Genetics Influences Whether Someone is Religious Or Not

I agree with LuckyLemon when he says, “religion takes [too] many processes, thoughts, decisions, and life lessons” to place all of these factors on one gene. I assume that a collection of genes influences a person’s religiosity, just as a collection of genes influences a person’s intelligence (1). We should also define what “religiosity” is, as this complex term has different meanings to different people. Here I’m defining it as some quantifiable variable that reflects “[actions that indicate] belief in, obedience to, and reverence for a god, gods, or similar superhuman power” (I used the OED.com’s third definition of “religion”). _________________________________________________ LuckyLemon says, “by understanding what truly does the role more [genetics or the environment], I can persuade the opponent of just how little, or not at all, their genes affect their religion.” I don’t know which of the two has a stronger impact. LuckyLemon did not address in this round which of the two has the bigger impact. And I don’t know if this claim was up for debate. But knowing which of the two has a stronger impact is irrelevant. All we need to know, or what we need to debate about, is that genetics influences a person’s religiosity. According to Michael Breed and Leticia Sanchez’s article “Both Environment and Genetic Makeup Influence Behavior,” “genes . . . create a framework within which the environment acts to shape the behavior of an individual animal” (2). I’m assuming these PhD’s of ecology and evolutionary biology know what they’re talking about simply because of their titles and the way in which they say this sentence, acting as if behavior being caused by a combination of genetics and environment is an established fact in their field. Breed and Sanchez also state that “genes . . . create the scaffold for learning, memory, and cognition, remarkable mechanisms that allow animals to acquire and store information about their environment for use in shaping their behavior.” Where I anticipate LuckyLemon and I, as well as others, disagree is whether or not religiosity is also one of the behaviors that genetics influences. In his 2006 TED Talk “Let’s Teach Religion – All Religions – in Schools,” Daniel Dennett says, “Religions are natural phenomena. . . . They have evolved over millennia. They have a biological base. . . . They have become domesticated. And human beings have been redesigning their religions for thousands of years” I infer from these claims that religion, just like genes, are natural, are evolved, are capable of being redesigned to cater to our needs, whether the needs are real or imagined. Although Dennett doesn’t give a reference for these specific claims in this speech, I have found a 2013 Popular Science article, “What Twins Reveal About the Science of Faith” by Tim Spector, that explains how two academic twin experts – Nick Martin, an extrovert atheist Australian, and Lindon Eaves, a British lay preacher – “estimated the heritability of spirituality to be around 40 to 50 percent.” But this article doesn’t explain how exactly these two experts came up with those numbers, and I couldn’t find an online copy of the study. So I’m guessing I’d have to read the book that’s advertised in the article to understand the statistics in the study, or at least get a reference to the study. There is another article though, “Familial Resemblance in Religiousness in a Secular Society: A Twin Study” (doi:10.1017/thg.2013.3), published in 2013 by several Danish researchers. The researchers of this article claim, “the influence of the family environment is most predominant in early life, whereas genetic influences increase with age.” The researchers used surveys collected from over a thousand pairs of twins to support their findings. _________________________________________________ LuckyLemon also says, “if genes influenced whether a human being becomes religious or not, there would not be nearly as many ‘rebellious’ atheists in the midst of strictly Catholic families and religious people from nonreligious families.” Let me contradict myself for a moment. Let’s assume that religiosity can be traced to one specific gene instead of many genes, and that the phenotype of religiosity can be identified as easily as albinism can. We can use a Punnett square to show how religious people can give birth to nonreligious people, and vice versa. Let’s say that being religious is the dominant gene (R) and that being nonreligious is the recessive gene (r). If both parents have the Rr genotype, then there is a 25% chance that their offspring will express the recessive gene and become nonreligious. If one parent has the Rr genotype and the other has the rr genotype, then there is a 50% chance that their offspring will express the recessive gene. The only time religious parents would be guaranteed religious offspring would be if one of the parents has the RR genotype, and the only way a seemingly nonreligious couple would give birth to religious offspring is if neither of the parents carry the RR genotype and if the couple maintained a household in which they accept religious worldviews. (“A Beginner’s Guide to Punnett Squares”) Well, that’s it for me right now. Looking forward to Round 3!!! _________________________________________________ References 1 – “‘Intelligence Genes’ Reveal Their Complexity”; http://postbiota.org... 2 – “Both Environment and Genetic Makeup Influence Behavior”; http://www.nature.com... 3 – “Let’s Teach Religion – All Religions – in Schools”; http://www.ted.com... 4 – “What Twins Reveal About the Science of Faith”; http://www.popsci.com... 5 – “A Beginner’s Guide to Punnett Squares”; http://www.youtube.com...