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A matter of
faith
Raj
Kaushik
What is common among Arundhati Roy, Azam Kamguian and
Taslima Nasreen? They are all progressive women, celebrity writers,
and bold activists. And just like Ms Congeniality, they may all be
genuinely longing for world peace. But if the recent claim of Dean
Hamer, director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit, US
National Cancer Institute, is correct, they are also devoid of “The
God Gene”.
The speculative work of Dean Hamer is published in a
book titled The God Gene: How Faith is Hard-Wired into our Genes.
According to his research, the more intense the expression of faith,
the more likely the participants are to share the VMAT2 gene. The
findings of Hamer are based on an analysis of 2,000 DNA samples and
a questionnaire composed of 226 items aimed at finding out the level
of spirituality of the participants. The gene VMAT2 stands for
Vesicular Monoamine Transporter no. 2. It exists in two strains,
differing only at a single position. People with one strain of the
gene tend to score a little higher on spirituality tests. Hamer
calls this spirituality-cultivating strain the God Gene. About 50
per cent of the participants in the study had at least one copy of
the God Gene.
The VMAT2 gene regulates the flow of monoamines
like serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine to the brain. The fountain
of chemicals, in turn, plays a key role in shaping emotions and is
responsible for transcendental experiences of Buddhists and other
renowned spiritualists. Growing up in a religious environment is
said to have little effect on belief. Just like intelligence, faith
and values don’t automatically trickle down from parents to
children.
While reading the cover article The God Gene in Time
magazine, Father Walter F Modrys, pastor of St. Ignatius Loyola,
came across the quiz, “How Spiritual Are You?” Father Modrys took
the test, and to his utter surprise, he flunked. His score ranked
him in the lowest category, “highly skeptical, resistant to
developing spiritual awareness.” Belief in religion is widespread.
The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are
common to all faiths. The place of spirituality in human lives has
always intrigued scientists. Before Hamer, many intellectuals have
offered insights into how spiritual behaviours and belief stem from
the human brain. Analysing the brain states of spiritual practices
started in the 1960s when researchers from the Menninger Clinic in
Topeka, Kansas, first came to India to record the brain waves of
yogis.
In 1997, a team of scientists, headed by Dr VS
Ramachandran, at the University of California at San Diego, claimed
to have found a God spot in the brain. They looked into the brains
of epileptic patients and compared them with the brains of healthy
people and also with the brains of a group of intensely religious
people. The epileptics and the deeply religious displayed a similar
response when shown words invoking spiritual belief. Ramachandran
suggested the possibility that some parts of the temporal lobes
could be conducive to religious belief. According to him, the
visionary perception of God could be a sort of neurological
hallucination.
In a study published in Psychiatry Research and
Neuroimaging in April 2001, Andrew Newberg and colleagues studied
the brain activity of eight Tibetan Buddhists while they were in the
middle of meditative experiences. All had about 20 to 25 years of
experience of meditation. They injected a radioactive material via
an intravenous catheter in the arm of the research subjects. The
radioactive material made the pathways of blood prominent and thus
allowed capturing a snapshot of the intricate process going on in
the brain at a given moment.
The researchers captured two sets of
scan – one before the mediation and the other after one hour of
meditation. They found increased activity in the frontal lobe of the
brain associated with attention and relative decreased activity in
the parietal lobe. The parietal lobe is a back part of the brain
that gives us a sense of time and place. The brain activity patterns
in the meditating Buddhists were similar to those in the praying
Franciscan nuns, another religious group studied by Newberg. Newberg
concluded that the human brain is hard-wired for religion.
We may
have a G-spot embedded in our brain or one or more genes that could
predispose us to believe in something, but they don’t tell us what
to believe in. In other words, the recent researches are not
designed to prove the existence or non-existence of God, but they
are trying to look into the neurological processes that make us
believe in a supreme force. The idea of God, irrespective of how it
is perceived, is perhaps the prime example of a mystic reality which
has continued to inspire humans for thousands of years. But many
church leaders are not happy with the ongoing efforts of scientists.
They say that God makes Himself available to all equally and there
is no such thing as a God gene or God spot. This is not the first
time the Church has disagreed with scientists. However if the
religious authorities are right then God wouldn’t let Arundhati Roy
declare, “No, I am just like an animal. I have no religion.” On the
other hand, if Hamer is correct then soon it would be possible to
inject god genes to non-believers and put them into the bandwagon of
believers. Vice versa, it would be possible to extract the God Genes
out of people and populate the world with non-believers.
The God
gene is not a problem. The worse could happen; tomorrow scientists
could come up with the gene - Allah, Shiva or Jesus - that implants
the seeds of faith in one particular religion. It is important that
scientists should resist the temptation of creating sensation, and,
instead, concentrate on works that promote the public welfare and
world peace.
(A former curator with the National Council of
Science Museums, India and exhibits manager at the Discovery Centre,
Halifax, the author now works as senior server developer in
Toronto.)
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