Is there something called the God gene? - DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate

**S.T.D.** · 12-28-2009, 10:29 AM

Is there something called the God gene?
By Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times

Nicholas Wade’s book ‘The Faith Instinct’ is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil.

How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for?

Nicholas Wade’s book ‘The Faith Instinct’ is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups.

Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behaviour, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.

Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution. He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene.

So how did this God gene flourish?

Wade’s counterintuitive answer repurposes an old social-scientific analysis of religion as a saga of biological survival. Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behaviour.

Wade walks us briskly through the history of religion to show how our innate piety has adapted to our changing needs. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine. But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical. Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance. Wade advances the delightfully explosive thesis that the periodic rise of exuberant mystery cults represent human nature rebelling against the institutionalisation of worship.

Revisionist approach

There’s a safari-hatted charm to Wade’s descriptions of what he calls, a little jarringly, ‘primitive’ religion, filled with details of the rites of tribes cut off from the modern world but still available for anthropological observation. But his _sketches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rush by quickly and confusingly and offer only superficial accounts of the spread of those faiths, which was in each case a dicier process than Wade makes it sound. Judaism’s strict moral codes, he argues, held together the rival states of Israel and Judah in Biblical times and provided comfort to Jews in exile, but failed to accommodate the more diverse Jews of the first-century Hellenic world. Early Christians adapted Judaism’s attractive but exclusivist mores to a society that had outgrown tribalism, succeeding “so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilisation.” Wade embraces a radically revisionist approach to Islam, which holds that it evolved out of a Syriac branch of Christianity whose members believed that Jesus was human and rejected the Trinity. This sternly monotheistic remnant was Arabized when a new dynasty needed to differentiate itself from a previous one. If the revisionist version of Islam is correct, Wade writes, it “furnishes a case study of how a religion can be adapted with great success to a state’s purposes.”

Wade would probably deny that being adaptive makes any religion better in a non-evolutionary sense than any other.

His scientist’s neutrality slips toward the end of the book, however, when he starts making the case for religion with a capital R. Like Robert Wright in ‘The Evolution of God’, Wade wants to defend religion from so-called ‘new atheists’ like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who see it as a malignant illusion. In chapters on religion and trade, religion and warfare, religion and nation, and the ‘ecology’ of religion Wade argues that our religious disposition can enhance social and national unity, manage scarce resources, even solve the tricky problem of how to get young men to die for the greater good when that’s called for. But Wade also knows that the faith-based preference for the group has engendered genocide, mass suicide and maladaptive cargo cults. Perhaps that is why he declines to draw one inference that proceeds from his arguments: that individual religions can be compared and ranked and, well, approved or disapproved of, since a religion can be good only insofar as it’s useful.

In any case, Wade says, religion is not going away, because it’s imprinted on the human genome. The first part of this claim is hard to argue with. The second part is probably true, too, but raises the question of how. Wade’s vision of religion as a socialising force is persuasive, but he does not do enough to distinguish socially efficacious religious beliefs from, say, socially efficacious political ideologies. There are biologically or at least neurologically grounded accounts of religion, like Boyer’s, that more successfully capture the weird particularity of religious experience while also revealing its tentacles in many other facets of mental and emotional life. Ask yourself: Why are our gods always equipped with recognisably human minds, even when they’re animals? How do sacred stories differ, if they do, from fairy tales, or from novels? What are holiness, impurity and ritual, exactly, and are they religious in essence, or categories implicated in everything we think and do?

The problem, to my mind, is not that Wade has overambitiously linked genetics and religion. It is that he has underambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is. Can we really isolate as distinct adaptations the magnificently bizarre and oddly satisfying behaviours and feelings crammed into that drab pigeonhole of a word, ‘religion’? I would have thought that would amount to explaining what makes us human.

**MannoFr** · 12-28-2009, 12:54 PM

Ask Tee Kee

**Drugmachine** · 12-28-2009, 02:01 PM

Ask Tee Kee

I thought you were going to say, "Ask GOD Meng Seng"!

Goh Meng Seng

**Drugmachine** · 12-28-2009, 02:03 PM

Yes, there is.
I know someone who thinks he has it.
You know him too.

**Drugmachine** · 12-28-2009, 04:55 PM

Yes, there is.
I know someone who thinks he has it.
You know him too.

