Fundamentalism: Is It a Genetic Defect?
• Hodgepodge
Back at the dawn of human consciousness people probably bowed and prayed to lightning bolts and high tides. Now it is to words in books. Is religious faith a leftover artifact of evolutionary adaptation?
A few words by Robert Winston the author of The Story of God.
The researchers found that attitudes to Sabbath observance, divine law, church authority and the truth of the Bible showed greater congruity in identical rather than non-identical twins - again supporting the idea of a genetic influence.
Bouchard has consistently found in many of his studies that intrinsic religiosity -which seems to incorporate a notion of spirituality - is much more likely to be inherited. Extrinsic religiosity tends to be a product of a person's environment and direct parental influence. Bouchard also found that tendencies towards fundamentalism were also rather more likely to be inherited.