Genes contribute to religions inclination...

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7147

Genes may help determine how religious a person is, suggests a new study of US twins. And the effects of a religious upbringing may fade with time.

Until about 25 years ago, scientists assumed that religious behaviour was simply the product of a person's socialisation - or "nurture". But more recent studies, including those on adult twins who were raised apart, suggest genes contribute about 40% of the variability in a person's religiousness.

But it is not clear how that contribution changes with age. A few studies on children and teenagers - with biological or adoptive parents - show the children tend to mirror the religious beliefs and behaviours of the parents with whom they live. That suggests genes play a small role in religiousness at that age.

Now, researchers led by Laura Koenig, a psychology graduate student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, US, have tried to tease apart how the effects of nature and nurture vary with time. Their study suggests that as adolescents grow into adults, genetic factors become more important in determining how religious a person is, while environmental factors wane.

Me I look at this information on genes and say: "the religious were born with the ability to have faith that I do not have... so great for them. If you are human.. you are under my tent".

The gene will prove that God predestines who will be saved and who will not.

we believe. In fact nobody told me that ever!!

I could be wrong...someone want to set me straight if I'm wrong?

down and working.

I was just pulling your leg. I do not know the details of being a Calvinist. Ponder on.....

A variation of Calvinistic thought also says that those people who are successful & healthy on earth have earned their god's grace, while those who are poor or sick are obviously pissing off god.

(Doesn't sound familiar to the Republican party line at all, does it? :eyes:)

has come in and out of favor with Protestant theology over the years. I don't know if Calvin espoused it, but some of his followers did. The Pilgrims believed in an "elect", that is, people who were born saved. Problem was, there was no sure way anyone was a member of this group, and so everyone still had to adhere to the religious teachings or be banished or placed at the fringes of Pilgrim society (like my ancestors were-they preferred living with the local Native population).

that religious belief is hard wired into our brains. The best believers can hope for in converting the naturally unreligious is to bully them into giving lip service; the best unbelievers can hope for is to bully the believers into shutting up. Neither side has a chance of converting the other.

As for confirming Calivinism, not a chance. There are rich heathens and poor believers.

I TRULY believed in my religion at one time, but found my way out. It took years and I went through a lot of pain. Some people can find their way out of fundamentalism. I find new people all the time.

Maybe it's the same gene as the one for addiction. Addicted people can get better, but it takes a lot of hard work.

Addiction gene = religious gene?

Does anyone have info on this.

I'm beginning to form my own hypothesis by looking at all these religious fanatics that have come out of the woodwork since the election.

Consider people like Thomas Merton and Mary Daly, both brilliant by any measurement we have, and both believers, although neither was a dead letter literalist. There may be a correlation between limited IQ and that particular mindset, although again I doubt it. I think there are cognitive deficits that prevent such folks from seeing complexity and contradiction, but it may not show up on a standard IQ test.

Plus, I've known a lot if nonreligious types who were dumb as stumps.

Some scientists also say sociopathy is inherited too.(no consience,no empathy,need for strong stimulation,takes stupid risks,ect.).I wonder if the two genetic markers(religiousness and sociopathy)are found in the same gene more often than not?
Maybe we'll find out why Fallwell and Limbaugh are so fucked up..and why so many rethuglicans and manipulating evangelicals are related..

Something I HAD to ask.

damage so that you are impulse or risk neutral. Sociopaths supposedly are always sussing out ways of not being bored. If you have not felling and not capacity for subtle feeling you may find yourself quite bored at the end of the day (most people would be busy putting their feet up, getting excited about watching a favorite TV show, loving those mud covered kids and laughing your way through exhaustion). A sociopath no.

I also thing that the insanity in sociopaths is not enough emotion. They would be the least delusional people out of a population. Remember that we are very delusional when we are in love... the bigger the emotion.. the further away from the nuts and bolts of how things really are. That is if we assume delusions have to do with feelings and beliefs. Whereas the strength of the religious is their faith. And their belief systems are accepted as normal if they are organized enough - though there may be no proof of what they believe and indeed some proof to the contrary. So to me the religious and the sociopathic would be on the opposite ends of the feeling scale and the thinking scale.

They recently did studies and the sociopath solved an emotional problem in the same way that a normal human would solve a math problem... they just don't have emotional empathy. When a sociopath is being emotional they are thinking because they cannot be emotional (save for angry if their prissy and brittle self-esteem is touched). A religious person is likely feeling their way through life (is this a good thing, would Jesus do this: all emotional decisions).

And often self-esteem is something truly religious do not struggle with so much. I mean their is true joy in thinking of others all the time and living your life that way builds a soul - you ask yourself and your god when things go wrong.. nobody else need be involved. Sociopaths on the other hand have no self esteem and rely of a cabal of yes men, or tricking somebody every single day, for their whole lives... to hold onto even a tiny bit of the brittle self-esteem whose loss will cause years of stalking or murder or a whole host of aggressive and frantic struggle.

