For centuries priests, ministers, and theologians have struggled to answer the mystery of why a kind, compassionate, personal God that answers prayers and looks out for our personal welfare, would allow so much evil to occur in the world? This is referred to as “the problem of evil.” In the fourth century BCE, Epicurus addressed this question by pointing out that it was hard to get God off the hook. “Either God wants to abolish evil and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot he is impotent. If he can but does not want to, he is wicked.”
    Several thousand years ago the Gnostics, a group of quasi-Christian mystics proposed there really was no problem because they viewed God as so inherently evil that he would have no interest in preventing evil.  They called this demonic God the Demiurge, taken from a term Plato used to denote the creator of the base world. The Demiurge was the God that interacted with man. The real God or “true Father” represented the less flawed world and could not be held responsible for the actions of the Demiurge.
    The deists propose a solution that still leaves God blameless but judgment of him is less harsh. They propose that God did indeed create the early universe but when this job was completed he was no longer involved. This approach has the advantage that it allows those who believe in this type of God to also believe in Darwinian evolution as the mechanism by which all life including man himself was created. This is far more satisfactory to the rational brain than the proposals of the young earth creationists who believe the Bible is literally true and that the world is less than 6,000 years old, and that Darwinism is baloney. The deist solution is not very satisfactory to the majority of people in the world who believe in a personal God that guided the evolution of man and watches over us on a minute-to-minute basis. These are called theists and they have proposed a number of solutions to the “problem of evil.”
       The most popular solution is that God endowed man with free will. This relieved God from the onerous duty of being responsible for all the minute detailed decisions that billions of humans make everyday. God could not be responsible if it was a person’s individual decision to do evil things. This, however, did not explain the evil done by nature in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Some have suggested that nature also has its own free will.
      Another creative answer to the problem of evil is the yin and jang solution. This says we cannot have good in the world if the opposite, evil, is not around to compare it to. We cannot have hot without cold, love without hate, or good without evil. Another explanation is that evil is part of God’s mysterious plan. This is especially evoked when a child dies or is killed. Somehow the pain is supposed to be lessened if this event is all part of God’s mysterious plan. A further solution, popular with several fundamentalist religions is that “people get what they deserve.” This was especially popular during the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the orient. Some ministers proclaimed that was God’s pay back for abortions, liberal sex, homosexuality, failure to pray to God in public school, and many other supposed transgressions against God’s laws. The problem is, none of these answers is truly satisfying if your child is killed, your spouse dies at a young age, or thousands or even millions of people are killed in natural disasters, purges, genocides, wars, epidemics or other horrors humans have been subjected to.
     There is however, one simple solution to the problem of evil, one answer, one explanation that does not require any of the above circuitous stretches of logic. That is a simple reversal of the assumption made by most people that God created man – to man created God. This proposes that man created the theory of a personal God who created the world, who answers prayers, and who attends to our minute-by-minute needs. In pre-modern times this theory was the best possible solution for the unknown questions – Where did we come from? Where are we going? When I die am I gone forever? Is there life after death?  In modern times with remarkable advances in biology, physics, and the neurosciences, these questions now have answers that do not require the ancient theory of a personal God. This takes God out of the issue entirely. The most simple and satisfactory answer to the “problem of evil” is to realize that man created God.

        

      During an interview Richard Dawkins was asked if he could give an example of a mutation or evolutionary process that resulted in an increase of the information in the genome. The video of this interview shows he appeared to be stumped by this question. tinyurl.com/6f7zv5 . 
    Creationists leaped on this as evidence that such processes do not exist. I responded (URL above) that gene duplication is the process Dawkins was searching his memory for. In 1970, Dr. Susumu Ohno, a colleague of mine at the City of Hope Medical Center wrote a classic book entitled “Evolution by Gene Duplication.”  He showed the new genetic material and new information is added to the genome by the duplication of single genes, duplication of whole chromosomes and the duplication of whole genomes by polyploidy.
    Single gene duplication can occur during meiosis, the process that produces eggs and sperm in the gonads. During meiosis the chromosomes from the mother and from the father pair up. If individual genes or groups of genes line up end to end instead of next to each other, and if crossing over occurs between the genes, one of the gene or genes will be duplicated. This is called “unequal crossing over.” Over subsequent generations these duplicated segments can undergo changes by random mutation. One of the duplicated genes can serve its original function while the other can slowly change to adopt new functions in the cell.
    After human and other genomes were sequenced, it became apparent that gene duplication was a very common process. A classical example was the HOX genes, involved in the development of body form. In fruit flies (Drosophila) there is a single group of eight duplicate HOX genes. In mammals there are four such sections with nine to eleven duplicate HOX genes. The globin (of hemoglobin) genes are another example consisting of duplicate alpha, beta, delta, gamma and epsilon globin genes. There are hundreds of other examples.
    It was Ohno’s suggestion that whole genomes were duplicated at least once during the evolution from invertebrates to mammals that garnered the most excitement and attention. The examination of large databases of gene sequences in many vertebrate gene families has shown that both early whole genome duplication (about 350 to 650 million years ago) and widespread duplication of single or multiple genes occurred during vertebrate evolution (1, 2). These studies suggest at least one round of polyploidy as originally suggested by Ohno.
    Sequence studies have also shown that the rate of gene duplication is quite high, occurring one in one hundred times per gene per million years. If we assume the presence of 25,000 genes in the human genome, this represents 250 gene duplication events per one million years. Over a period of 400 million years this would be a billion gene duplications. With this degree of duplication it is not surprising that the vast majority of these duplicate genes are silenced within a few millions years (3). However, many are not and these form the major source of new information in the genome. To keep the size of the genome from exploding by so much gene duplication, the same unequal crossing process that produced the duplications can delete genes.
    Polyploidy is even more common in plants than in animals. Seventy percent of plant species were produced by polyploidy.
    One of the exciting new developments in genetics is the appreciation of the presence of “copy number polymorphisms” or CNPs (4). This refers to ways in which individuals differ on the basis of different numbers of duplicated genes. Some of these CNPs have been shown to be associated with different diseases.
    Dawkins seeming to be stumped obviously came from a lapse of memory rather than a lapse of knowledge. In his book, The Blind Watch Maker, on page 172 he says” “One of the main things that must have happened in the early evolution of living organisms was an increase in the numbers of genes… Bacteria have far fewer genes than animals and plants. The increase may have come about through various kinds of gene duplication.”
    In summary, despite their glee and widespread distribution of the Dawkins stumped interview, their celebration is short lived. The addition of new information to the genome has occurred at a massive scale throughout evolution.


