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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."
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?
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.
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.
Any less complex model clearly would have predicted over 9000%!
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
"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.
honestly these guys are full of shit. I come out of a family with a long tradition of strict religion but me and both my siblings are non religious. Sure this is only anecdotal evidence but the article also doesn't have the data 100% on its side. Their entire study is based on this sentence:
"an individual’s predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics"
This is just another way to spread the fear against muslims and other religious groups. I just wish this fear wouldn't encounter such fertile ground here in europe. Stop the fearmongering ffs.
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?
What a ******* load of bunk !
The gene VMAT2 is likely what they are talking about. VMAT2 is a physiological arrangement that produces the sensations associated, by some, with mystic experiences, including the presence of God or others.
Carl Zimmer claimed that, given the low explanatory power of VMAT2, it would have been more accurate for Hamer to call his book 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.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene
It's worth noting that one of the other research pioneers of this so called God Gene, Dean H. Hamer pretty much disproves the whole God Gene theory in his own book by the same title.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faith-boosting-genes
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.
There is NO SUCH THING as a gene that dictates your behavior, preferences, or predisposition!
What's your favorite explanation for instinct?
(Assuming you believe such a thing exists.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
"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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
Actually, the greater your ability to focus on one task and maintain that concentration, the greater your ability to be hypnotized. A hypnotized person is in a super-concentrated state, and the hypnotist can use this to bypass conscious filters and "teach" things to the hypnotized person that they then "remember" and carry out. People with ADHD and diminished intelligence are actually much harder to hypnotize than educated, intelligent people, so strength of will and intelligence actually makes you a better candidate for hypnotism.
What you're probably after is gullibility, which is another thing entirely.
"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)
If she's pretty enough, there are plenty of guys here that will believe anything else she wants to tell us!
Not necessarily.
You don't have to believe in an imaginary friend in the sky who hates teh gheys and the eating of shellfish and of beef on fridays to be religious about something. I've seen people with religious zeal over everything from their diet (See, for example, vegans and the low-carb people.) to their particular environmental cause to their hobby or sport (triathletes) to their politics to their choice of computer operating system. Even some atheists are so fanatical about being anti-religion that they could well be describes as being religious about it.
So just because people don't fall into the same church as their parents that doesn't mean they're not religious and not genetically predisposed towards it.
Imagine all the people...
You don't have to believe in an imaginary friend in the sky who hates teh gheys and the eating of shellfish and of beef on fridays to be religious about something. I've seen people with religious zeal over everything from their diet (See, for example, vegans and the low-carb people.) to their particular environmental cause to their hobby or sport (triathletes) to their politics to their choice of computer operating system. Even some atheists are so fanatical about being anti-religion that they could well be describes as being religious about it.
I think you're describing "zeal," rather than "religion," per se. While a religious person can be zealous, it's not the only aspect of being religious. A person can be zealous without being religious. Religion implies other features like mysticism, which is mostly or wholly absent in the other "groups" you've suggested.
I realize that one of the definitions of "religious" is "zealous". However, it doesn't seem that any of TFAs are using that definition of "religious". In fact, the 3rd article specifically characterizes religion as: "belief in the supernatural, obedience to authority or susceptibility to ceremony and ritual . . . "
I am not a crackpot.
Amen brother. After discovering the truth about low-carb, and realizing that I had come to a revelation that the USDA and it's damn food pyramid and the vegans wanted to keep me from, I suddenly, as an atheist, realized what it meant to feel like an evangelical christian. I had the "Good Book" (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes), I wanted to save people, and I feel the impulse to spread the "Good Word" to nearly *anyone* I come into contact with. I can only imagine that I'm as annoying as the evangelicals who occasionally try to argue with me about theology, but I now know how they *feel*. It's an empathy that I hope has made me more patient with the God zealots, even if it probably annoys the shit out of anyone who hasn't experienced that kind of spiritual revelation.
That statement is awfully close to the bullshit people throw around about "atheism is a religon durr durr durr", which in itself is just a sad attempt by people to try and gain legitimacy by forcing a non-existent association between their view and another's. The same thing as creationists trying to assert that creationism is "just as valid a *theory* as evolution".
... 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
The first six footnotes of TFA support the point that religiosity is based in genetics. I'm not endorsing his position, but citing eight[1] books all written in the last 5 years is hardly "deliberately ignoring" the debate. I wonder why your post got modded up so highly.
[1] Footnote 1 seems to be to a three volume series.
>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.
I've never understood why people think there has to be a "why" they exist.
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.
The previous post wrote "influcenced by genetics" which you transformed to "determined by nature" in an attempt to discredit. It seems to me like the previous poster was open to both genetic and environmental explanations ("influenced by"), but that you are uncomfortable with anything less than 100% nurture. And indeed, if religiosity even *in part* (say 10%) is driven by genetics then that could still drive evolutionary patterns as suggested by the original article.
Fortunately the answers to the "nature vs nurture debate" have to a large extent been answered by expensive and extensive twin studies in the last decades. The answers are in. Genetics play a huge role in a number of traits, including religiosity:
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002666.html
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/1532/
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...
True. But what would people say if someone went around writing books about how they didn't collect stamps, and everyone who did was crazy. Then they'd start enumerating which of the stamps other people had were the silliest ones to collect, and explain away any things that resembled stamps in their house.
Not collecting stamps might not be a hobby, but bashing another's hobby can certainly turn into one.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
So... One insane Nazi and the non-treatment/disclosure of a venereal disease is "too much science"?
The first has nothing to do with science. The second was merely questionably unethical as the patients were likely to go on unaware and untreated anyhow.
This, in your mind, is the same as the continual slaughter of millions of people for believing in the wrong fairy tale?
Let's look at the opposite side of things. Runaway science has brought us artificial fertilizer and modern farming techniques (feeding billions), modern medicine (saving billions), electricity, computers, cars, airplanes, world-wide communication networks, sent man into space and landed us on the moon. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Runaway religion has ... well, it helps some idiots feel better about being sick or poor.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
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.
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)
I did not engage in ad hominem attack. If I called him a jerk or typical ivory tower liberal, that would be an unfair attack. The fact that Rowthorn has published for a radical communist magazine (black dwarf) and is an atheist is a relevant issue because these points of view relate directly to the study's subject matter.
Flame all you want, but Rowthorn's radical views are the 'unscientific' element to this discussion, and the study only makes sense if one assumes that God does not exist and that a single gene is responsible for mass delusion.