduce here due to copyright.

Vaj's favorite Einstein quote is featured prominently: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

cheers,
lunamoth
 
Hello lunamoth,

Thanks for the post. As long as I know what is written in this article, it's O.K. with me.



I do not contest the existence of a gene VMAT2, but I definitely contest that "God is an artifact of the brain."



We are all unique and I'll try to explain with my knowledge of genetic from my memory.



The genotype represents the totality of genetic material from each cell of the organism. The phenotype (character) is the totality of morphological and physiological characteristic which result from the interaction of the genotype and medium. The genotype is relatively stable all the life of the individual, instead the phenotype changes constantly. The person I am in this moment will be another one by tomorrow. (see motto Vajradhara)



Even when two individuals have the same genotype, or be alike, if they live in different conditions, their phenotype will be different. This makes us unique!



Each phonotypical manifestation of a character is determined by at least one pair of genes. If the two genes from a pair are identical, we have a homozygote or homogametic genotype. If the two genes are different, we have a heterozygote or heterogametic genotype.



The characters may be classified in qualitative (generally determinate by a single pair of genes allele (allele = two genes are in the same place on the chromosome) and quantitative (determinate by a great number of genes). The two types of genes pass to another generation by the same laws of the heredity.



From a genetically viewpoint, the study of a character is based on the determination of genetically and environmental conditions.



So the presence of some chemicals in the brain that regulate mood and motor control is acceptable. But if the conclusion of Deam Hamer is based on a standardized quiz, I consider it as speculation only and not a scientific view.
 
Copyright concerns are certainly important - if Time magazine wanted the article in public circulation on the internet I'm sure they would have set it up for non-subscribers. :)

As for the general points of the article - it all seems terribly simplistic to claim a single gene involved. The workings of DNA are much more complex than that. But I guess it's all good fun in the public arena.
 
lunamoth said:
...Vaj's favorite Einstein quote is featured prominently: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
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Hmmm,

Seems to me that life without either, is both. That might explain why some people hate everything, and others hate everyone. :(

v/r

Q
 
A few things struck me about this article.

First, there is no reference to a peer-reviewed publication about this work, just to Hamer's new book published by Doubleday (The God Gene: How Faith is Hard-Wired into Our Genes). The investigator has a good job title, and there is no reason that the work he described could not be done in a straightforward manner now that the genome has been sequenced, but still, it smacks of poor science, sensationalism and self-promotion.

Second, despite it's neutral (agnostic) spin in the article, I have to wonder about the timing of publication in a popular (and liberal) magazine in the final weeks of an election season in which religon has played such a large role.

Finally, by the description of how the work was done in the article it is not surprising that he located a monoamine gene correlating with enhanced ability to have a self-described transcendent experience. Monoamines are in the family of feel-good brain chemicals affected by drugs like LSD and peyote. So, he used the personality questionaire to find people who have a natural tendencey to experience transcendence like those induced by mind-altering drugs, he looked specifically at genes affecting brain chemistry, and found a correlation between one of these genes and the characteristic. This is not necessarily bad science, although it requires a heck of a lot more substantiation than what is presented in the article (geneticists take educated guesses all the time when trying to survey the genome for genes associated with specific functions). However, this is no more ground-breaking theologically than the studies which showed how different portions of the brain quieted or lit up in meditating Buddhist monks.

Or do I protest too much. :)

sign me, spiritually challenged,
lunamoth
 
Hi lunamoth,

I checked this guy, Hamer and I found out that in 1993 he clamed with his group to have found a link between this sexual orientation and five specific locations or markers in a vast area of a million or so DNA base pairs of an arm of the X chromosome referred to as the Xq28 area or sequence. This Xq28 region contains a few hundred genes.

It seems that he said one thing to the press and another one to his fellow scientists. His scientific conclusions were consedered poor and all the scientists who tried to reproduce the experiment were not able to get the same results. On the contrary.

