EP
Copyright 2003 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
To appear in the proceedings of the Silver Anniversary Conference of the Center
for Process Studies, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate
School, Claremont, USA, 4-9 August 1998. Copyright 1998 by Kevin Sharpe.
by
Kevin Sharpe
Graduate College, Union Institute and
University, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Oxford Institute for Science and Spirit, Oxford, UK
Founder of Science & Spirit
Magazine
kevin.sharpe@tui.edu
www.ksharpe.com
and
Oxford University Press, Oxford,
rebecca@serenity.u-net.com
ABSTRACT.
A persons baseline levels of cheerfulness, contentment and psychological satisfaction are largely a matter of heredity [or genes], according to molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute. Our genes represent a point in the evolutionary process, our evolutionary heritage. So do our happiness levels, according to the science of behavioral genetics.
Our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us also represents a process. Different disciplines feed into one another, mutually interacting, to produce a unified explanatory whole. Or at least they should.
This paper examines spiritual and scientific approaches to the concept of human happiness, with a view to answering the question, Is behavioral genetics the new reductionism?
KEY WORDS.
Behavioral genetics, evolution, genetics, happiness, reductionism, science and theology.
CONTENTS.
Happiness:
Spiritual Approaches
Happiness:
The Genetic Approach
Reactions
to the Genetic Approach
Conclusion:
The Non-Reductionism of Behavioral Genetics
A persons baseline levels of cheerfulness, contentment and
psychological satisfaction are largely a matter of heredity [or genes],
according to molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute
(Hamer
Our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us also represents a process. Different disciplines feed into one another, mutually interacting, to produce a unified explanatory whole. Or at least they should.
This paper examines spiritual and scientific approaches to the concept of human happiness, with a view to answering the question, Is behavioral genetics the new reductionism?
Many religions and their philosophies focus on happiness and advise us to seek out spiritual happiness in everyday life:
Reformation Protestants focussed on justification by grace through faith. They believed that through this grace we could share what God offers, a positive loving action. The Bible presents a picture, to their eyes, of a gracious and loving deity who desires everyones happiness. Happiness arises from God.
Spiritual leader Robert Schuller writes about The Be Happy Attitudes: Eight Positive Attitudes that Can Transform Your Life. Along with charismatic and Pentecostal tendencies in the spiritual traditions of the contemporary west, such books and movements assume that religion intends for happiness. Happiness is nearness to God.
Happiness
comes to the person who lives a life of intellectual contemplation. So thought
philosophers in ancient
Augustine accepted the basic tenet of the ancients ethical theory: we should aim our behavior toward the achievement of well-being or happiness, the only universal desire. Aquinas concurred with Aristotle and Augustine: happiness is the basic human pursuit. He also agreed that happiness had to do with intelligent reflection. The highest form of happiness derives from the highest use of the intellect: thinking about spiritual matters and in particular about God .
Theologians and artists of the Renaissance believed in happiness and pleasure as the aims for life, particularly for the Christian life. Virtue formed only one route to happiness. Happiness supersedes virtue.
Several spiritual traditions and churches also emphasize the promise of happiness to come in the afterlife:
In Christian orthodoxy, happiness lies
elsewhere, a place of original bliss and innocence (the Garden of Eden) or of
future joy (Heaven, our eternal and happy home where we will see God
face-to-face, or the Promised Land where we will find happiness and complete
satisfaction). Heaven is destination and reward, writes David van Biema,
succor and relief from earthly trials (van Biema
Islam views the paradise of afterlife in heaven as a garden of pleasure where the righteous enjoy the highest of spiritual and sensual happiness. Happiness embraces divine pleasure and physical enjoyment.
According to many modern philosophers, religious people prize another world and therefore despise this world and feel uncertain in their attitudes toward the world around them. Religion thus dries up and attacks any happiness this world can provide, while promising happiness in a life hereafter which some humanists call pie in the sky or an opiate of the people.
Plato
occupied a compromise position in the battle between happiness in this life and
the life to come. In Platos Republic,
Socrates described the man [sic.] at peace with himself as being in perfect
balance between the three elements desire, passion, and reason a condition
attainable in this life. However, the Phaedo
indicates that the true philosopher attains utmost joy only when he retracts
from the senses and carnal distractions. The philosopher genuinely experiences
his final goal, purity of wisdom, only upon fully quitting the body (Kaplan
Hinduism also advocates withdrawal from the world of pleasure. Hindu scriptures suggest spiritually mature people abandon desires, lose their appetite for joys, and withdraw from their senses. The Bhagavad Gita depicts the ideal person as one of discipline, one who acts without worrying about the results of the action, unaffected by praise or rebuke. Actions in prior lives influence the situation of the next life and decide the degree of happiness or unhappiness between lives in the hereafter.
