Download Ebook The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer
Reviewing, just what do you think about this word? Is this word burdening you? With many tasks, tasks, and tasks, are you required a lot to do this certain activity? Well, also many people consider that analysis is sort of uninteresting activity, it doesn't mean that you have to ignore it. Sometimes, you will require times to invest to read the book. Even it's just a book; it can be an extremely worthwhile as well as valuable thing to have.
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer
Download Ebook The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer
This is it the book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer to be best seller lately. We provide you the most effective offer by getting the stunning book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer in this internet site. This The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer will certainly not just be the kind of book that is challenging to find. In this web site, all types of books are provided. You can look title by title, author by author, and author by author to learn the best book The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer that you can review currently.
The service to get this book is that we do not over you the cost-free book. Yet, we provide you the cost-free information about The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer Why need to be this book to check out and where is the place to obtain it, even the soft data forms are common questions to utter. In this site, we do not only offer this book. We have still great deals of books to review. Yeah, we are internet collection that is always full of recommended publications.
Maturing from elementary to the adult, reading books will let various reasons to think. Sometime, we need the book because of the job deadline. But in various other time, you could read once again this The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer, for not only the work due date need however additionally for anxious. So, is reading this publication your fantastic anxious to check out. When you have enough to seek for one more book that cannot make you really feel pleased, you will always search for various other sources, won't you? This is why we involve you to assist in locating the ideal book.
And also the reasons that you need to select this suggested publication is that it's composed by a popular author worldwide. You might not have the ability to get this publication conveniently; this is why we offer you here to reduce. Being very easy to obtain guide to review really comes to be the initial step to end up. Occasionally, you will deal with troubles in locating the The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired Into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer outside. But here, you will not face that problem.
The overwhelming majority of Americans believe in God; this conviction has existed since the beginning of recorded time and is shared by billions around the world. In The God Gene, Dr. Dean Hamer reveals that this inclination towards religious faith is in good measure due to our genes and may even offer an evolutionary advantage by helping us get through difficulties, reducing stress, preventing disease, and extending life. Popular science at its best, The God Gene is an in-depth, fully accessible inquiry into cutting-edge research that can change the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Written with balance, integrity, and admirable scientific objectivity, this is a book for readers of science and religion alike.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #602718 in Books
- Brand: Anchor
- Published on: 2005-09-13
- Released on: 2005-09-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .55" w x 5.15" l, .43 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Great product!
From Scientific American By page 77 of The God Gene, Dean H. Hamer has already disowned the title of his own book. He recalls describing to a colleague his discovery of a link between spirituality and a specific gene he calls "the God gene." His colleague raised her eyebrows. "Do you mean there's just one?" she asked. "I deserved her skepticism," Hamer writes. "What I meant to say, of course, was 'a' God gene, not 'the' God gene." Of course. Why, the reader wonders, didn't Hamer call his book A God Gene? That might not have been as catchy, but at least it wouldn't have left him contradicting himself. Whatever you want to call it, this is a frustrating book. The role that genes play in religion is a fascinating question that's ripe for the asking. Psychologists, neurologists and even evolutionary biologists have offered insights about how spiritual behaviors and beliefs emerge from the brain. It is reasonable to ask, as Hamer does, whether certain genes play a significant role in faith. But he is a long way from providing an answer. Hamer, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, wound up on his quest for the God gene by a roundabout route. Initially he and his colleagues set out to find genes that may make people prone to cigarette addiction. They studied hundreds of pairs of siblings, comparing how strongly their shared heredity influenced different aspects of their personality. In addition to having their subjects fill out psychological questionnaires, the researchers also took samples of DNA from some of them. Hamer then realized that this database might let him investigate the genetics of spirituality. He embarked on this new search by looking at the results of certain survey questions that measured a personality trait known as self-transcendence, originally identified by Washington University psychiatrist Robert Cloninger. Cloninger found that spiritual people tend to share a set of characteristics, such as feeling connected to the world and a willingness to accept things that cannot be objectively demonstrated. Analyzing the cigarette study, Hamer confirmed what earlier studies had found: heredity is partly responsible for whether a person is self-transcendent or not. He then looked at the DNA samples of some of his subjects, hoping to find variants of genes that tended to turn up in self-transcendent people. His search led him to a gene known as VMAT2. Two different versions of this gene exist, differing only at a single