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October 21, 2004
Dean Hamer is doing press interviews for his new book The God Gene. In an interview with Beliefnet he says straight up:
The God gene refers to the idea that human spirituality has an innate genetic component to it. It doesn’t mean that there’s one gene that makes people believe in God, but it refers to the fact that humans inherit a predisposition to be spiritual--to reach out and look for a higher being.
I read Hamer's book at
Powells when I was in Portland recently. It is 250 pages of big print and small pages, so it really is a quick read, and frankly much of it is pretty banal and unsurprising.
Hamer & co. are basically offering a specific elaboration on a common drumbeat that has been coming out of "neurotheology" for several years now, that is, certain brain states are associated with spiritual transcendence & those states are partially genetically controlled. The irony of the balsy and sensationalistic title of Hamer's book is that the deeper you get into it the more qualified and cautious he gets. Even in the interview Hamer tries to decouple "spirituality" from "religion." Religion is complex, defining it is pretty hard as the shifting lines of practice and belief are very fluid. I happen to think researchers like Hamer are focusing especially on a particular subset of human beings, those prone to become mystics, prophets or their followers, and play the role of religious change catalyzers. Neurotheology can not be understood without remembering that normal human variation means that though mysticism is a
cross-cultural human universal, it exists in a range of expression within any given population.
Related: Carl Zimmer was unimpressed by this book.
Addendum: Hammer also wrote The Science of Desire: The Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior. So his modus operandi is pretty set, take a controversial topic, offer a hypersimplistic sensationalistic explanation, and spend the rest of the time backing off and qualifying your claim after you've realed your audience in.