The Buddha preached life as suffering. If we accept the intrinsic sorrow of life and observe his teachings for instance, if we practice the virtues of sympathy, compassion, joy, and equanimity we will experience happiness.
Behavioral genetics also says something about happiness.
For each of us, our happiness fluctuates within a small range called a set-point that our genes largely determine. So concludes Hamer in his review of studies on the role of genes in happiness or misery.
So many people plan their lives for a distant goal, says
David Lykken. They believe that if they become C.E.O. or win a gold medal,
their lives will rise out of humdrum ordinariness. This isnt so. Theres a
rush of glory and then it fades (Gose
Identical twins (those with the same genetic makeup) attain
the same level of happiness
Other studies show that a persons level of happiness remains stable over many years. Inherited genes account for the majority of this level, though diseases like depression can override the set-point for well-being over the long term.
How you feel right now is about equally genetic and
circumstantial, concludes Hamer, but how you will feel on average over the
next ten years is fully
Hamer continues by directing our attention to two of the
more than
Genes carry the instructions for the construction of
neurotransmitters, their receptor and reabsorption portals. They also impart
information on such things as their storage and release rates. Hence, genes can
influence the prevalence, scarcity, and activity of serotonin and dopamine,
and, in turn, whatever behaviors and feelings these neurotransmitters induce.
Researchers have found, for instance, that people who differ in the gene that
produces part of the D
Some scientists think they have located the part of the brain that registers happiness and where the set-point mechanism works. Other developments in neuroscience may shed further light on the biology of happiness.
On the surface, a clash looms between religious and scientific accounts of the nature of human happiness. Scientists define happiness as physical well-being, while theologians define it as spiritual or intellectual satisfaction. Religious thinkers seek to understand happiness in the future as well as the present, while scientists concentrate firmly on the here and now.
Spiritual thinkers fear the clash. Is religion doomed in the face of science? Must theologians give up the ghost? They react by bashing science: behavioral genetics completely misses the sacred, spiritual nature of human happiness. It concentrates on mere mechanics. It is the new reductionism.
The media exacerbate this unhelpful conception of behavioral
genetics. For example, journalist Sharon Begley emphasizes that several claims
for the genetic roots of various behaviors run into trouble because follow-up
studies fail to replicate the original research. She points out that one recent
claim the connection between a condition of the gene D
Begley also refers to an often-raised suspicion of twin
studies, which some of the happiness research draws on. Identical twins frequently
dress alike and create a private world for just the two of them. People treat
them alike too. Fraternal twins, on the other hand, typically behave no more
alike than other siblings. Identicals thus share more influences from their
environment, according to biologist Marcus Feldman from
Most of the other objections Begley reports are either incorrect, or trivial. For instance:
The claim that one gene generates a trait. (Researchers now stress that traits arise from configurations of many genes.)
Fraud in one instance (which does not mean they all are fraudulent).
Behavioral geneticists do their statistics incorrectly. (They should do them correctly, of course, if their colleagues are to consider their work valid.)
Grant Steen, a medical researcher at the Saint Jude
Childrens
Other critics say that behavioral geneticists like Hamer try
to reduce the holistic human experience of happiness to nothing but the actions
of genes, electrical activity, and chemicals. Walter Freeman, for example,
says, Joy comes with activities that we share with people we have learned to
trust, and that enable us to share meaning across the existential barrier that
separates each of us from all others. So happiness is not made by a chemical
(Freeman
More and more work is emerging to
But spiritual thinkers and their media
Process thought emphasizes the processive or evolutionary
nature of [human beings] and the world (Cross and Livingstone
We can take this picture of mutual interaction as a model
for the process of human knowledge. As our genes, our minds, and our wills act
in concord, so should science and religion. By quitting the hostilities and
working together, science and religion can produce a better, more complete
understanding of us and our world. In the words of this conferences theme,
such co-operation must contribute to the common good.
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Begley, S.
Benjamin, J.,
et al.
Blakeslee, S.
Bower, B.
_________.
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Depue, R. A. et al.
Doskoch, P.
Ebstein, R. P.,
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Freeman, W. J.
Goleman, D.
Gose, B.
Grantham, R.
Hamer, D. H.
Happiness May
Truly Come from Within.
Holden, C.
Holmes, B.
Irwin, T. H.
Kaplan, J. D.
Lykken, D. T.,
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Lykken, D. and A. Tellegen.
McDannell, C. and B. Lang.
McGrath, A. E.,
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Myers, D.
_________.
Nature vs.
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van Biema, D.