Poke around GD some time. Anyway, to quote a Skepdic.com blurb on the ‘god gene’ subject:
What in the world does this mean?
Prove the "near 100% [religiousness] of our ancestors. The only evidence I’ve ever heard is that they buried their dead. What if someone found all of our graveyards 20,000 years from now and said “Well, those 21st centurians were near 100% religious!”?
Wasn’t that clear? Seemed clear to me. However, if I was being obscure, I apologise. I’ll try to rephrase: if the theory of the gene is true, why weren’t large swathes of our ancestors atheists? Or were they just pretending to be religious due to contemporaneous societal constraints?
I don’t think humans choose anything. Ever read What is Man by Mark Twain? link
All this gene does is alter the amount of neurotransmitters in the brain. It’s not a “GOD GENE” any more than it is a RPG gene or a schizophrenia gene. The title of his book makes it pretty obvious that his goal is to make money off of Christians.
Cisco already posted what I was thinking: you made a very large generalization that you can’t prove. You could generalize about what tribes did, but “near-100% religiosity” is absurd.
Everything I’ve ever learned about, for example, mediaeval England, indicates that everyone was a churchgoer. Not to do so would have meant total ostracisation from society.
:smack: That’s why everyone was a churchgoer! When it was against the law not to go to church, which it sometimes was, you went whether you believed it or not and kept your mouth shut.
OK, I ws just about to type a reply and then Marley23’s post appeared.
What Marley23 said.
:smack: Hence my “going through the motions” speculation. I think you’ve misinterpreted what I’m asking.
Wiki:
(My emphasis.)
Do we have any evidence that there were substantial non-god-gene-bearing people going to church but crossing their fingers and not believing?
I ain’t no god-botherer, by the way. I am the athiest atheist.
Hell, people still go to church to keep up appearances or to fit in. I’ve even met agnostic ministers.
So if you don’t have the god-gene, is that a god-plan?
There’s none that I know of, but between the political climate and record-keeping at the time, I’m not sure how you’d find any. Absence of evidence does not blah blah blah. 
Likewise.
::giggles and raises hand:: I’ll be performing my third wedding ceremony this spring.
I was going to give a 
Homebrew’s way, but it has been redirected your direction, Cisco (not that I disapprove or anything like that, I’m agnostic myself. I’m just wondering why someone would choose that line of work)
Hm… slight hijack…
(insert another cheap blue jeans joke)
Don’t people become ministers to perform temporary services for friends/family?
Like Joey in Friends?
Or maybe for moneymaking purposes (So people can pay them to marry you)
Better it go to him than Robertson and his ilk.
I hate these kinds of press releases.
Everybody has VMAT2, the neuron-type (it’s found in other cell types too, like platelets, which carry a very similar variant) vesicular monoamine transporter. Mice that largely lack it (the true knockout is a lethal phenotype), for instance, cannot properly package monoamine neurotransmitters in secretory vessicles, and hence cannot transmit nervous impulses with these chemicals normally. Saying “I have VMAT2” is like saying “I have monoaminergic neurons”, for all practical purposes.
Obviously, Hamer thinks he’s found a variant of the VMAT2 gene that correlates significantly with religious faith or spirituality. Unless this variant has some impact on the VMAT2 gene product’s function and/or abundance, the finding is likely to be a red herring.
It’s interesting to note that functional variants of this gene have been implicated in neurological and psychatric diseases, such as parkisonism, depression, and bipolar I disorder, though the linkages appear to be pretty tenuous, if not non-existant, outside of animal models of disease. I would have thought the importance of this protein to dopaminergic and serotonergic neurotransmission would make it a prime gene candidate as a causative agent in schizophrenia, but no such association has been found. Given the gene’s essentially universal role in monoaminergic neurotransmission, I should think that any marked differences in function would have profound effects on one’s neurological state, and ought to be pretty easy to recognize as some form of severe neurological illness. My guess would be that any kind of profound functional polymorphisms would be selected against pretty heavily, meaning that whatever is going on with this gene, it must be pretty damn subtle. Best of luck to Dr. Hamer proving the linkage has any true significance. As noted above, his “gay gene” proved to be a big fat red herring of the most redolent variety. I’m somewhat surprised he still has the chutzpah to make similar kinds of claims about human behavior based simply on genetics. There’s a lot more to biology than allelic variants.
Not as a line of work. I do weddings for non-religious friends and family, and I don’t charge them anything (though the last couple I married bought my round-trip plane ticket across the country to do it, which was flattering.)