position. People with one version of the gene tend to score a little higher on self-transcendence tests. Although the influence is small, it is, Hamer claims, consistent. About half the people in the study had at least one copy of the self-transcendence-boosting version of VMAT2, which Hamer dubs the God gene. Is the God gene real? The only evidence we have to go on at the moment is what Hamer presents in his book. He and his colleagues are still preparing to submit their results to a scientific journal. It would be nice to know whether these results can withstand the rigors of peer review. It would be nicer still to know whether any other scientists can replicate them. The field of behavioral genetics is littered with failed links between particular genes and personality traits. These alleged associations at first seemed very strong. But as other researchers tried to replicate them, they faded away into statistical noise. In 1993, for example, a scientist reported a genetic link to male homosexuality in a region of the X chromosome. The report brought a huge media fanfare, but other scientists who tried to replicate the study failed. The scientist's name was Dean Hamer. To be fair, it should be pointed out that Hamer offers a lot of details about his study in The God Gene, along with many caveats about how hard it is to establish an association between genes and behavior. But given the fate of Hamer's so-called gay gene, it is strange to see him so impatient to trumpet the discovery of his God gene. He is even eager to present an intricate hypothesis about how the God gene produces self-transcendence. The gene, it is well known, makes membrane-covered containers that neurons use to deliver neurotransmitters to one another. Hamer proposes that the God gene changes the level of these neurotransmitters so as to alter a person's mood, consciousness and, ultimately, self-transcendence. He goes so far as to say that the God gene is, along with other faith-boosting genes, a product of natural selection. Self-transcendence makes people more optimistic, which makes them healthier and likely to have more kids. These speculations take up the bulk of The God Gene, but in support Hamer only offers up bits and pieces of research done by other scientists, along with little sketches of spiritual people he has met. It appears that he has not bothered to think of a way to test these ideas himself. He did not, for example, try to rule out the possibility that natural selection has not favored self-transcendence, but some other function of VMAT2. (Among other things, the gene protects the brain from neurotoxins.) Nor does Hamer rule out the possibility that the God gene offers no evolutionary benefit at all. Sometimes genes that seem to be common thanks to natural selection turn out to have been spread merely by random genetic drift. Rather than address these important questions, Hamer simply declares that any hypothesis about the evolution of human behavior must be purely speculative. But this is simply not true. If Hamer wanted, he could have measured the strength of natural selection that has acted on VMAT2 in the past. And if he did find signs of selection, he could have estimated how long ago it took place. Other scientists have been measuring natural selection this way for several years now and publishing their results in major journals. The God Gene might have been a fascinating, enlightening book if Hamer had written it 10 years from now--after his link between VMAT2 and self-transcendence had been confirmed by others and after he had seriously tested its importance to our species. Instead the book we have today would be better titled: A Gene That Accounts for Less Than One Percent of the Variance Found in Scores on Psychological Questionnaires Designed to Measure a Factor Called Self-Transcendence, Which Can Signify Everything from Belonging to the Green Party to Believing in ESP, According to One Unpublished, Unreplicated Study.
Carl Zimmer's books include Soul Made Flesh and Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea.
From Booklist Like his and Peter Copeland's Living with Our Genes (1998), geneticist Hamer's provocative new book begins with the caveat that a single gene rarely accounts for a complex behavior, such as homosexuality, which was instanced in Living, or spirituality, the focus here. Still, Hamer has done sufficient research to argue that a single gene is implicated in spirituality, and his highly accessible exposition of how he arrived at that point is pretty impressive, if occasionally a bit Mr. Rogers-like in tone. Later, he adopts antireligious geneticist Richard Dawkins' concept of the meme, or transmissible unit of cultural information, to expand upon how culture and genetics interact to prompt expressing spirituality through religion and thereby to sustain faith traditions, such as in the demonstration case here, Judaism. (Hamer thinks Dawkins' attitudes toward religion less than rational, by the way, and poses those of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson as a healthy alternative.) He ends with another caveat: distinguish between beliefs and the act of believing--and the war between science and religion just might be resolved. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review “Fascinating. . . . A compelling case that spirituality very well may be part and parcel of our genetic structure.” –Los Angeles Times“Hamer ably narrates his quest to identify a gene that strongly correlates with self-transcendence. . . . Persuasive.” –The Washington Post Book World “Hamer weaves a fascinating fabric of mysticism, culture, consciousness, and biochemistry . . . rife with history and multidisciplinary tidbits. . . . Enlightening.” –Seed“Challenges some basic assumptions we may have and certainly goads us into reflection about human nature.” – The News & Observer
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer PDF
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer EPub
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer Doc
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer iBooks
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer rtf
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer Mobipocket
The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our GenesBy Dean H. Hamer Kindle
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar