Slashdot Mirror
Model Says Religiosity Gene Will Dominate Society
Hugh Pickens writes writes "PhysOrg reports on a study by Robert Rowthorn, emeritus professor at Cambridge University, that predicts that the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion are currently "hitchhiking" on the back of the religious cultural practice of high fertility rates and that provided the fertility of religious people remains on average higher than that of secular people, the genes that predispose people towards religion will spread. For example, in the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010. The huge growth stems almost entirely from the religious culture's high fertility rate, which is about 6 children per woman, on average. Rowthorn says that while fertility is determined by culture, an individual's predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics, in addition to their upbringing. In the model, Rowthorn uses a "religiosity gene" to represent the various genetic factors that combine to genetically predispose a person toward religion, whether remaining religious from youth or converting to religion from a secular upbringing. Rowthorn's model predicts that the religious fraction of the population will eventually stabilize at less than 100%, and there will remain a possibly large percentage of secular individuals. But nearly all of the secular population will still carry the religious allele, since high defection rates will spread the religious allele to secular society when defectors have children with a secular partner."
What a ******* load of bunk !
Emeritus professors really have nothing else to do ? Can't they you know hunt down university girls and propose to "help improve their grades", like they usually do instead of pushing rubbish like this ?
For Christ's sake! this can't be true. . .
A nice way of saying that the stupid people are breeding too much
Religiosity gene. Wow, really? Gee, what's next, the gay gene?
Must be one complex and accurate model to figure it will stabilize at less than 100%.
Well, that's evolution for you. If all else is equal but there's a genetic factor that predisposes some people to reproduce more than others, then that phenotype will eventually dominate.
So, religiosity is a (generation-late) STD?
Clearly, we should terminate those inferior people before they contaminate us.
Hitler was right in his war!
At least now we can prove it, since we've isolated the gene.
We're getting closer and closer to Idiocracy.
I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions. It seems very unlikely that there's anything like a genetic "predisposition" to religion.
Now what will happen is that more people will grow up in religious households than not; but that I see as a good thing, as it will decrease the overall fear of religion from people who don't have much direct experience with it. People do stupid things out of fear and fear of religion and those that practice it is no different. In reality although I'm not religious myself, most friends and families I have known that have been very religious have been fine people and I have no desire to see anyones ability to practice the religion they choose impacted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Might prove useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#History
Anyway, it seems that such a trend is eventually self correcting; we will have a religious war in which all those extra children will exterminate each other.
Wanna sign up for the next Crusade, anyone?
Yes I said it, this should have never made the front page:
Religious people nowadays have more children on average than their secular counterparts. This paper uses a simple model to explore the evolutionary implications of this difference. It assumes that fertility is determined entirely by culture, whereas subjective predisposition towards religion is influenced by genetic endowment. People who carry a certain ‘religiosity’ gene are more likely than average to become or remain religious. The paper considers the effect of religious defections and exogamy on the religious and genetic composition of society. Defections reduce the ultimate share of the population with religious allegiance and slow down the spread of the religiosity gene. However, provided the fertility differential persists, and people with a religious allegiance mate mainly with people like themselves, the religiosity gene will eventually predominate despite a high rate of defection. This is an example of ‘cultural hitch-hiking’, whereby a gene spreads because it is able to hitch a ride with a high-fitness cultural practice. The theoretical arguments are supported by numerical simulations.
link to abstract
I am all for keeping an open mind but after reading that last sentence, I suspect the paper is quite ridiculous and may actually be a funny read.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Well that was a perfectly depressing way to ruin a Saturday night. I'm going to go read about something fun, like the Egyptian riots. :-/
Thomas Galvin
AKA i'm going to deliberately ignore a "nature vs nurture" debate that has raged on for centuries, and go with "nature" in an offhand comment that states a specific behaviour determined by nature is.. likely.
Oh and this is the lynchpin of my entire preposition. I'm a professor.
Stop posting articles like this. They are purely speculative and based on the assumption that a "religiosity gene" even exists (hint: it doesn't). Quit polluting the internet.
My favorite reply is: meh, how many leaders does the world need anyway? Then the existentially scared person will assume you are referring to their subset as "leaders" and will wander away)
"Rowthorn says that while fertility is determined by culture, an individual's predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics"
If I had to choose one or the other, I would probably go with the desire to reproduce as more "genetic" rather than a set of abstract belliefs that must be taught. But then again, I don't teach at Cambridge
Whats behind religiosity is probably something more broad and fundamental, like following leaders, belonging to groups, easy to be suggestionable and things like that. But religions are more culture than genes, they belong to the meme terrotory, and is of the bad ones. In any case, the movie Idiocracy explain it better, and probably the base explanation and causes are the same.
Religiosity is mainly just a predisposition to value things like group solidarity
and the stability that comes from enforced conformity and hierarchical authority.
Someone who values these things (or fears the lack of them) more than they
value some kind of quest for truth or rationality or objectivity, is predisposed
to religion.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion
*facepalms so hard that my head starts to bleed*...
JSYK, here's the Common misunderstandings of genetics page on Wikipedia.
This is absolute madness. Nobody knows what genes do anymore! They've all became tools for misleading people into believing the stupidest things, including, but not limited to:
That you can be "born" gay (or with ANY other sexual attraction, for the matter)
That, as the article suggests, you can be born leaning towards religion in general, which is the most illogical thing I've heard this week
That it's useless to try and change who you are because you were "born that way"
Etc. etc. etc.... There is NO SUCH THING as a gene that dictates your behavior, preferences, or predisposition! When will people actually care about this? All of those things are either semi-random or are determined by the person's general intelligence/experiences (IIRC).
Not to forget that this article also assumes that there is absolutely nothing positive to be gained from religion and that it "makes people stupid", therefore it's a "bad thing". I, as a Catholic, beg to differ. Roman Catholicism is one of the most well-thought-out, reasonable, logical, and historically accurate religions in the world (if not THE most, for all of them). Yes, there are stupid Catholics (including ones that abuse children) but that doesn't disprove the religion, unless it contradicts something (which it doesn't).
tl;dr, don't listen to this guy who obviously doesn't know his facts.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
It isn't a religiosity gene, it's more like a gullibility gene or a genetically caused weakness of the mind. I have found that those who devoutly believe in fairy stores and invisible people can be easily convinced of the most absurd things as long as you talk to them in that level, convincing tone that Obi-won pulled off so well in Star Wars.
Also, some people can be hypnotized, others can't. Difference: strength of mind.
