Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [42]
Debbie, too, wondered about her early religious faith.
“I have a mother who’s like,‘Oh, I had a headache once during Yom Kippur so I never fast.’And that drove me nuts as a kid!” Debbie laughed.
As in Sharon’s case, Debbie was mystified that her nonbiological sister showed little interest in synagogue.“My [nonbiological] sister and I grew up in the same house, and I used to think, How come it means something to me and it doesn’t mean anything to her?”
The answer, she believes, lies in their genes. “When we went to school in the sixties, everything was nurture,” Debbie said. “It was all ‘environment, environment, environment,’ and I used to figure, Oh, my mother must just be weird, I must be like my dad, and try to rationalize. And then Sharon and I met, and it’s like,Well, there goes environment out the window.”
I put the question to Nancy Segal: Is it all genes?
“Nothing is all genes,” Segal said, “but I think it’s genes to a large degree. The content is fashioned largely by the culture, but how they’re doing things, how they’re going about living their lives, is very similar. And that has to be something genetically influenced, because they were raised in different places.”
Once the twin researchers believed they had established a link between genes and spirituality, it was inevitable that geneticists would try to find which genes made for a Sigmund Freud and which ones led to Saint John of the Cross. This line of inquiry is in its infancy, with relatively few studies, in part because scientists find it easier to win grants to study schizophrenia than spirituality. When the spirituality studies are conducted, it is usually on the sly, with data gleaned from existing smoking or alcohol-abuse studies. This is how Dean Hamer claimed he stumbled—oh so controversially—upon the “God gene.”
The God Gene at NIH
If you want to conduct a spirituality test on very high-end subjects, look no further than Bethesda, Maryland. Dean Hamer and Francis Collins are both leading geneticists at the National Institutes of Health. They both love the scientific method. Where they part company is God; specifically, whether one’s inclination toward God boils down to genetic coding or something more.
“Genetics has become so much more powerful,” Dean Hamer told me. Hamer is a Harvard Ph.D. who works at NIH’s National Cancer Institute. “Things that seemed utterly mysterious, like the pattern of dots on the wings of a butterfly, have now been reduced to individual genes acting at specific times during development. So the idea that something as complicated as ‘why people pray’ might be studied, has gone from a complete fantasy to something that scientists can think about in a serious way.”
Hamer is author of The God Gene,6 a book that has many scientists pulling out their hair in frustration, since they felt the study was shallow, sensational, and published without scrutiny by other scientists. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I arrived at his four-story brownstone near Logan Circle, a once scary, now fabulously expensive neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Hamer opened his door, shushing aside two barking dogs. He wore a black T-shirt, tan shorts, and Birkenstock sandals. He looked like a professional soccer player, trim and compact, with salt-and-pepper hair, neat features, and cocky eyes. He was a man that any woman, and some men, would notice at a cocktail party.
We walked up the spiral staircase to the third floor. A framed copy of the Time magazine cover featuring The God Gene hung on the wall. A dozen copies of his book were scattered on tables and chairs. We gravitated toward a tiny room of rich grays—gray walls, gray chairs, a small round glass table.
Hamer was a practiced interviewee—engaging, modest, with the charming verbal patter of a springtime shower. He has written that he is a “materialist,” which means he believes that much of people’s behavior can be reduced to