Is There a God Gene?
This is from The New York Times:
Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.
The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion…bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest… Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it.
It’s obvious there’s a God gene. But not everybody has it. Or maybe it comes in degrees. If so, some people have a lot of it and others not very much.
I agree with Bruce.
Very interesting theory.
There may be a God gene. But it seems almost sacriligious to talk about it.
Nancy, whether there is a God gene is entirely independent of the question of whether there is a God.
[…] self-interest to group goals the “collectivist gene.” It probably has a lot in common with the God gene in that it has evolutionary survival […]