Who? The old man?

**Ifroham4** · 12-28-2009, 05:19 PM

Jesus is the solution to world's problem! Many are called, but few are selected...it's a blessing to be called by God.

History will repeat itself because of man's sins...trusts in men, will bring you much sorrows...trust and have faith in in God will bring deliverance from sinful encapsulation!

You are dangerous to mankind if you think or being revered by many that you are God.

e.g.

1. Hitler
2. Emperor Hirohito
3. Stalin
4. Mao ZeDong..

Need I elaborate more?

those u mention above are doing god a service by exterminating human being.

**PhillipHer** · 12-28-2009, 05:31 PM

wah! you evil...

human are all selfish n evil. they are the root cause of all problems in this world.

**HedgeYourBets** · 12-28-2009, 05:37 PM

still, i dun think you are the one who decide who lives or die...

they are only doing god a favour, since the god doesn't want to do it. but wait.. how come ur god din stop the killing? the god must have GIVEN THE GREEN LIGHT.

**TorryJens** · 12-28-2009, 07:47 PM

God doesn't need your favour....He can do anything He wishes...

There's always a reason for something to happen..

The question is....how come man is always interpreting and explaining God to all others. As if God cannot do the job himself.

Well, there is always an explanation for everything..from MAN himself.

**Big A** · 12-28-2009, 08:08 PM

otherwise people will use it to their advantage...and that's how a cult is formed...

So does CHC and NCC falls into this category? just answer yes or no

**S.T.D.** · 12-28-2009, 08:18 PM

But God can touched you and tell others about Him...through the Holy Spirits....it's like a interface between God and man...

Like God can touch the pastors and speak to you as if God is speaking to you...but hor must always double check with the bible to confirm if it is really God's words...

otherwise people will use it to their advantage...and that's how a cult is formed...

like I said..there is always an explanation..from man..for all what God is doing or not doing ( silently, unseen and quietly !! )
The only thing is..it still is man's explanation..although man says
it is God's. ( or shall we say CLAIMS )

**NeroASERCH** · 12-28-2009, 08:39 PM

i think if it is from the bible, it's from God....

bible is made by man..claiming it is from God..right ?
same with other holy books of other religions.

all claims..made thousands of years ago and
continuously reinforced with blind faith over centuries and
centuries.

**Drugmachine** · 12-28-2009, 08:47 PM

i have seen CHC and NCC preaching...so far they don't look like a cult to me...

but then again, me no expert lah...

So it's a yes or no for you? 不要婆婆妈妈啦!!!

**LottiFurmann** · 12-28-2009, 09:44 PM

i said already, 你还不明白吗？ :d

你讲的都是废话!!! :d:d:d:d

**Peptobismol** · 12-28-2009, 09:45 PM

Many are called, but few are selected...it's a blessing to be called by God.

Well, its a consolation to know that you not one of them.

**Raj_Copi_Jin** · 12-28-2009, 09:47 PM

if you say so. 那你还要等我的答案？ :d

不要了啦，跟你说话会吐血!!!!! :d:d:d:d

**Ifroham4** · 12-28-2009, 11:28 PM

is god gene something like gay gene?

**Lillie_Steins** · 12-29-2009, 05:31 AM

The Bible was inspired by God in man to write what God message for man is...

I don't really think it's blind faith...only those who failed to see and understand what's written in the bible are blind..

'Inspired by God in man...' hmmm....and your basis for saying that is blind faith, nothing else.

The same with the other holy books.

Till today GOD has not confirmed these claims to mankind
even with a simple divine signal.

The funny thing is..it seems God used a single ambassador
to pass the message and refuse to talk to the masses.
Atleast he should verify to the masses that ambassador
is indeed his genuine chosen ambassador.
That does not happen so far.
Its all about the words coming out of the ambassador's mouth.

