|
SRT Home Page What is the SRT Project? Site Map & Subject Index What's New? Highlights Current Talking Point SRT Publications SRT Newsletter SRT Information Sheets SRT Topical Papers Press Room Contact SRT Send a comment Guest Book SRT Trust & Associates Links European Christian Environmental Network Eco-Congregation |
|
Dean Hamer's book The God Gene 1 claims to have found a link between a sample of about a thousand people who estimated their "spirituality" in a series of questionnaire questions and a particular gene he found in the same set of people called VMAT2. The claim is carefully worded. It is not as such about formal religious belief or practice, but the much more vague concept of spirituality. But the title of his book "The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes" is also carefully worded, but not as a piece of careful scientific research, but as a rather blantant example of hyping science for the sake of commerce. It panders to a scientific error in order to boost sales. In an era when some areas of science are on the ropes in terms of public trust, this sort of irresponsible claim does damage to both science and religion.
The title's claim that we have a 'God gene' that makes us have faith is simply untrue. Essentially what Dean Hamer has found is a correlation between the presence of a particular gene and his interpretation of the meaning of questionnaire answers an extremely complex and diverse issue of "spirituality". Full stop. End of the science.
There is no proof that the two are causally linked. False correlations are the bane of the science of epidemiology. True correlations of data are really only valid if there also is another set of scientific evidences that show the undisputed mechanism that one did actually cause the other. Hamer has done the "easy" bit. To do the second part means that someone will have to locate the function of the gene, analyse its interactions of other genes and proteins, relate this to brain chemistry and nerve science, relate this in turn to outward religious expressions, and relate this to belief in God. That might be the work of decades, if ever.
So why the book title? I asked Dean Hamer this very question over coffee during a remarkable conference in February 2003 grandiosely called The Future of Life. It was run by Time magazine to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA. Its location in Monterey, California was as exotic as the some of the ideas being presented by scientists from all over the world about what our biological future might look. Dean and I were both on the conference advisory board and were giving talks, I on GM food ethics and he on genes and behaviour. He came up at a coffee break and said he'd like to know what I thought about his findings about genes and religion.
I said it wasn't a big issue for me to correlate particular expressions of spiritual feelings with genes. Since we are bodily people, our bodies will in principle show some measurable physical embodiments of anything which affects our senses, and some aspects of this may have a genetic component. But please don't confuse that with people's religious belief, or make out it's genetically determined. Feeling spiritually aware is not the same thing as believing in God. For example, I know some very down to earth people who believe in God and some very spiritually aware (in the terms of his experiments) people who are atheists. If God is there and wants all people to come the knowledge of him,3 as St Paul put it, it would seem rather ridiculous to have created humans with a genetic system which meant that it was harder for some to believe in him than others.
'So, why call it the God gene when you know it's nothing of the kind?' I asked. He laughed and said it's a good title for book sales.
Yes it is, but it also presents a serious issue about scientific responsibility and the use and misuse of scientific concepts in the interests of profit. The title panders to a crude genetic determinism beloved of the media because it makes a good story. The gay gene, the god gene, and so on, are a sub-editor's dream for sound byte headlines. But they are usually seriously misleading, because such behavioural and personal phenomena are by general acknowledgement a highly complex and personal mixture of genetics with environmental factors, social influences, the person's own free will choices, and so on. It usually isn't a simple cause and effect of one thing.
Calling it "the God gene" may help sell a book for a few months but it will probably hinder the public understanding of genetics. In an era of greater misgivings about genetics and its uses, the biological sciences are having a hard job winning back a public shocked by BSE, sceptical about GM, and disturbed about cloning. This sort of claim can undermine work in science dialogue and communication which we in the Church of Scotland SRT Project and many others are doing. It belongs to the same category as "electricity too cheap to meter" (the 1956 sound byte coined by a journalist to convey the optimism of the early nuclear power programme) or "Frankenstein foods" (Greenpeace's untrue but devastatingly effective parody of GM foodstuffs). There may be nothing new in this sort of science exaggeration but it doesn't make it any better.
For people who might not know otherwise, hear the title but never read the book, the impression is created that a crude cause and effect genetic determinism is what we humans really are. If said often enough in the media, it adds to a cultural shaping of scientific error, and a kind of subliminal drip feed of what, as a Christian, I find an impoverished view of the glory (and sadly also the shame) of what it is to be human. To me, genetics gives a mono-chrome image to what is in reality a rich multi-coloured picture. Black and white photos can be very powerful and so can genetics, but it's so much less than the full view of our humanity.
Religious belief gives a description of humanity which is best seen as complementary to the many possible scientific ones, each telling the story in different and, in principle, equally valid terms. Naturally the two will overlap at some points, and a tiny part of that overlap is what Dean Hamer has examined. Fair enough. But to reduce the religious as a subset of the scientific view is not science but a particular philosophy. In my view, it is one as wrong as the medieval church's view of Galileo in making scientific discovery a subset of church dogma. As the leading scholar of science and faith Rev Dr John Polkinghorne has observed "You can't cut faith down to the lowest common denominator of genetic survival. It shows the poverty of reductionist thinking." 3 Examine the overlap, by all means. But, please, no more God gene claims!
References
1. Hamer, Dean (2004), The God Gene: How Faith Is Hard-Wired Into Our Genes, Doubleday
2. Day, Elizabeth (2004), 'God gene' discovered by scientist behind gay DNA theory Daily Telegraph, 14 November 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/11/14/ngod14.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/11/14/ixnewstop.html
3. Paul of Tarsus, New Testament, I Timothy chap.2 v.4
Return to Contents
Return to Further Information
More on Science and Religion
Return to SRT Home Page
Index of SRT Project Pages
SRT Website Map
