The Genetic Basis of "Finding God"

Aha..that is why I did not find the study in PubMed. I had heard something about a correlation study of religion with genetics but turned up nothing. If it was in a book it would not be listed.Hamer's "gay gene" or monsterous portion of a chromosome(it was not that narrowly mapped) fell apart immediately. While there may be a genetic component to being religious, it probably overlaps with a lot of other types of group behaviors...just find some praying monkeys and we can narrow it down using comparative genomics

We can look for shared deletions in monkeys and creationists and maybe find a cure
More seriously, I think evolutionary biology (or psychology) will have something to say about organized religion among other group structure related behaviors. Bonobos are not the first primates to use tin cans to scare the hell out of their troop mates to gain dominance. P. troglodytes have used the trick as well under Jane Goodall's watch.Trying to do a linkage study would be a nightmare however since how people define religiosity is probably variable and influenced by social environment. And without a fairly tightly defined phenotype, it is really hard to do quantitative genetics. I think the "gay gene" work of Hamer stumbled for this reason as well.

I still have a problem with how you would define the "phenotype". Is the person a fundamentalist? What kind? When they say what they believe in a questionare, are they telling the truth or trying to say what they think the person wants to hear? Is a Buddhist "religious" per se even though Buddha is not a diety?
Is the person poorly educated? Well educated? Fundamentalism and poor education correlate so how much will this skew the results and obscure the genetic background of "belief"? I think there are other behaviors that would be a lot easier to map the genetic contribution for than religiosity.