What is the God gene?
The God gene refers to the idea that human spirituality has an innate genetic component to it. It doesn't mean that there's one gene that makes people believe in God, but it refers to the fact that humans inherit a predisposition to be spiritual--to reach out and look for a higher being.
A big part of your research involved a "self-transcendence scale" to rate people's spirituality. What is this scale?
As you can imagine, it's not trivial to separate spirituality from more formal aspects of religion, but some psychologists like Robert Cloninger have tried to do that. They use a scale called "self-transcendence."
Overall, it tries to measure a sense of "at-oneness" with the universe independent of formal religious beliefs. More specifically, it actually looks at three different subscales. One of them is called self-forgetfulness: a measure of people's propensity to completely lose themselves in what they're doing, whether it's weeding the garden or meditating or whatever. People who are self-transcendent put less focus on themselves and more on everything outside of them. They see the connections to things.
A psychic component is called "transpersonal identification," a feeling of a sense of unity with everything else in the universe. Then there's a third scale called mysticism or spiritual acceptance which is more like, do you think mystical experiences have changed your life? Do you believe that science can't explain everything? Do you believe that there might be ESP, for example? Believing that there is more going on than meets the eye.
So you studied a certain gene to see how it related to this self-transcendence scale?
Right. There was a twin study suggesting that this spirituality scale is at least partially inherited. We were interested in finding out what are the genes. So we did a classical type of study that molecular biologists do: we rounded up a bunch of people and measured their self-transcendence. Then we looked at a bunch of genes and looked for differences. And we found this one gene that was at least correlated with self-transcendence. It's called VMAT2, which stands for 'vesicular monoamine transporter no. 2.' It handles one type of brain chemical, monoamines, that have a lot to do with emotional sensitivity.
