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In 2005 Dean Hamer's book, The God Gene, sparked quite a bit of ferment. His thesis was that he had data showing a correlation between "spiritual" people and the expression of a cellular membrane protein. This protein, vesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2), is one of two that move molecules known as monoamines into the brain's cells for storage and later use. Monoamines (e.g., dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin) are neurotransmitters, meaning they are how brain cells talk to one another. Many psychoactive drugs exert their effects by altering the concentrations of these substances. Cocaine, for example, causes marked reduction in the levels of VMAT2 present on the cell.
There were immediate criticisms. For one thing, the definition of "spiritual" was based upon a survey, after which expression of VMAT2 was determined and compared with the survey. The postulated association was also culled from a study of something else entirely -- smoking addiction. (Always be cautious interpreting results of secondary data analysis.) Finally, the association was a weak one. Carl Zimmer, a prominent critic, wrote that Hamer's book might as well be called, not The God Gene, but rather 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Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.
Still, the basic tenet of Hamer's hypothesis was that spiritual tendencies, religiosity, were heritable traits that evolution could go to work on.
Now there's another book out about religion and evolution, Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and How It Endures. Wade is a science journalist, not a scientist. His thesis also uses the controversial notion that evolution can work on groups, not just individuals. You can read a couple of interesting reviews here and here. One of Wade's connections back to Hamer's thesis is Wade's argument for the importance of music and ecstatic dance in human culture, particularly primitive culture, and thus presumably paleolithic culture.
The issue to me (and many others, too) is if the near universality of some kind of interest in transcendent things is simply what Gould and Lewontin would have called a spandrel, a fascinating side-effect of evolution that, by itself, means nothing. Wade claims religion had powerfully useful attributes for humans emerging from bands of hunters to more organized ways of living. Perhaps an augmented level of VMAT2 promoted that tendency and was therefore an evolutionary advantage.
Here is another problem, in the words of one reviewer:
"The problem, to my mind, is not that Wade has overambitiously linked genetics and religion. It is that he has underambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is. Can we really isolate as distinct adaptations the magnificently bizarre and oddly satisfying behaviors and feelings crammed into that drab pigeonhole of a word, “religion”? I would have thought that would amount to explaining what makes us human."
As a Quaker, my own view is that religiosity is not a spandrel. It is bound up with both consciousness of ourselves and awareness of the consciousness of others. I see no reason why those things cannot be linked to evolution, although the teleological implications of that notion will bother evolutionary biologists.
There were immediate criticisms. For one thing, the definition of "spiritual" was based upon a survey, after which expression of VMAT2 was determined and compared with the survey. The postulated association was also culled from a study of something else entirely -- smoking addiction. (Always be cautious interpreting results of secondary data analysis.) Finally, the association was a weak one. Carl Zimmer, a prominent critic, wrote that Hamer's book might as well be called, not The God Gene, but rather 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.
Still, the basic tenet of Hamer's hypothesis was that spiritual tendencies, religiosity, were heritable traits that evolution could go to work on.
Now there's another book out about religion and evolution, Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and How It Endures. Wade is a science journalist, not a scientist. His thesis also uses the controversial notion that evolution can work on groups, not just individuals. You can read a couple of interesting reviews here and here. One of Wade's connections back to Hamer's thesis is Wade's argument for the importance of music and ecstatic dance in human culture, particularly primitive culture, and thus presumably paleolithic culture.
The issue to me (and many others, too) is if the near universality of some kind of interest in transcendent things is simply what Gould and Lewontin would have called a spandrel, a fascinating side-effect of evolution that, by itself, means nothing. Wade claims religion had powerfully useful attributes for humans emerging from bands of hunters to more organized ways of living. Perhaps an augmented level of VMAT2 promoted that tendency and was therefore an evolutionary advantage.
Here is another problem, in the words of one reviewer:
"The problem, to my mind, is not that Wade has overambitiously linked genetics and religion. It is that he has underambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is. Can we really isolate as distinct adaptations the magnificently bizarre and oddly satisfying behaviors and feelings crammed into that drab pigeonhole of a word, “religion”? I would have thought that would amount to explaining what makes us human."
As a Quaker, my own view is that religiosity is not a spandrel. It is bound up with both consciousness of ourselves and awareness of the consciousness of others. I see no reason why those things cannot be linked to evolution, although the teleological implications of that notion will bother evolutionary biologists.