12-28-2009, 10:29 AM	#1
S.T.D. Join Date May 2008 Age 42 Posts 5,220 Senior Member	Is there something called the God gene? Is there something called the God gene? By Judith Shulevitz, The New York Times Nicholas Wade’s book ‘The Faith Instinct’ is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for? Nicholas Wade’s book ‘The Faith Instinct’ is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behaviour, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources. Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution. He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene. So how did this God gene flourish? Wade’s counterintuitive answer repurposes an old social-scientific analysis of religion as a saga of biological survival. Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behaviour. Wade walks us briskly through the history of religion to show how our innate piety has adapted to our changing needs. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine. But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical. Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance. Wade advances the delightfully explosive thesis that the periodic rise of exuberant mystery cults represent human nature rebelling against the institutionalisation of worship. Revisionist approach There’s a safari-hatted charm to Wade’s descriptions of what he calls, a little jarringly, ‘primitive’ religion, filled with details of the rites of tribes cut off from the modern world but still available for anthropological observation. But his _sketches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rush by quickly and confusingly and offer only superficial accounts of the spread of those faiths, which was in each case a dicier process than Wade makes it sound. Judaism’s strict moral codes, he argues, held together the rival states of Israel and Judah in Biblical times and provided comfort to Jews in exile, but failed to accommodate the more diverse Jews of the first-century Hellenic world. Early Christians adapted Judaism’s attractive but exclusivist mores to a society that had outgrown tribalism, succeeding “so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilisation.” Wade embraces a radically revisionist approach to Islam, which holds that it evolved out of a Syriac branch of Christianity whose members believed that Jesus was human and rejected the Trinity. This sternly monotheistic remnant was Arabized when a new dynasty needed to differentiate itself from a previous one. If the revisionist version of Islam is correct, Wade writes, it “furnishes a case study of how a religion can be adapted with great success to a state’s purposes.” Wade would probably deny that being adaptive makes any religion better in a non-evolutionary sense than any other. His scientist’s neutrality slips toward the end of the book, however, when he starts making the case for religion with a capital R. Like Robert Wright in ‘The Evolution of God’, Wade wants to defend religion from so-called ‘new atheists’ like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who see it as a malignant illusion. In chapters on religion and trade, religion and warfare, religion and nation, and the ‘ecology’ of religion Wade argues that our religious disposition can enhance social and national unity, manage scarce resources, even solve the tricky problem of how to get young men to die for the greater good when that’s called for. But Wade also knows that the faith-based preference for the group has engendered genocide, mass suicide and maladaptive cargo cults. Perhaps that is why he declines to draw one inference that proceeds from his arguments: that individual religions can be compared and ranked and, well, approved or disapproved of, since a religion can be good only insofar as it’s useful. In any case, Wade says, religion is not going away, because it’s imprinted on the human genome. The first part of this claim is hard to argue with. The second part is probably true, too, but raises the question of how. Wade’s vision of religion as a socialising force is persuasive, but he does not do enough to distinguish socially efficacious religious beliefs from, say, socially efficacious political ideologies. There are biologically or at least neurologically grounded accounts of religion, like Boyer’s, that more successfully capture the weird particularity of religious experience while also revealing its tentacles in many other facets of mental and emotional life. Ask yourself: Why are our gods always equipped with recognisably human minds, even when they’re animals? How do sacred stories differ, if they do, from fairy tales, or from novels? What are holiness, impurity and ritual, exactly, and are they religious in essence, or categories implicated in everything we think and do? The problem, to my mind, is not that Wade has overambitiously linked genetics and religion. It is that he has underambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is. Can we really isolate as distinct adaptations the magnificently bizarre and oddly satisfying behaviours and feelings crammed into that drab pigeonhole of a word, ‘religion’? I would have thought that would amount to explaining what makes us human. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-28-2009, 12:54 PM	#2
MannoFr Join Date Mar 2007 Posts 4,451 Senior Member	Ask Tee Kee Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-28-2009, 02:01 PM	#3
Drugmachine Join Date Apr 2006 Posts 4,490 Senior Member	Ask Tee Kee I thought you were going to say, "Ask GOD Meng Seng"! Goh Meng Seng Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-28-2009, 02:03 PM	#4
Drugmachine Join Date Apr 2006 Posts 4,490 Senior Member	Yes, there is. I know someone who thinks he has it. You know him too. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 04:55 PM	#5
Drugmachine Join Date Apr 2006 Posts 4,490 Senior Member	Yes, there is. I know someone who thinks he has it. You know him too. Who? The old man? Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 05:19 PM	#6
Ifroham4 Join Date Apr 2007 Posts 5,196 Senior Member	Jesus is the solution to world's problem! Many are called, but few are selected...it's a blessing to be called by God. History will repeat itself because of man's sins...trusts in men, will bring you much sorrows...trust and have faith in in God will bring deliverance from sinful encapsulation! You are dangerous to mankind if you think or being revered by many that you are God. e.g. 1. Hitler 2. Emperor Hirohito 3. Stalin 4. Mao ZeDong.. Need I elaborate more? those u mention above are doing god a service by exterminating human being. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 05:31 PM	#7
PhillipHer Join Date Jun 2008 Age 58 Posts 4,481 Senior Member	wah! you evil... human are all selfish n evil. they are the root cause of all problems in this world. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 05:37 PM	#8
HedgeYourBets Join Date Aug 2008 Posts 4,655 Senior Member	still, i dun think you are the one who decide who lives or die... they are only doing god a favour, since the god doesn't want to do it. but wait.. how come ur god din stop the killing? the god must have GIVEN THE GREEN LIGHT. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 07:47 PM	#9
TorryJens Join Date Nov 2008 Posts 4,494 Senior Member	God doesn't need your favour....He can do anything He wishes... There's always a reason for something to happen.. The question is....how come man is always interpreting and explaining God to all others. As if God cannot do the job himself. Well, there is always an explanation for everything..from MAN himself. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 08:08 PM	#10
Big A Join Date Oct 2005 Age 50 Posts 4,148 Administrator	otherwise people will use it to their advantage...and that's how a cult is formed... So does CHC and NCC falls into this category? just answer yes or no Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 08:18 PM	#11
S.T.D. Join Date May 2008 Age 42 Posts 5,220 Senior Member	But God can touched you and tell others about Him...through the Holy Spirits....it's like a interface between God and man... Like God can touch the pastors and speak to you as if God is speaking to you...but hor must always double check with the bible to confirm if it is really God's words... otherwise people will use it to their advantage...and that's how a cult is formed... like I said..there is always an explanation..from man..for all what God is doing or not doing ( silently, unseen and quietly !! ) The only thing is..it still is man's explanation..although man says it is God's. ( or shall we say CLAIMS ) Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 08:39 PM	#12
NeroASERCH Join Date Jul 2006 Posts 5,147 Senior Member	i think if it is from the bible, it's from God.... bible is made by man..claiming it is from God..right ? same with other holy books of other religions. all claims..made thousands of years ago and continuously reinforced with blind faith over centuries and centuries. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 08:47 PM	#13
Drugmachine Join Date Apr 2006 Posts 4,490 Senior Member	i have seen CHC and NCC preaching...so far they don't look like a cult to me... but then again, me no expert lah... So it's a yes or no for you? 不要婆婆妈妈啦!!! Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote