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
How would you distinguish a "Religiosity gene" from a gullible gene, or a gene for looking for an easy way for dealing with stress or negative emotions, or a gene for simply fitting in with family and friends without actually believing....
People believe or follow religions for various reasons, to reduce them all to a gene is ridiculous. Even one type of 'follower' being reduced to a gene, even reduced to a predisposition is fucking unlikely, for very simple reasons.
idiocracy, anyone? i think the idea of a religious gene as valid, though definitely contentious.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
How would you distinguish a "Religiosity gene" from a gullible gene, or a gene for looking for an easy way for dealing with stress or negative emotions, or a gene for simply fitting in with family and friends without actually believing.... People believe or follow religions for various reasons, to reduce them all to a gene is ridiculous. Even one type of 'follower' being reduced to a gene, even reduced to a predisposition is fucking unlikely, for very simple reasons.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
As the availability of scientific texts increases, we'll see a decline in religious affiliation.
Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/111/
Obviously we secular people have to take more seriously the old slogan "Make love, not war". ,I have found it useless to argue in favor of secular attitudes to religious people so the only way to change the world for the better is to reproduce more vigorously. Since nature has already provided the motivations for this a popular movement towards secular reproduction should catch on with no trouble.
Where are the Presbyterians when you need them? I was taught that it was a sin to "do it," even if you were married. As to the Amish:
Amish Chick: "It's Friday evening, do you want to drink beer and watch television?"
Amish Guy: "Hell, no. We're Amish. We don't drink beer and we don't watch television. How about you showing me the new quilt that you sewed for the bedroom? God said nothing in the Bible about fucking like bunnies. Ooooh, you make me feel so macho! Bark for me, baby, 'woof, woof, woof'"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Religion persists only because people have an use for it. But that's steadily disappearing.
One of the main things about it is that it's an explanation for the unexplainable. For instance, before we knew what lightning and the Sun were, those were "explained" by religion. Now we know what they are, and that part of religion became obsolete.
Currently some of the main things people seem to cling to is healing, morality and the afterlife. Healing will go away eventually, as medicine gets to the point where we can heal pretty much anything. Morality will take some effort, but the Catholic church seems to be making a very good demonstration of how their priests aren't especially moral. For the afterlife, we'll probably be able to live eternally if we want to eventually.
Over time, things like that should result in it fading until it becomes inexistent or barely so, as it has less and less relevance to people's lives. The effect is already seen in Europe, where in many countries a large percentage is not religious, and antiquated religious policies are being beaten back. For instance Spain introduced gay marriage in 2005 and is progressive in other respects like allowing transsexuals to serve in the army.
this should be common sense to anyone that observes humanity, notices cultural differences, and realizes that natural selection favors NOT the fittest, but most prolific species. Notice i said 'natural selection'. no need to go deeper with the term 'evolution'. However, that was a very funny comment...'those who don't believe in evolution have an evolutionary advantage'...it's so true. just like they say people with depression actually have a more accurate perception of reality than people that are not depressed.
where there is a will, there is a way. having the will is a matter of accepting the consequences of the way.
"In the model, Rowthorn uses a 'religiosity gene' to represent the various genetic factors that combine to genetically predispose a person toward religion..."
But nowhere is there any further mention of what those genes may be or any evidence for them, or even past research on the subject. (The past research mentioned is only about fertility among religious people... not about any genetic predisposition.)
There is no evidence I am aware of that such a thing actually exists.
Frankly, I am dubious. This seems to be a very big assumption. Huge, in fact. Huge and very questionable.
There was a good talk on religious demographics at fora, and how fundamentalist families have much higher fertility rates within most all cultures.
http://fora.tv/2010/09/05/Eric_Kaufmann_Shall_the_Religious_Inherit_the_Earth
I don't understand the hostile reaction to the idea that propensity to religion has a genetic component. I wonder what the gene is for that.
Like the 'gay is a choice' promoters would have us believe, perhaps we can "Save' the misled religious folk, and show them the path to true non-stupidity.
What a load of hogwash.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
...when you can be so easily swayed by such scant evidence?
Blar.
But in the real world, religion is on the decline.
By this logic, the percentage of the population that play in the NBA will stabilize at some point less than 100%.
ha ha, all this time you Americans have been running around worrying about some bearded dudes in the Middle East, panicking about Muslims, al-Quaeda, Bin Laden and all that crowd... and all the time you've been looking at the WRONG BEARDS!
Fancy that, turns out those chilled out Amishes have pulled one on you, it's the dudes with the buggies and the barns you got to watch out for, and they've all got US passports to boot.
Just goes to show, doesn't it. It's the quiet ones who do carpentry you got to watch out for ;-)
This is another instance of Gresham's Law, originally "Bad Money drives out Good Money" but applicable in many fields. This time it's Bad Genes drive out Good Genes.
Evolution is producing organisms that don't believe in it.
A gene for religiosity? Come one! That's ridiculous.
What we are seeing is simply cultural evolution. A philosophy that says "have lots of kids and instill in them this belief system on the pain of eternal punishment" is simply (unfortunately) quite likely to propagate itself.
I've always suspected that a species will evolve intelligence and then devolve into lawyers and politicians. This isn't too far off. I wonder if this accounts for external factors such as deadly plagues which secular people will vaccinate against while religious people will pray against.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It seems to me that people on welfare are the ones who procreate the most.
What about a welfare gene?
Putting aside that There Is No Religious Gene so the premise is bunk, the study is starting from the present and extrapolating forwards. If there was a genetic basis for religion, then the huge worldwide rise of secularism over the past 20 generations suggests that it has been massively selected for, and I can see no reason for that long running trend to suddenly change.
1- This model predicts that there will be plenty of Amish people by 2150. But being them rather refractory to the present ever increasing consumption culture if their numbers become significant it will result in the collapse of such model which is which allows them to multiply so fast so their numbers will not follow the model. It looks like a self limiting process.
2.- Given the fact that our civilization is going to collapse one way or another, as all its predecessors did, the taking over of the world by the Amish is hardly the worst alternative I can envision.
3.- Is all this thread just a joke?
Does this gene come in various flavors? Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, etc?
Perhaps there are political genes as well: Conservative, Liberal, Middle of the Road, etc.?
And programming genes: Basic, C, C++, Java, etc.?
People with that gene are less skeptical in general.
Again not matching with my experience which finds the religious kids I knew just as skeptical as anyone; and usually stronger willed than non-religious kids I knew (probably from having a more structured childhood).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Robert Rowthorn is a radical communist revolutionary and an atheist. I think it is very hard to trust a study performed by someone with such an agenda.
