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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."
Religiosity gene. Wow, really? Gee, what's next, the gay gene?
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%!
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
So there's an evolutionary advantage to not believing in evolution? Whoda thunk it?
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
There are no atheists during Orgasms or when you bang your knee.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
"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.
Because things have changed in the developed world over the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution. Now infant mortality has been conquered, we have enough to eat and a welfare state to look after us when we are old we don't have to have as many children as possible. - Unless that is we belong to a Religion which knows it can just outgrow the opposition in tons of flesh by breeding beyond the replacement rate - though whether this is due to wilful hostility towards unbelievers or just ignorance, or small c conservatism and a 200 year lag in changing social rules to suit the conditions is an open question.
Given that the main reason for environmental destruction and social decay is an expanding population it seems incredible that so many religions instruct their followers to carry on breeding untill they are waist deep in their own shit. Religions are so irresponsible over population growth that they quite clearly represent the greatest actual threat to humanity of any of our political systems.
Whether or not there is a god it will be the churches who bring abut the downfall of mankind.if they carry on with business as usual. Remember all a Religion needs is followers, it has no interest in whether they live healthy fulfilled lives or live like battery hens just so long as they are infected with the meme. I am sure that many church leaders aspire to something better but at the root of the thing it's just membership that counts.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
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 agree (I'm an atheist).
Uh, pardon? I'm under the impression there's an incredibly elaborate system (science) that goes to extraordinary lengths to prove their postulations. Electron microscopes have imaged discrete atoms, and a couple of cities in Japan have seen first hand the results of what you can do with that knowledge, not to mention all the nuclear reactors throughout the world, and the electronic devices we all live with.
I postulate that the religious are susceptible to a very mild form of schizophrenia. They want to believe in voices they hear in their heads, and other "things that go bump in the night."
It's easier for them than accepting things they can't, or don't want to bother to, understand.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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)
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...
"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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
"On the other hand, the non-conformists may have been the big innovators, and were probably more flexible in the face of change, like changing climate conditions, or exploring new terrain. "
Exactly, and being successful would have rewarded such individuals with access to all the best wenches. Which would have spread their genes into the religious population getting us to where we are now.
The problem with today's society is that there is no sexual reward for being a science oriented non-conforming innovator.
Therefore, I suggest that anyone who demonstrates high aptitude or innovation in one of the sciences gets to sleep with any religious girl they choose, no condoms of course. How about one girl for every article you get published.
"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
>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.
Yeah. Except not. I would wager that highly religious people actually have less free time than their irreligious counterparts. There's all that time spent at church and on church-related activities. Religious people (depending on the religion, but I would guess this is true for most) either value children more. So they have more of them. A few religious folk probably also believe contraception is verboten, and I can't imagine any irreligious person thinking that.
When it comes to the poor, I'm thinking the key factor there is irresponsibility. Generally speaking that's why many people are poor to begin with. I highly doubt "amount of free time" plays a part in either case.
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.
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)