12-28-2009, 09:44 PM	#14
LottiFurmann Join Date Jan 2008 Posts 4,494 Senior Member	i said already, 你还不明白吗？ :d 你讲的都是废话!!! :d:d:d:d Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-28-2009, 09:45 PM	#15
Peptobismol Join Date Oct 2005 Age 58 Posts 4,386 Senior Member	Many are called, but few are selected...it's a blessing to be called by God. Well, its a consolation to know that you not one of them. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-28-2009, 09:47 PM	#16
Raj_Copi_Jin Join Date Oct 2005 Age 48 Posts 4,533 Senior Member	if you say so. 那你还要等我的答案？ :d 不要了啦，跟你说话会吐血!!!!! :d:d:d:d Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-28-2009, 11:28 PM	#17
Ifroham4 Join Date Apr 2007 Posts 5,196 Senior Member	is god gene something like gay gene? Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
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12-29-2009, 05:31 AM	#18
Lillie_Steins Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 4,508 Senior Member	The Bible was inspired by God in man to write what God message for man is... I don't really think it's blind faith...only those who failed to see and understand what's written in the bible are blind.. 'Inspired by God in man...' hmmm....and your basis for saying that is blind faith, nothing else. The same with the other holy books. Till today GOD has not confirmed these claims to mankind even with a simple divine signal. The funny thing is..it seems God used a single ambassador to pass the message and refuse to talk to the masses. Atleast he should verify to the masses that ambassador is indeed his genuine chosen ambassador. That does not happen so far. Its all about the words coming out of the ambassador's mouth. Share Share this post on Digg Del.icio.us Technorati Twitter
	Quote