It's beyond we mere mortals to stop this trend. Only Science can save us now. Praise be to Science! (Incoming *whoosh* in 3... 2...)
Please, spay or neuter your religious children. It's the humanist thing to do.
Anyone know?
Kill All Humans for a Better Tomorrow!!
Paid for by Earthicans for Bender B. Rodriguez
It's actually great news if religiosity turns out to have a strong genetic component, because with our advancing knowledge of molecular biology it means that some day, some bright scientist might be able to engineer a virus that infects the global population and neatly splices out that rather destructive part of our collective genome. Think of it: a species freed from ancestral superstition to create a true scientific civilization and finally reach for the stars. Excuse me, I'm starting to get a little teary eyed...
I will pray that the abnormal religiosity gene is recessive.
I will pray that the religiosity gene is predominantly dormant in the secular population.
I will pray that normal genes are dominant, and that Robert Rowthorn, emeritus professor at Cambridge University is kept far away from all students.
Religiosity, godddd said, is a mater of nurture not nature.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
There is a study, (Sorry don't recall the author offhand), that shows that atheists tend to develop from males with weak or despised father figures. So if you are a male and perceive your father to be a weakling, you are likely to become an atheist as you mature. Oddly, in this study females with a weak father figure are likely to choose alternative religions (IE goddess worship) , rather than totally abandon all religions.
This emeritus professor is leaning pretty heavily toward nature in the nature vs. nurture debate. What effect will social conditioning have on the expression of such a gene, if it does in fact exist?
I believe the gene that makes someone more likely to turn to religion is called poverty. Go ahead and look it up. Nice work idiots.
Susceptibility or propensity to religion is unlikely to be caused by a single gene (almost no human traits are) but rather a trait composed of complex interactions from dozen or perhaps hundreds of genes, which themselves can be modulated by environmental influences. So can we please stop this "one gene - one trait" idea? There is no intelligence gene, no sexual preference gene, no religion gene, etc.
This sounds really stupid. I had been taught the idea of nature vs. nurture since elementary school. If you ask me, the only reason it doubled was that because of the larger amount of children per woman caused more children to be exposed to the religion at an early age and come to respect/depend on it AND choose to continue with it later on in life.
They've managed to prove the lead hypothesis that was presented in the very beginning of the Mike Judge movie, Idiocracy, that "the stupid breed at an alarming rate" compared to smart people. From my viewpoint, some of the smartest people I know are atheists.
Well partner, that's cause we ain't played cowboys and Saudis yet
Parenting greatly influences the choice of religion, but not the strength of belief. Studies of adopted children show that there is a very strong tendency to become more like the biological parents during early adulthood. A child of atheists raised in a young-earth household is likely to become less of a believer once out of that environment, while a child of young-earthers raised by atheists is likely to convert to some religion.
No mystical energy field controls my destiny. - Han Solo
If some there is an observation, then the most interesting question is: can we explaing this observation by the simplest model. There are two simple (extreme) models inheritance of religious views/bias to adhere to religion:
a) genetics does not play a role in the formation of religious closed groups
b) it does.
a or b can be falsified by comparing the predictions of statistical models with the reality, given that statistical data of high quality is available, and upon using a meta-analysis (sometimes an art, most times a hard science) to exclude/reduce study bias, unwanted correlations. It is a proper methology to first do the simulations of the simple assumptions and then ask a specific question to the statistics, otherwise you may end catching something significant just by chance (it is dangerous to look for anything).
So while the slashdot headline was an exageration (as usual) and i can not judge the articles validity in 10 minutes (not my field, and even then it would take longer), i find that the things which are done there give an interesting view on how to possibly falsify one of the two hypothesis.
In the abstract and the conclusion i have the feeling the author puts a little bit to much of his worldview without referencing the claims somewhere, but he states clearly what he assumes and what he calculated.
Homosexuality becomes more and more likely as a mother produces boys all in a row. (accounting for home environment via adoption studies)
We can conclude that something in the womb environment is the cause. In other words, homosexuality is a birth defect, and the March of Dimes ought to be all over it.
...and therefore teach/indoctrinate their larger broods to despise and ridicule anyone who believes anything else except their particular beliefs.
Suggest you re-read your own comments about other peoples' beliefs, and then reflect on the irony.
So, why would a person want to pass on his DNA?
This is a brain feature. We've already discovered numerous cases where such features are inheritable. Most have been the subject of Slashdot articles.
For example: faithfullness, IQ, violence...
This isn't any different. Any behavioral trait that increases descendents in the Nth generation will become more common. In modern human society, most strongly selected traits will be mental. A few will be disease-related or diet-related, so you can live on a McDonald's diet while screwing all day long. Mostly it's the brain that matters, because brain features are most capable of defeating birth control.
No shit Sherlock. .. But why one could not get that kind of experiences about science?
I'm actually not completely hostile to the hypothesis - I'm fairly convinced that lots of behavior that we think is largely subject to free will is, in fact, heritable. Even those with a scientific bent tend to gloss over the real implications of evolution - evolution never stops. The selection pressures just change. One reason that modern Western society seems to take better in some places than others has a lot to do with the selective pressures that came from urbanization - over amazingly brief periods of time, the selective pressures of evolution have equipped urbanized cultures with a set of skills and value structures that support modern life, but those alleles are scarce among groups that never urbanized. They thus have trouble adapting to Western civilization - their evolution hasn't selected for those traits. Give them a few generations and those traits will start to appear - either through the higher expression of local alleles that are conducive to urbanization or from the importation of those alleles from visitors or immigrants. Pick up a copy of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn.
That said, I'm very skeptical of this new "the religious will outbreed us" meme. It's fairly uncontroversial that religious folk outbreed secular types, especially in modern Western societies. But these self-same societies were, in the not too distant past, for more religious than they are now. I'm not just talking pre-Enlightenment times (when the religious/secular ratio was probably near a peak), but even since. American culture is prone to Great Awakenings, when the religious nature of America reaches local peaks. Soon thereafter, however, a wave of secularism occurs - emerging from the huge cohort of children of those highly religious types had during the previous Awakening.
So, it seems to me there are multiple factors involved here, both cultural and genetic. My suspicion is that alleles that predispose toward religious impulses have synergistic reactions with those that predispose toward secularism - that the mix of alleles is too complex to push us too far in any one direction.
But who knows - evolution never stops. If religion (or secularism) is selected strongly enough, only our great grandchildren will know for sure.
