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."

Comments

Re:Thats just

[Weaselmancer]

"I could label all theoretical physicists as stupid, since they too are choosing to believe things that they cannot prove, or see."

You could, but you would be wrong. I think you'll find that there are well defined experiments in this field.

There aren't any for religion. That's the difference.

Re:not choice or solely genetic

[sunspot42]

>In other words, homosexuality is a birth defect

Your conclusion doesn't follow the facts. If homosexuality is indeed more likely as mothers produce male offspring sequentially, that implies it's some kind of survival adaptation, one that evolved. It could confer a survival advantage for the genes by providing non-breeding siblings whose presence can help ensure the survival of their siblings' offspring.

We see examples of this kind of reproductive strategy elsewhere in other social animals. Bees and ants are two powerful examples - colonies comprised almost entirely of siblings, with only a handful (or even just one) breeding female, plus a crop of fertile offspring produced seasonally.

Re:Religiosity gene?

[Z8]

The funny thing is that I thought academics would lean towards the free will argument, but I guess sometimes they take "there must be an explanation for everything" too far and convince themselves that human behaviour is easily explained with statistical models with ridiculously weak premises.

TFA itself sites a lot of work done on this. It even mentions specifically one bit of evidence: "twin studies that quantify the genetic and environmental determinants of what they call the ‘traditional moral triad’ of authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness ... show that 40 to 60 per cent of the observed variation in such personality traits is explained by genotypic variation."

So yeah, professional scientists actually try to do science and then believe what their science seems to tell them. Those silly academics!