Battleangel

Dean Hamer hits a nerve once again with his claims of having found a “God Gene“. It’s those little things that really makes life worthwhile in a world overrun by dark age humanistic ideas and non-scientific religious thinking.

While the term “God Gene” is immensely popularized and the actual discovery is of a transporter molecule that helps regulate mood-altering chemicals in the brain, the deduction is hard to dispute. Except for a raving bunch of clerics that feel violated in some way. Shouldn’t they be at least a little grateful? If the theory holds true, they could be looking at an entirely new way of searching out and converting followers to their cause.

And for those of you who think they’ve heard the name Hamer before, you probably have. He was the one who identified a fragment of DNA and linked it to male homosexuality back in 1993. As important of a discovery as that was, the results were much too specific to be put to any real use, nor explain homosexuality on a larger scale

One religious critic even went so far as to say that the gene research revealed the “poverty of reductionist thinking”. That might be so. But poverty is such an ugly word. I’d like to think of it as perfection. Reality can not always be clad in fancy attire, drama and colorful narrations. Realism versus romanticism.
Now, keep your fingers crossed that at least something useful will come out of this. It could be the beginning of the end for world religion / mass psychosis as we know it. And a good place to begin with an artificial eugenics program once we have the proper tools for vectoring such genetic transformations on a large scale.

Apart from purely and boiled down molecular reasons for faith there is additional research on a macro level available. Of course it is not unlikely that many types of observed behavior and cognitive structures can be traced back to purely micro biological sources. But whether that is always necessary depends on the application of the research. It might not always be useful to dig quite as deep unless you are sure you actually need such precision tools, and have the technology to make use of them. After all, the real interest lies with HOW a certain regulatory protein is expressed in everyday life.