Some people produce lots of kids. They will pass on the traits, both physical and mental, which cause this. Soon enough, everybody in the population will refuse to use birth control (or just fail at it, in the idiocracy scenario) and our population growth will go exponential until we start dying from overpopulation.
The natural state of all living creatures is to live in squalor. You are very lucky to live in the current anomaly.
"The Marching Morons" was a science fiction story I read a looong time ago, written by C. M. Kornbluth, whose most famous stories were probably "The Space Merchants" and "The Black Bag". The story didn't talk about religion, but about the more intelligent part of the population having fewer children, and speculated on the consequences. I guess that makes it sound like I'm equating intelligence with lacking in religiousness, which I don't think is quite true. But I do think decisions made for religious reasons are more apt to be wrong than plain old straightforward thinking type decisions. I also don't equate morality with religion. For example, slavery in America was defended on religious grounds and also attacked and criticized on religious grounds. But I think the anti-slavery forces had the moral high ground. They also used persuasive economic arguments that had nothing to do with religion.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
... stupidity.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If she's pretty enough, there are plenty of guys here that will believe anything else she wants to tell us!
The worst way of doing proper science.
On an other note, all civilisations that have fallen till now where in some way religious. Why wouldn't we give no religions at all a shot at the longest civilisation to ever live.
i9 thought that i had seen the premise to "idiocracy" before! thanks for the knock on the ol noggin! yes, i realize the plot lines are different... but the underlying main stream remain true!
Free will is an illusion. Humans are prediposed to specific behaviors by their brain chemistry which at any given moment is determined by genetics and external stimulus.
Didn't I already see much the same premise in a movie?
http://blip.tv/file/2204956
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
if we apply the same logic - we should be able to find a gene that predisposes people to atheism too - no?
(fyi - i'm not for the christians or the atheists, i want out of that whole dichotomy, give me option C)
also explains the reproductive rate
Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010
Shocking, maybe we can put birth control pills in their funnel cakes?
If man 'naturally' tended to religious fundamentalism then after at least 6,000 years (as God fools us with dinosaur bones) we should all make Lord Protector Cromwell look like an atheist.
Something like 80-85% of the world is religious - how much more dominant can you get?
sic transit gloria mundi
... the smart people will take a page from L. Ron Hubbard's play book and position themselves to take advantage of the masses.
Have gnu, will travel.
"All models are wrong, some models are useful (my experimental design professor)", but this is not one of them.
This is pure, unadulterated BS. Religiosity Gene? This is not really science, it is speculation and bigotry (religion only makes sense if you have a genetically inherited mental disorder).
The number of Amish is growing because of the social obligation to have as many children as God gives you. It's the same reason that Catholics have a reputation for large families. The "non-religious" have no similar social pressure to avoid contraception, and plenty of other pressures (economic, stress, selfishness, etc.) to keep their families small. There is no need to invent a Gene for which there is no other evidence than the authors desire to explain a culture he does not understand using the wrong tools (biology, instead of sociology).
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
may be predisposed to religion.
All human societies have some sort of religion (creation myth, belief in a higher power, rites etc.) Here's one possible reason.
We do have an instinct to anthropogenize the world. Some say we have developed this way, i.e., the people who think the rustling in the grass is a tiger and runs has better chance of surviving than those who ignore the noise, even if the tiger is there only 1% of the time. Thus, the 'seeing the tiger' response is passed on. So the world is full of ghosts, images of jesus on toast etc.
Is this a basis for religion? Could be!
There is to a point evidence against the existence of a Supreme Being, in that trying to find it plays havoc with Occam's Razor. "An undetectable supreme being that can't say hello? Really?!"
I've heard the Ant analogy, etc. Right, we can't exactly talk to ants, but you can get them to notice a huge chunk of melting chocolate you thunk down.
And remember, unlike ants, we're *starting* with *our* brainpower... and the supreme guy can't do anything at all that creates a noticeable event? Not even morse code?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
first off, this dude is an economics professor, apparently. yep, economics.
second of all, and i aint no professor emeritis or nothin, but isnt this prima facie wrong?
two hundred years ago, there was basically no such thing as an "atheist" . as in AT ALL.. on the whole planet!
even ONE hundred years ago there were very very few.
now, there are hundreds of millions of atheists (e.g. europe)
if the "religiosity" gene existed, and was dominant, and the entire species was religious for millenia, how could just a gene produce an outcome of exponential decline?
wtf
Maybe the supreme being has created noticeable events; churches are always talking about miracles, people have gotten better from illnesses miraculously, etc. Are these just flukes, or the work of a god? It's impossible to know, because these aren't testable phenomena; you can't set up an experiment to replicate these "miracles".
Also, maybe the supreme doesn't want to say "hello". Why? Who knows? If there's a god out there (whether a single supreme being of unlimited power and knowledge, or a more limited one or ones more like the "Q" of Star Trek), it'd be pretty hard for us to understand them just as it's hard for rats to understand humans. Perhaps he/they have a Prime Directive, and believe in non-interference. Maybe our whole existence is just a big scientific experiment for it/them.
As for melting chocolate, maybe it/they exist in different dimensions outside our perception. There's already theories in physics that there are more dimensions than we can perceive, perhaps 11.
Now, if you want to debate the existence of a "personal god", the kind that many religions believe in which is actively involved in human affairs, then your arguments might have some weight.
I hear this comment all the time about how group X is going to dominate society because they're breeding faster:
My complaint is that humans, and to a lesser extent other mammals, have a very different definition of reproductive success that involves having few offspring and intensively investing resources in them.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
:P
Secular Quiver Movement
There is to a point evidence against the existence of a Supreme Being,
Not scientific evidence. Whether or not a supreme being exists is outside of the realm of science.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Any chance I get to tell people I know Jesus is LORD, God is love, I do. Be good and loving to all even those who aren't good and loving to you.
PS: If there are any hot Christian women browsing Slashdot right now, I'd like to meet you sexy statistical anomaly you.
God spoke to me.
And I thought my idea of modeling religions like the spread of infectious diseases would be considered politically incorrect. Someone was having too much fun with some ODEs.
As someone who studied genetics... All I can say is that I will believe it when I run the supposed religiosity gene sequence through a Bioinformatics supercomputing system for a few years....
What is this "will dominate"? Religious people dominate today. Atheists are a tiny percentage of Americans - grossly overrepresented on places like Slashdot. In the world at large, they are a rounding error.
Maybe the ratio is the same as the right handed vs the left handed or right brain dominate vs the left brain dominate. The gene may be more than one gene.
