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In a news item "Official: It's Nurture and Nature" we reported that the two teams working on completing the genetic mapping of mankind had completed their task. We now know the entire genetic blueprint for a human being.
For psychologists like myself, the greatest surprise was that there were so few genes — a mere 30,000 or so. In a sense this was reassuring because it finally put to rest the theory that all of our actions were genetically programed. There are simply too few genes to do all the programming. We who had been on the nurture side of the great nature/nurture debate were finally vindicated. My own view has always been that genetics and nurture play an intricate dance but that, in the end, a child's environment was more important in forming personality than the genes he or she was born with.
I have read fascinating articles by other psychologists and sociologists, by biologists and neurobiologists, by mathematicians, by research chemists, by doctors, by agriculturalists and by political commentators and so on as to how the genome findings affect their spheres of interest.
What has surprised me has been the relative silence from religious and spiritual leaders. Make no mistake about it, the mapping of the human genome is, perhaps, the most important scientific work of discovery of the last thousand years. Leadership was called for from religious and spiritual thinkers in telling people what the spiritual implications of the discoveries were and that leadership was abdicated.
When, a couple of years ago, the researchers at University of California in San Diego discovered the 'god-spot' in the human brain — that series of neurological connections in the cortex which predispose us for religious belief — the voices of church spokesmen rang out loud and clear, pontificating (mostly inaccurately) on the profound implications of these findings.
But the human genome project findings are vastly more important and the silence is deafening. Creationists, for example, may challenge the integrity of the researchers or the scientific validity of the methodology used in the research. They would be right to worry: if the findings stand , their view of the world will be seen to be as quaint and archaic as that of the flat Earthers' was after satellites began taking pictures of the Earth from space.
One more blow has been struck at the whole idea of God as an explanatory device. There are now fewer things we need the divine to explain. We don't need Thor to explain thunder, or Amon-Ra to account for the rising of the sun. We no longer, now, need God to explain how we became what we are or why we behave as we do.
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Sprituality