This is from an essay of David R. Garcia :
Dr. Alan Sanders, a professor of psychiatry at the
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University of Chicago looked at another group to see if the Hamer group's findings could be confirmed. His investigations looked at 54 sets of homosexual brothers. Sanders said he found a slight link in that Xq28 sequence but not enough to be significant. At the American Psychiatric Association's 1998 annual conference, he announced that his attempt to find a significant link was not successful: "No [genetic] marker data reached statistically significant criteria." This news apparently stayed in small items in the back pages of newspapers, if it made it into papers at all. And the big front page, magazine cover story news concerning Hamer's study still remained fresh and certain in the minds of many.

Not long after that, in 1999, Canadian researcher George Rice and his associates of the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada reported that their attempt to duplicate the Hamer group's results was a failure, that they found no link whatsoever between the markers at Xq28 and sexual orientation.

· "We were not able to confirm evidence for an Xq28-linked locus underlying male homosexuality."

"It is unclear why our results are so discrepant from Hamer's original study. Because our study was larger than that of Hamer's et al, we certainly had adequate power to detect a genetic effect as large as reported in that study. Nonetheless, our data do not support the presence of a gene of large effect influencing sexual orientation at position Xq28."

The news of this (that this writer saw) was hidden away in small items in the back pages - without the drama and fanfare that attended the first announcement of Hamer's findings. (See Rice, G.; Anderson, C.; Risch, N.; Ebers, G. : Male homosexuality: absence of linkage to microsatellite markers at Xq28. Science 284: 665-667, 1999. and Risch, N.; Squires-Wheeler, E.; Keats, B. J. B. : Male sexual orientation and genetic evidence. (Letter) Science 262: 2063-2065, 1993.)

Those interested in seeing confirmation of these might wish to look on the World Wide Web at -

http://www3.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Omim/dispmim?306995
and
http://www3.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/dispomim.cgi?id=306995 .

Dr. Ruth Hubbard, professor emeritus of Biology at Harvard University, and a board member of the Council for Responsible Genetics, wrote an article for The New York Times pointing out difficulties with the Hamer group's X chromosome study. She said that the study didn't analyze a control group; it failed to search for the markers in the heterosexual brothers of the subjects. Dr. Hubbard comments:

· "The fact remains that seven out of 40 pairs did not share identical chromosomal markers. This is difficult to explain if genetics are responsible for sexual orientation.

"It is surprising that the correlation found in this research warranted publication without these controls, especially in as influential a journal as Science.'" (Hubbard, Ruth, " The Search for Sexual Identity: False Genetic Markers," The New York Times, August 2, 1993, section A15.)

In an article in The Boston Globe of February 7, 1999, Dr. Hubbard is quoted as saying that searching for a gene for homosexuality "is not even a worthwhile pursuit...Let me be very clear: I don't think there is any single gene that governs any complex human behavior. There are genetic components in everything we do, and it is foolish to say genes are not involved, but I don't think they are decisive." [emphasis mine]

Dr. Hamer recognized the limitations of his findings. He told The Associated Press that his study failed to show that a single gene determines homosexual orientation, and that it does not rule out other possibilities. He stated:

· "There also could be another gene on some other chromosome. Or it could be that there was some other physical or biochemical factor involved. Or there could be some other non-biological factors related to life experiences or environment or upbringing." (Recer, Paul, "Researchers find Genetic Link to Homosexualtiy," The Associated Press, July 15, 1993.)

So far as his research suggesting that homosexuality is genetically determined, he says:

· "We knew that genes are only part of the answer. We assumed the environment also played a role in sexual orientation, as it does in most, if not all behaviors.... Homosexuality is not purely genetic…environmental factors play a role. There is not a single master gene that makes people gay. I don't think we will ever be able to predict who will be gay."

· "The pedigree failed to produce what we originally hoped to find: simple Mendelian inheritance. In fact, we never found a single family in which homosexuality was distributed in the obvious pattern that Mendel observed in his pea plants.