Runaway religion gave us the Inquisition and Islamic fundamentalists blowing people up and chopping off their heads.
Runaway science gave us Dr. Mengele and the Tuskegee experiments.
Too much of anything is a bad thing.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The meme of the need to procreate is far and away the most successful of all.
If the idea of the need to procreate in the face of what can seem to be less than ideal situations does not grow legs, that meme dies within a generation or three. Lesser memes (that is to say those which manifest in the mind of the individual less as instinct and more as concepts) will rise up to compete for mindshare and find the best way to keep themselves spreading. A meme can only survive as long as it has an audience. It is very difficult for them to survive the process of being archived and then resurrected.
Ask Isis about it.
It behooves a meme to encourage people to come together and continue to stoke the fires of attention.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
I cannot believe that anyone is calling this real science. This belongs in the same category as Phrenology. It is an excuse to practice racism and anti-relgious bigotry.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
... that there is a genetic component to homosexual preferences, then almost certainly there is a genetic component to many other sexual preferences?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Am I wrong in thinking that the lack of birth control is in fact what leads to the higher birth rates in conservative/very religious individuals? So by that train of thought, the only conclusion I can draw is that they are too unintelligent to use birth control or their(parents) beliefs prevent them from using it.
/. crowd does provide a strong argument to the contrary....
Although, the
Not how it works. They may have a gene that is relevant to them finding meaning in religion, but it is not that gene alone that causes that person to do so. If 100 people with the "religiosity gene" are all raised in a totally equal environment, not all of them will choose religion. The same goes for drugs. No drug is by itself addictive. It's the combination of the person's susceptibility to being addicted to that drug, and the drug's addictive nature. Not everyone who does cocaine becomes an addict. Not everyone who has a beer will become an alcoholic. It's the combination of the person, and their environment. Both, not just one or the other.
Whether or not a supreme being exists is outside of the realm of science.
He exists outside of the realm of science, and He really, really wants you to vote Republican.
where one can actually get paid for coming up with drivel such as this. /facepalm
> So... how would you detect free will, if it does exist?
The same way I get all my other direct sensory experience? I have the sensation of control and I no reason to believe that my actions are being controlled.
You could argue that it's not a sense in the same way that the five senses are, but the five senses in the first place are arbitrary divisions that leave out things like proprioception. You could argue that my sensory experience doesn't mean anything, but you'd have to jettison empiricism and the scientific method itself if you go that route and fall straight into solipsism.
You might claim that you really don't sense anything like that, but merely by using the word "I" you've already admitted that you intrinsically believe in some concept of self, which implies quite a bit, even if you intend to argue with me for the sake of not losing an argument.
But maybe I'm being controlled to say, think and feel that. Maybe you'll find some schizophrenic out there who believes that little green men are controlling him. Even so, if you can't trust your own senses, you're screwed. You can't even do science.
Robert K. Graham, founder of the Nobel Sperm Bank, devoted his later life to promoting this simple idea:
"The more intelligent you are, the more children you should have."
A simple idea with complex implications, many of which are not politically correct.
...omphaloskepsis often...
So in the end it all comes from physics.
Due to an interesting combination of particles just after the Big Bang, I'm going to eat a pizza now.
Wow... nice to see that such people are being employed as faculty in Cambridge...!! What utter rubbish...
This article had every single logical fallacy in the book.
Tying the genes factors that contribute to a likely-hood of being religious may have have qualities in common with a stable family life... Like, i dunno, "trust". There's basically a lot of assumptions made throughout the entire article. Any of which given a proper error analysis would cause the conclusion to fall apart.
Also, the assumption that future "religious gene" carriers will be in an organized religion. There's a lot of things that people become "religious" towards. Kings, talk show hosts, drugs, sports teams, presidents, pseudoscience, etc. Just look at Obama supporters. It's so obvious that you can parody it without much stretching of the imagination. Example.
As opposed to... I dunno... the child's upbringing? Because apparently the father and mother have nothing to do with it?
Doesn't it seem like there are too many people these days blaming gene X or Y on something that really has no correlation to that gene. Correlation does not imply causation, right?
And then there's the question of how long until someone uses this finding as an excuse to pass laws restricting who can and cannot procreate or how many children you can have? After all, science says you'll outnumber us because you're religious, and that's bad for the environment [so they say].
Dude. It's a feature article on Physorg. Those articles are written for people without genes.
Heh, normally I keep a pretty open mind about these kinds of things and am slow to doubt scientific findings that I don't 100% understand... but this just sounds like utter BS. I'm sure this has been discussed by now, but if there is such a thing as a "genetic predisposition" to religion, then how has secularism/atheism become so much more common over the course of human history? People's tendency to become religious has everything to do with culture, the biggest factor being education I think. If genetics are an influence (and I'm sure there are some genetic factors), it is tiny by comparison... ... However, with all that said, it is an interesting point that religious people are a hell of a lot more likely to have children than non-religous people. Does make me wonder how things will develop over the coming generations.
Either way we are fucked. Even if it's not genetic at all (and I tend to believe that it's not). But we are still screwed because even if it's just a "learnt" behavior" it still means that the majority of the children is and will be raised in families with some shade of religious view. So the outcome is the very same: 6 religious children (in average) producing another 6 religious children (in average) while the secular people pretty much die out due to low fertility rates.
Additionally society will add some pressure on those that have a tendency towards secular thoughts because more and more people will start to preach nonsense like creationism and you only need to look into countries like Iran, Pakistan, Israel and pretty much any other country led and controlled by religious people to see what happens to society when religion is dominating and controlling a country.
A strong argument against the existence of "real god", the strongest in my view, is the plausibility of the psychological and sociological role that "invented god-concept" (a Jungian archetype, a useful and persistent meme) would play in human society.
From birth, humans see powerful intelligent agency, more wise and powerful than they themselves, all around them,
in the form of their parents and other older humans. Why would we not make an analogy and posit the same sort of agency as an explanation
of the powerful and unexplainable forces of nature, as an explanation of otherwise inexplicable turns of fortune. Surely someone made the
great unseen "mother/father to us all" angry. Surely we must act righteously to gain favor from this ultimate arbiter of our fate.
And surely if we behave well, we will be accepted into this great ancestor's company when we die, for otherwise, the most feared and incomprehensible fate awaits us. Nothing. Our personal non-existence is unimaginable and unimaginably painful to contemplate. We must replace that most terrible worry with a soothing story, such as our parent would tell us to calm our fear of the night.
