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L. Eaves, B. D’Onofrio, and R. Russell, “Transmission of Religion and Attitudes,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 59-61. The researchers found that variation in personality is partly genetic, but there are large effects from the family environment.

T. Bouchard et al., “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religiousness: Genetic and Environmental Influences and Personality Correlates,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 88-98. This study of thirty-five identical and thirty-seven fraternal twin pairs raised apart found that intrinsic religiousness is 43 percent heritable; extrinsic religion is 39 percent heritable. The rest is attributed to nonshared environment.

6 Dean Hamer, The God Gene (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

7 Hamer’s idea of a “gay gene,” as proposed in his 1995 book The Science of Desire (coauthored with Peter Copeland), stirred controversy, and large sales; the book was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Hamer’s findings never appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and scientists were unable to replicate them. By the time other scientists were commenting that they could not find a gene that inclines one toward homosexuality, Hamer had moved on to his next project: the God gene.

8 Francis Collins, The Language of God (New York: Free Press, 2006).

9 This has put Collins in hot water with evangelicals, who take the Bible literally. For example, he believes in evolution, and when he said so in The Language of God, major evangelical figures refused to endorse his book.

10 D. Comings et al., “The DRD4 Gene and the Spiritual Transcendence Scale of the Character Temperament Index,” Psychiatric Genetics 10 (2000): 185-89. (Note that neither the serotonin study nor the dopamine study has been replicated.)

11 As in many studies, the researchers tried to compare similar subjects, and thus did not compare across gender. In addition, most of this spirituality research is done on a shoestring, and researchers often recruit their subjects from already existing treatment programs or trials; therefore, researchers do not have much of a choice of subjects.

12 In both the serotonin and dopamine studies, it was the subset “spiritual acceptance versus material rationalism” that accounted for most of the difference in spirituality. This makes intuitive sense to me. It seems logical that believing in miracles or that one’s life is directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being, or feeling in contact with a divine being, describes a more classic spirituality. Transpersonal identification (feeling connected to others and being willing to sacrifice for the good of other people, animals, nature, and the world) seems more a qualification for the Humane Society than evidence of a spiritual worldview. Self-forgetfulness (losing oneself in thought, time, and space) appears to me a measure of one’s ability to focus—a trait surely found as readily in the atheist biologist or agnostic violinist as in the pastor or mystic.

13 D. E. Comings et al., “A Multivariate Analysis of 59 Candidate Genes in Personality Traits: The Temperament and Character Inventory,” Clinical Genetics 58 (2000): 376.

14 Comings et al., “The DRD4 Gene,” p. 188.

15 J. Borg et al., “The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences,” American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 1965-69.

16 What they found was an inverse relationship: the higher the subjects’ spirituality score, the fewer the number of serotonin receptors that lit up. A couple of theories were offered to explain what that might mean. One was that spiritual people have less of that neurotransmitter. The researchers reasoned that the serotonin system regulates a person’s perception and the various sights, sounds, and other stimuli that reach his awareness; therefore, if there is a weak “sensory filter,” they wrote, that would allow for “increased perception and decreased inhibition.” In other words, the filter is more loosely woven, so that more spiritual experiences get through. Think about a soccer team playing without a goalie: it’s much easier for “God” to kick spiritual feelings and ideas