In 1998, Time Magazine interviewed Hamer. He told his interviewer:

· "These genes do not cause people to become homosexuals. … the biology of personality is much more complicated than that." (J. Madeleine Nash, "The Personality Genes," Time Vol.151, no. 16 (April 27, 1998): pp. 60-61.)

When Hamer was asked if homosexuality was rooted solely in biology, he replied:

· "Absolutely not. From twin studies, we already know that half or more of the variability in sexual orientation is not inherited. Our studies try to pinpoint the genetic factors...not negate the psychosocial factors." ("Gay Genes, Revisited: Doubts arise over research on the biology of homosexuality," Scientific American, November 1995, p. 26.)

The following comment from Hamer is very interesting:
· "...biology is amoral; it offers no help in distinguishing between right and wrong. Only people, guided by their values and beliefs, can decide what is moral and what is not."

This comment was also made by L.C. Lim of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the National University Hospital in Singapore. It was in response to Hamer's study:

· "… This paper [of Hamer et al] presents the evidence of a genetic contribution, evaluates the complexity of sexual behaviour, and discusses the implications and challenges ahead if indeed a "gay gene" exists. It is apparent that scientific discoveries do not resolve moral dilemmas. The author believes that it is through debates and discussions that some ethical code can be, and should be formulated to prevent possible abuses." (L.C. Lim, "Present controversies in the genetics of male homosexuality" in Ann Acad Med Singapore 1995 Sep;24(5):759-62) [emphasis mine]

On noting the results of the study done by Australian behavioral geneticist Nicolas Martin and Northwestern University psychologist Michael Bailey, Hamer writes,

· "The best recent study suggests that female sexual identification is more a matter of environment than heredity."

Elsewhere he states that in one study it was found that sisters of female homosexuals had about a 6% chance of being homosexual, but daughters of female homosexuals had a 33% chance of following their mother's sexual orientation. Hamer said that such a "whopping" jump could mean only one thing: being a female homosexual is "culturally transmitted, not inherited." (The Washington Blade (paper devoted to male homosexuals), January 30, 1998)

Aside from the somewhat suspect program of homosexual activists using research to promote a particular belief and political agenda, there was a problem involving one of the Hamer group's team. John Crewdson wrote in the Chicago Tribune of June 25, 1995, that an anonymous former member of Hamer's lab alleged that Hamer had engaged in selective presentation of data in this study, throwing out data that didn't conform to his desired results. The accuser was a 38-year-old post-doctoral fellow who did the computerized genetic mapping that formed the core of Hamer's purported discovery. When she voiced her concerns about this, she was reportedly ordered to leave the laboratory without being permitted to pick up her personal belongings. Her complaint resulted in an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Hamer has since left the National Cancer Institute. He was reportedly acquitted of this charge due to lack of evidence.

J. Price states in an article, "Federal Cancer Lab Hunts for Gay Gene", in The Washington Times of April 3, 1994 that although Hamer's research is sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, his work has had little to do with cancer and that this study alone took $419,000 of taxpayer-backed funds.

Most of the news media didn't find any of this to be a problem. As one writer has complained, scientists who can "prove" that homosexuality is genetic get in the limelight, while the great majority who find results to the contrary do not. Is it any wonder that so many among the public, even in universities, are quite convinced that homosexuals are "born that way" and cannot be helped to be otherwise, that this is all proved by solid science?
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I think his "discoveris" about the God gene doesn't worth anything !


Lunanoth, this is specially about your concerning about copyright written by the author of the essay:
I don't believe in either copyright or copywrong. Everyone is free to do what they want with anything I've written as long as strict honesty and fairness are used as guidelines. Taking statements out of context to try to convey a false impression of what I said, miscopying, misrepresentation, mischief, missiles, Mrs. Sippee and Miss Olenius are all forbidden, and all transgressions will result in the issuance of a fatwa declaring that each offender will have to listen for two weeks non-stop to gangster rap artists singing cowboy songs and cowboys doing rap music!
Thanks so much!

With genuine Baha'i love and good wishes to each of you!

David




 
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