The more intelligent, ruthless, and cynical among us can take advantage of these churning fears and abstract hopes, and use these stories, this meme, as an amplifier of their personal power, as a ladder to the top of the societal hierarchy. They can claim to have a closer relationship with and knowledge of the deity. They can claim to have heard and interpreted its will and thus claim to be entitled to enforce its will.
It's too useful an idea not to invent.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This is pure bullshit. This crap about religiosity being genetic is pushing some atheistic barrow where it shouldn't be. Debating the existence of God belongs in a philosophical discussion not just assuming that one opinion is correct. Religion bashing is pretty popular among stupid geeks who are just sheep when it comes to anything beyond reductionist dogma.
"I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions."
The plural of anecdote is not data. Do a study which is not biased towards the people you know or have heard of, then draw conclusions.
Is religion carried by a gene or a meme ? If it is a meme then there is more hope for us all that the problems caused by religious belief will gradually die away through better education.
However: people will act in a way that is most beneficial to themselves with the result that many will defer to or feign religious belief as a way of avoiding problems. Non believers tend not to go around discriminating against believers, but some[**] religious people do act against those who are not religious or who follow a different set of beliefs than they do. Examples are Teachers [who] Back Away From Evolution In Class and religious wars.
[**]: read this carefully, I said ''some'' not ''all''
It's the only way to be sure
Specifically, a memetic / genetic complex.
Until there is any significant proof of genetic predisposition to susceptibility, the memetic part is by far the larger and more significant part of that.
Certain memes go along with religion though - the "be fruitful and multiply" meme being written into the religious text is no coincidence. Religions evolves just like any other self-replicating entity. Like other life forms dependent on a host, it may confer benefits to enhance the survival of that host or induce odd behavior to induce it's host to proliferate or to spread itself (like toxoplasmosis).
I view the evangelic strains of religion to be more virulent, and they probably do take root in minds with an unprepared "immune system" more easily. To steal directly from Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash - the decline of the staid, formal religions, like Catholicism or the Church of England, is probably reducing the group immunity of the populace to the virulent evangelical religion - what would you prefer, someone who goes to Mass and understands that their religious texts sometimes speak figuratively, or someone who goes PTA meetings and demands that the education of your children is hobbled because it contradicts their holy book?
Religion *is* a political ideology. That people tend to see listening to an orator on sunday and listening to one on the TV every day as different things, is not surprising but still incorrect.
Especially in times before radio and TV, how would any political idea spread, if not in the form of religion? And why does religion reflect the attitudes of the social class that was the biggest supporter of that religion so much, if it was just Divine inspiration and not a form of political ideology?
I mean, look at Islam: everything in it reflects the attitude of nomadic traders living in a very inhospitable climate. And look at the protestant version of religion: comes up at the same time as the cities start to grow in importance, with the new bourgeois desiring equal representation in relation to their new worldly power and having an urgent need for free people to work in their workshops (and not being banned from hiring anyone because everyone's a serf). What a surprise that it stresses the value of the new upcoming "burgers" as opposed to those ruling the world at the time. No surprise that it took a few revolutions and a lot of heads to change the system - it *was* a revolution, a political one. Just look at Cromwells New Model Army.
And the Catholic faith just happens (by Divine will ofcourse) to stress the importance of peons listening to feudal lords, everyone in their place. What a surprise, that the changeover in early Christianity from "kick the rich out of the temple!" to "well, listen to the good King because he knows best and that is the will of the Lord" comes around the time that Kings start to convert into Christians.
I'm not even going into Confucianism here. That is such a blatant justification for the way the world was ordered under the emperor. And don't say it's not a religion - about a gazillion Chinese will disagree with you.
And religion wasn't just a "minor component" of this, and of the Crusades: without priests giving absolution, without priests calling for volunteers, without the Church pressing rulers into adventures into strange lands, there would have been no crusades at all. If you think Luther and Calvijn were just political, I'm pretty sure a lot of protestants will disagree. But if you say they were a-political, that's just silly.
And I'm not even going into the succession wars, the three popes, the fact that the Church at one time controlled more than half the areable land in Europe, or the things Machiavelli wrote about religion (and that book was banned by the church with reason - it's both very well written, a great read even now, and an absolute brilliant expose of the way in which rulers should use religion to control their subjects. Hot stuff for the 16th century)
Religion has been the main political ideology for thousands of years! Only recently do we get new ideologies, because the facilities have started to exist with the start of mass bookprints. Luther and Calvijn didn't just open the door for their OWN ideology with that, they opened the door for OTHER ideologies as well. The ones we call "political". But all that means is that they don't claim to derive from Divine inspiration. Apart from that, I see no difference.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
or perhaps the non-relilgious have spent too much time killing off their babies in the name of their god Freedom!
Obviously, this has been posted as a spoof. The joke is the hundreds of "intellectual replies" to a silly subject.
Catholic church loves celibate for a slightly different reason: a celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because the religious organization is the only heir. ;)
Yes. The "religiosity gene" -- this is a dishonest way of saying "indoctrination of children into their parents' religion," by the way -- will dominate a poverty-ridden and overpopulated society because this irresponsible practice takes no account for the fact that resources are limited. Given three or four generations of exponential growth, what's any person with half a brain to expect? It's outright despicable, in my opinion.
There is not a religious gen. There are various gens that might affect the predisposition to religion.
If you think this is a bad development, just do your job and outbreed them.
"Religion" is simply an acceptance of 'X' based on inadaquate, incomplete evidence. It's synonymous with 'faith' or 'belief'. That heuristic ends up sorting both brane physicists and Druid priestesses into the same subset. In fact, all functional humans end up in that subset. (What, you don't believe in ANYTHING?) No one has all the facts, and all human knowledge, every human mind, requires essential leaps of faith to make sense of this unfathomable universe. Where we leap is where our religion is found, and we typically congregate with those who leap in the same internal places. Scientists may have more data when they leap, and seem more rational about where they leap, but they still have religion.
Religion remains a fascinating discussion and an unwinnable argument. I so believe.
Me? I'm a possibilian.
Hmmm. so it seems, that atheism is a genetic disorder and the nature will take care of it one way or the other. Amazing how God has it's mysterious ways.
JAM
This whole article is a crock. First of all, no genes for "religiousosity" have been identified, so no one has any idea where or how such genes are "hitchhiking" on the human genome. Second, if there is any such thing as an inhomogeneously distributed predisposition towards religion based on genetic factors, that predisposition is almost certainly extraordinarily multifactorial, not just a gene, but dozens, hundreds of genes, spread out over many chromosomes. The population genetics of transmission in this case are vastly more complicated than any simplistic model could reveal.
