Study Links Spread of Religion With 'Believer Gene'

From Religion News Service courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

Rowthorn suggests that people with strong religious beliefs tend to have more children and that this, combined with a genetic predisposition to believe, can explain the expansion of religion.

The academic cites the World Values Survey in 82 nations from 1981 to 2004, which found that people who attended religious services more than once a week had an average of 2.5 children; those who never attended averaged only 1.67.

"The more devout people are," Rowthorn wrote, "the more children they are likely to have."

This, coupled with a "genetic endowment" that his theory ascribes to strong believers, could mean the spread of faith across the broad sweep of the population.

More here.

Historically, I've been in the nurture over nature camp in as much as the old controversy goes, but when I heard the great linguist Noam Chomsky asserting years ago that the human brain is hard wired for language acquisition, I've been slowly and continually reevaluating my view. Indeed, I've been reevaluating all kinds of psychological issues in terms of biology rather than social influence or personal choice. Why are conservatives conservative? They have access to the same information I do, more or less, but arrive at utterly different conclusions. For that matter, why am I liberal? I mean, I flatter myself that I've approached my politics from a rational point of view, but I've always been something of a non-conformist, an emotional outlook that pre-dates by many years any and all political views I ended up having.

Our brains, as with our bones, muscles, and skin, are biological organs, which means that the mind is simply a metaphor by which we discuss our thoughts and emotions: that is, the activities of the human mind are biological functions as surely as the heart pumping blood is. A lot of who we are and how we think must necessarily be as out of our conscious control as the flow of blood.

So a real emerging question for me is how attitudes and opinions may very well result from biological proclivity.

The study described in the excerpt above is authored by an economist, rather than a geneticist, so I take it with a grain of salt. But it does raise an intriguing possibility: perhaps humans are hard wired for spiritual belief in the same way we are hard wired for language acquisition. This doesn't even have to be genetic to be in play: I posted a few weeks ago on Dr. Gábor Máté's ideas about how the human brain continues to be wired up during post-natal development; social influence could be literally transformed into biological imperative during childhood.

Either way, the ramifications for such a view are stunning. When one speaks out against religion, it may very well be that he is arguing against biology, instead of making a rational appeal, and will, thus, never be heard or understood. This makes the reverse potentially true: when making any argument at all, couching it in religious language and appealing to an audience's understanding of a God filled universe, one may actually be more persuasive than if he had stuck with a secular frame.

Perhaps I should try being more respectful of people's spirituality. That'll be tough.

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