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Devil's Advocate
libfemme ( 05/18/2004, 09:44:00 )Oh, I wouldn’t attempt anything so grand as proof. Proof, to me, means thousands of experiments performed by countless research teams over a good number of decades. Dalton’s theory of the atom, to take an example, is something I would call pretty much in the proved category. No I mean something far more modest, something like, “evidence leaning toward the conclusion that..”, or “indications in the direction of...” That sort of thing. Behavioral genetics is far too new a field to make any stronger claim yet.It’s not so much that I am trying to “settle” an issue here, so much as to “unsettle” one that seems to have been made in the past by the public. It’s enough if I can cast doubt upon the hypothesis, of which you are only one of a vast majority of adherents in society, that environment is the sole determinant of religiosity. Perhaps I am over stating your position personally, if so I apologize. I am just using you as convenient and willing stand in for the popular point of view in a friendly conversation. So, if this majority point of view should be true, if religiosity is caused by environment, what would one reasonably expect to follow as a consequence? What could we predict?1. That if the environment stays the same the religiosity will stay the same. 2. If the environment changes the religiosity will change.Could we perform an experiment to test those predictions? In a manner of speaking such an experiment has already been performed many times. For instance, children born in Korea adopted by Americans and raised in Idaho, rarely end up worshiping Buddha. Certainly, which sect of religion one embraces, has a great deal to do with which religion one is exposed to. Although there is always that tantalizing anecdotal situation in the other direction. In every recent generation in the West it seems a minority of teenagers leave a comfortable middle class home, in say Liverpool or Marin County, to join a guru in India or study Islam with the Taliban. It’s the very rarity of those situations that make them intriguing. Are these more examples that religion is culturally induced? That even religious rebellions are environmentally determined? Or is something else at work here?Certainly, if environment were the only trigger for religiosity, one would be hard pressed to explain a great deal of history. Why should Christianity arise among some Jews but not others? Or Protestantism spread amidst hostile Catholic reaction? What can account for a phenomenon like the Great Awakening? Why should any new religion arise, for that matter if culture is the sole determinant? Mind you, I’m not claiming to disprove that religion and culture have any relationship, only that the explanation is less than completely satisfying.But, suppose religiosity had a genetic component? How would we ever know? The problem with environmental vs. genetic causes is they are not easily distinguishable. People who share the same genes, tend also to share the same environment. The fact that a trait runs through a family doesn’t make it clear whether it is caused by shared genetics or shared upbringing. However, if you could alter the environment without altering the genes then you might have an interesting experiment. Something like that has been done: by studying identical twins raised apart. Identical twins have the same genes. If you raise one twin in family X, and the other in family Y, and after several years check their eye color and find it identical, one can conclude that eye color is the result of genetics rather than environment. Behavior can be studied much the same way. Suppose family X was an outgoing extrovert family, and family Y a quiet, subdued family, and that the personalities of the twins matched their respective family environments and not each other. It might be tempting in that case to conclude that upbringing determined personality.Well, do they? Just as adoption across culture has performed one experiment, identical twins separated at birth and raised in disparate families might be seen as another kind of experiment. Do identical twins raised apart resemble each other or their different adoptive parents in regard to religiosity?
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