To be more explicit, the study is arguing that:
* There are two distinct strains of humanity, one that is genetically religious, one that is not.
* Certain religions promote larger families (not all religions do, note well).
* People that are genetically religious are statistically more likely to belong to the religions that promote larger families.
* Larger families guarantee a higher survival to reproduction rate (note well that this assumption is not generally true in nature, where survival rates for smaller families and less populous cultures are generally higher than those for larger ones with dilution of resources and more competition).
* No mechanism exists where non-religious people secularists can compete in reproduction rate, say by having multiple partners, engaging in infidelity and adultery, and so on (most of which are frowned on by the very religions that encourage high reproduction rates).
* Reproduction rate is ultimately the only thing that matters in population genetics. (So much for the long term survival of the homosexuality genes, eh?)
* Religiousosity genes in religions that encourage high reproduction rates will therefore always have a positive derivative in the enormously complex set of coupled differential equations that describe the gene distribution of the population, and must therefore eventually take over the population and become universal.
This is complete, utter, bullshit. It is bad science. It is terrible mathematics. Have these bozos never heard of complex systems and chaotic differential systems? Even if all of the assumptions above were true -- where clearly, most of them are pretty dubious -- the argument is naive in the extreme in a system so complex that there are doubtless many strange attractors on a constantly shifting landscape. Things it ignores:
* Memetics. Oh, wait, religions are memetic constructs, they are social superorganisms, not genetically encoded theistic beliefs. The key step in preparing a new generation of theists is the brainwashing of the children by bringing them up in the delusion. Perhaps there are genes that predispose one to being brainwashed, perhaps not, but as secular society continues to control information transmission to the very young there is a much, much faster mechansim than genetics acting to actively reduce the relative numbers of theists worldwide by simply educating young people so that they can see that the base doctrines and myths underlying the primary theisms are false.
* Non-religious, non-genetic factors that suppress or enhance survival rates. The Amish are a perfect example. They live within and are protected by a secular society. Plop them down in the Middle East and suddenly they would be a heavily persecuted minority. Plop them down in billion-person strong mostly-secular China and they'd have no capability of isolating their children for the key brainwashing step; the children would be taught from the earliest of ages that their parents religious beliefs were stupid myths. Alter American culture so that religions such as this no longer had tax advantages and insist that Amish children learn about astronomy and evolution and the fact that Amish mythology is mythology and you'd increase the defection rate to secular society.
* The fact that the number of secular non-religious people worldwide appears to be growing at
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
It's about time those religious nutjobs start killing each other by the millsions again, like in the past centuries. But we must take care that we are left out of the massacre. Maybe we should lead them into it and watch the show?
How is this different from what happened in the movie idiocracy? Couldn't that explain his "findings"? Leaping from "religoius people breed a lot!" to "religion-gene is gonna dominate all" is a huge leap of faith, pun intended.
Also, almost ANY social behavior could be said to have a genetic "component". How could you enjoy music if you weren't genetically predisposed to have ears? And music-lovers breed more because of drunkenness at concerts, leading to future generations with GIANT ears, relying solely on sonic bat-like senses for navigating their surroundings! They will then have an all-out war with the other faith-enhanced human factio , who has developed bioluminence on their scalps (religious people would be attracted to that) and a tendency to blindly believe in lots of strange things. The bat-faction would then win, because their king told the theology-faction that he was the president of the world, and because of their genetic inclination towards believing stuff, they believed him and surrendered.
Aah, i love theorizing on the potential of evolution :)
Us non-religious people that improve technology and create advances in health care need to stop sharing it with the religious crazies.
If that's the case, why is there a higher percentage of secular people in the present than in the past?
Except that it was those same celibate monks who transcribed and preserved what little scientific knowledge there was through the "Dark ages".
If you ask the people at NASA who worked with Sagan, he was an arrogant, pompous, out of touch fruit-loop.
Rational, tolerant populations produce science and technology that allows us to live longer and more healthily.
Irrational, religious populations are growing much faster and use science and technology to conduct
The problem is that the rational, tolerant populations are sharing their advances with the irrational parts of the populations.
If the genes contributing to religiosity are identified, it will be very interesting to see if they are over represented in the US where a fair sized part of the founding population came here for religious reasons.
A more recent genetic sorting out might be seen in the descendants of Mormons who may be over represented in certain new religions, i.e., cults.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
Well, the Dutch neurobiologist Dick Swaab was practically ostracized for his work on brain differences between homo- and hetero-men. Apparently, homos have a bigger one.
I mean suprachiasmatic nucleus, of course.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_hormones_and_sexual_orientation
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
So maybe by 2400 society will be back to how it was in 1400 ? The New Middle Ages ?
I agree with what are some are asking, is it really a "religious" gene so much as a "stubborn thinking" gene that leads one into buying into a meme.
I think there are different kinds of atheists. Sure some are like Ayn Rand- extremely cold individualists who would throw you under the bus, refuse to marry or have kids, etc. Is it surprising that if this was genetic, it would die out in no time?
But a lot of atheists and agnostics are secular humanists- people who do believe in some kind of fuzzy morality and whose primary reason for not believing in a god stems from living in a modern era where supernatural/mystical superstitions are irrelevant and not so much . There is also those who probably believe in science the way some people believe in god. These people could very well be just as "religious" just that they have rejected the ancient and meaningless garbage because it has zero or a negative impact on their need to understand the world.
So even if a "religious gene" took over, would it always equate with judeo-christian-islamic faiths where people think there's a magical dude in the sky, or would there be just as many professed atheists whose mode of believe has been directed into a different channel, like political or cultural identity?
I wonder if there wasn't some truth to the old joke that Catholic school girls put out more than their public school sisters...all that repressed sexuality bubbling to the surface and resulting in increased fecundity.;)
if there was a religous gene winning against an atheism genome set due to hight number of offspring, we would not have any atheists today. We do hence there is not. q.e.d.
I giggle some how net.think mistakenly uses the word "religion" when they mean "Christianity".
Nice write-up on why this is junk science - Research on Authoritarianism and Religion.
[Insert pithy quote here]
The age of enlightenment set off in Europe after all the religious fanatics have fled to the Americas... makes you think.
I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions. It seems very unlikely that there's anything like a genetic "predisposition" to religion.
Suppose that out of every ten religious-gene children, seven become religious themselves (let's say, in five different religions); out of ten atheist-gene children, only six become religious. Then, this version of reality is consistent with your experince *and* with the headline+summary (I don't RTFA, the comments have more signal per time).