The attraction of sociopaths to religious organizations would be the faith the devout carry with them and their openness and willingness to not question authority so much.. This leaves open the door to all sorts of exploitation for the sociopath... and the chance to see his brittle self (because he has no soul) - reflected in the eyes and adulation of a congregation or a cult that sees him as its leader. Power by tricky means and strategy and sadism arouse the monster and control his victims would be the life-blood of the extreme sociopath. While the extremely devout would likely live a life of working in a series of orphanages or amongst the sick.. a life full of hard work and emotion.


In fact the religious who do have well exercised souls project their souls and their hearts onto a psychopathic leader... and it makes him feel alive. But having no soul.. he projects his anger & frustration on his victims... and accuses them of not following the rules or being 'outsiders' and on and on and on. Indeed, having no soul the sociopath will project that lack of humanity on all his victims and targets and have his brown-shirts & his patsies attack the very thing that makes the victim human.

I would say that two hominid looking things could not get further apart on the scales of empathy, souls, common projections, & thinking than the sociopath and the truly devout.

What should we do about it?

I mean people get hurt everyday by sociopaths..
And being kind ,letting them off the hook,not investigating their actions,denial, a toothless rebuke,and showing sociopaths pity is what these creeps want so they can keep up the game..

The Inuit call them Kanglungeta. Means the mind knows what is wrong but they do it anyway..

The Inuit just push a kunglangeta into an ice flow and not look back after they discover someone behaves like a sociopath in their tribe.

I almost killed my father.He was an abusive person.He almost killed my mom a year later.Maybe if I was in an Inuit tribe,he would have been taken somewhere out in the wilderness and shot.
And I would have not faced all the abuses I faced,nor would our family faced it while the"authorities" slapped his wrist, pooh poohed our situation.

of the woodwork because they see in him a leader.

I think they were encouraged to scurry out into the light, and take their rightful place in the soon-to-be post apocalyptic world. :(

then it must be the case that a person's inclination to atheism or lack of religious belief is determined by genetics to the corresponding degree.

But in neither case is it true that genetics alone determines a person's adherence or non-adherence to religious belief.

Or to put it another way, if this study is true, so fucking what?

whether there's a genetic basis for beliefs. I think it may say a lot about whether those beliefs are externally true.

That's what we would take from this kind of knowledge.

If there was or was not a genetic predisposition?

There have been studies that show that believers tend to find patterns where there are none and skeptics tend to dismiss some (not as severe as the believers) patterns that do exist.

Studies were performed where patterns of dots were presented to believers and skeptics. Most of the images were chaotic and random. But some had patterns embedded in them. The subjects were asked to note which images they saw patterns in when they were briefly shown them.

The believers had a much higher false postive rate than the skeptics. That is they found patterns that were not present in the images. While the skeptics had a higher accuracy they did miss more actual images that the believers did though not as large a miss as the believers false positives.

There seems to be a neurological link associated with perception amongst believers and skeptics. This could be the genetic link that provides the coding to create the neurological tendency within the brain.

The study is testing for detection of visual patterns.

But religious belief centers on the invisible. So maybe religious believers tend to see patterns in visual images because they already believe in a divinely ordered universe, rather than it being the case that they believe in God because they tend to see patterns in visual images. Causal direction here may be the opposite of what you're supposing.

Also, I'm curious to know how the experimenters could be sure they were correctly detecting false positives, since that presupposes that they themselves were not subject to any bias.

More generally, people 'see' patterns in clouds, rock-formations, abstract expressionist paintings, and so on. But that does not necessarily mean they're imagining something that isn't there. It may just mean they're choosing to interpret a shape as resembling something else which is patterned. I may look at some clouds and think they look like a pillow. Does that mean I'm making a mistake? People often think that shapes in nature resemble something, or that one's person's face resembles another person's. Are they mistaken? If I say Bush looks like a chimpanzee, am I making an error? I don't think we have to say that judgements of resemblance in such cases necessarily imply error. Rather than statements of fact, they may just be proposals or invitations to look at something in a certain way. But proposals and invitations are not the kind of thing that can be objectively wrong.

Presumably the dots in the experiments are made up of atoms. Are atoms random patternless things? You say, believers tend to "find patterns where there are none". But there are patterns everywhere at some level of analysis, according to physics. The study presupposes that a sharp distinction can be made between pattern and non-pattern. But I'm not sure that there is a sharp distinction.

Right now, for instance, I'm looking at a tree outside my window. I see apparently random branches extending from the trunk, and the branches are covered in an apparently random way with leaves. Are the branches and leaves examples of randomness or examples of pattern?

My previous exposure to this one came from the radio. Finally found a link to it. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2589

The images shown were not dots. They were scrambled words and faces. Interspersed were occaisional coherant words and faces. These were briefly shown to the subject and they had to quickly determine if they saw a coherant image or not.

in seeing the results of doing exactly the same test for different pairs of groups, such as:

Artists and non-Artists
Mathematicians and non-Mathematicians
Scientists and non-Scientists
Men and Women
College-educated and non-College-educated
Engineers and non-Engineers
Children and Adults
Whites and non-Whites

etc.

But then I like studying the mind.

work with all of the senses. This study is simply a way to analyze how the process of picking out patterns varies between people - to see what the tendency is of the brain to ascribe patterns when they're not really there. If this tends to happen more often in religious people than non-religious, it suggests a correlation.

That's all. No need to get defensive.