That's one issue: when you do any observation of complex systems, such as humans or groups of humans, you don't just look at a single data point. You look at two different points, and try to link the difference in outputs (kid religiousity) to the difference in inputs (parent religiousity).
Another issue: humans are complicated systems. Groups of humans even more so. Therefore, if you look at only one point of each type, you might get fooled by an arbitrary difference that's due to some unrelated factor. That's why you make a lot of observations, hoping that the unrelated variations distribute themselves evenly, such that the "sum of error vectors" is zero (or exponentially small) in both groups of subjects.
So even if your anecdote ran counter to the theory, you would need an overweight of similar anecdotes versus the ones confirming the theory, and the anecdotes would have to be chosen randomly in order for the assumption "the error vector sum is small" to make sense.
(At least as far as I understand science and statistics. If I'm wrong, please tell me: help me inform rather than misinform people in the future.)
Now that you speak of reproduction rates, here's a thing that's bugging me:
For example, in the past 20 years, the Amish population in the US has doubled, increasing from 123,000 in 1991 to 249,000 in 2010.
What does that mean? Doubling sounds like a lot, but consider this:
It's about a 3.5% yearly growth. Your bank balance can probably do that with a reasonably diversified portfolio, at least if you can afford parking your money for a few years.
Throughout the same past 20 years (1990-2010), the US economy has grown from 8 to 13 times X dollars (http://www.supportingevidence.com/Government/US_GDP_over_time.html), or put another way by 50% and then some. The US population in general has grown by roughly 25% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States).
So yeah, it's fast, but's it's 3.5% vs. 2% and 1% if you put it in those terms. (@editors) Let's have some context, yes?
There are tons of factors defining how we'll behave on a primordial level if left unchecked. Women will flock to men who provide well even if it means being one of ten of his mates. Men will beat tigers over the heads with clubs in a jungle etc...
Genetics which provide a leaning towards needing to be a member of a group of people no matter how ridiculous their belief system is is a primordial survival trait as well. Let's face it, weaker people survive when they gather into groups. They're willing to say or do just about anything so long as it will allow them to survive. There will also always be "leaders" in this group. People who are believers and wanted to lead to support other believers, or opportunists which see the clear benefit of leading large groups of easily mailable followers.
The point being that even if the gene had 100% proliferation into society, it should make very little difference. If anything, it can work against religion (as in believing in imaginary "higher beings") just as easily as for it. I would imagine (though I have no substantiating evidence or research to support) that the same gene which makes someone more susceptible to spending 3-5 full years of their lives sitting on uncomfortable benches praying to some imaginary thing that the world will be better etc... while the other people are out actually trying to make it better is the exact same gene which creates music groupies. People who want to be part of something "bigger than themselves" but instead of idolizing and praying to some mysterious magical thing, they instead idolize and practically pray to "super stars" which seem bigger than life. And they gain their "status" as being a "true fan" since they give up large portions of their lives to follow the band on the road and be their "true fans".
This same behavior, if acted upon properly could instead be used to make society as a whole the "great being" or make education the "greater group" etc... but, so long as we don't actively exploit the weakness in this way of thinking to attempt to help these people, they are more likely to choose religion or a rock band as their "larger than life, higher existence". This is the benefit of trying to make rock stars out of scientists and engineers. "Immortalize" the smart people and others can choose to learn more and become part of the "greater meaning". Sure, they'll still be idiot religious groupies, but they might spend their time trying to actually fix problems as opposed to being stubborn pains in the asses who pray for a better world and then get in the way of anyone who try make it for them.
So, here's my argument with your point.
1) It's an economics professor formulating a theory regarding the spread of a gene. Ok, he's got a model, but it's highly doubtful he understands the constants and the variables well enough to allow the model to have any merit.
2) He is clearly biased in the direction that from what I can read, his model is designed to attempt to prove "We'll all be religious one day, shouldn't we just skip all the waiting and get to it now".
3) His "facts" regarding reproduction rates based on the popular science sources he sites are poorly interpreted to begin with.
4) The model makes the assumption the "religiosity" gene plays a strictly dominant role and has a damn near 100% success rate of being carried from one generation to the next.
5) He doesn't take environment into consideration nearly enough. He models based on the idea that all people will live strictly by their primordial instincts. It's entirely possible the gene in question is present in tons of non-religious people as well. From what I can tell, the gene is kind of like a thing which says "A kid born with this gene and left in the wild to raise him/herself is more likely to pray to volley balls named Wilson that wash up on the shore than kids who aren't." It doesn't seem to actually have that great of an impact on people in their later lives. Just that it seems they are more likely to come from other p
"Also, maybe the supreme doesn't want to say "hello"."
Oops. You stumbled into what I call the division by zero effect of classical religion. YHVH/Allah 'loves' you! Of course He'd want to say hello? Right? Or do we have 2500 years of emotional sunk cost we can't bear to dispense with?
I chuckle a little at an anti-social supreme being that likes to play nasty games and obfuscates his presence. It makes for funny literature, but it would be downright creepy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Again that runs into the problems. He exists in a completely untraceable realm ... where prayers get through but science can't?!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...even Dawkins posited that it may be that there is an evolutionary value to religion, in the sense that a society that BELIEVES that there is 'an invisible watchdog' that's going to punish for 'cheating' has a stronger bias toward not cheating.
And since really any society is based on a set of assumptions and the fewer free-riders/cheaters there are, the better the system works, discouraging cheating by whatever means is a non-negligible advantage.
Today, in the West, where we're seeing an atomization of communities, it could even be that we're situating ourselves to a place where this tendency could actually turn out to be once again useful.
-Styopa
Well that's pretty damn selfish. Some of us honestly don't give a fuck about your god or your lord and have better things to do with our time than listen to you and your ideas about the universe. But that's not going to stop you from trying to talk to us anyways is it? Nope, you have to make brownie points with your imaginary sky fairy so we have to suffer your intolerable intrusiveness into our lives. And with each chance to tell people about god, Jesus, and all that mumbo jumbo you waste a little mroe of our time, and impede a little bit more into our lives and our privacy.
It never ceases to amaze me how fucking selfish religious people are, as if they and their beliefs are the center of the whole frackin' universe.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Sirs:
Just another permutation of the principle that the problem makers are out-breeding the problem-solvers ------- and both are absolutely true.
JimBob
I can see it now, phyorg posts about religious people having more children on average than the secularists and weeks later theres a rise in secularist key parties.