1. McLysaght, A. et al: Extensive duplication during early chordate evolution. Nature Genetics 31: 200-204, 2002.

2. Gu, X. et al. Age distribution of human gene families shows significant roles of both large- and small-scale duplication in vertebrate evolution. Nature Genetics 31:205-209, 2002.
    
3. Lynch, M and Conery, J.S.: The evolutionary fate and consequences of duplicate genes. Science 290:1151-1155, 2000.

4. Redon, R. et al: Global variation in copy number in the human genome. Nature 444:444-454, 2006.

        

    One of the major purported benefits of religion is that it helps us to behave morally and to understand the difference between right and wrong. However, what if morality is simply an inborn human trait, produced because it had an advantage in the evolution of man? In Chapter 38, The Genetics of Good Behavior, I discussed altruism as one form of inborn moral behavior. Altruism consists of performing good acts that put the individual at risk for the benefit of the group. Altruism is common in many animals other than humans, is controlled in part by our genes, and imparts a selective advantage during evolution.
    Scientists are becoming increasingly interested in the biological basis of morality (1). John Mikail of Georgetown University is investigating the question or whether there is a ‘universal moral grammar’ that is present in a broad range of humans independent of gender, age, education level,  cultural background, and religion. He administered a moral dilemma test to a wide range of people, including children and individuals from non-western cultures. His preliminary results suggest that such a universal morality does exist. Hauser and colleagues have administered an online Moral Sense Test (http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu) to over 200,000 individuals from 120 countries. You should log on and take the test; I suspect you will enjoy it. Again the results indicate much similarity in moral principles across cultures. These studies are consistent with humans having an inborn moral code independent of religious or cultural upbringing.
Studies in primates have also found evidence for inborn moral fairness. Monkeys will forgo food for days to prevent a neighbor from receiving a shock. Human morality may be an elaboration of a primate behavior that evolved because it helped to promote cohesiveness in early groups of humans.
  These studies increasingly suggest that morality is an inborn rather than a God dictated trait. This make it likely that man’s inborn sense of right and wrong led the human authors of the Bible and other sacred books to incorporate moral laws into their verses. Then, to add greater authority they proclaimed these laws had to be followed because the verses were dictated by God.


(1) Miller, G: The Roots of Morality. Science 32); 734-737, 2008

        

    As I stated in my first entry, the purpose of this blog is to update new facts and discoveries that are relevant to the book, “Did Man Create God?”  This is based on a constant perusal of a number of my favorite science journals including Nature, Science and many others. A second purpose, of course, is also to provide readers with a source of feedback and you are encouraged to input contributions of your own.
     One problem. While the blog is primarily about science and religion, the title does not portray that. The solution – a title change to “Did Man Create God? The Blog for Science and Religion.”
    This is not an anti-faith or anti-religion site. It is in part devoted to understanding why humans are such a spiritual species and what can people do to allow their spiritual brain to be at peace with their rational, thinking, critical brain.
This blog will examine the same wide range of subjects covered in the book including:

    New findings showing the wonders of evolution
    Rebuttals to Intelligent Design
    How natural selection works
    New discoveries of missing links
    Evolution of man
    The origin of life
    Cosmology
    What came before the Big Bang?
    Neuroscience of behavior
    Updates on the spiritual and rational brain
    Genetics and evolution of spirituality, reason, good and bad behavior
    Origins of religion
    Benefits of religion
    The science of the placebo effect
    Evils of religion
    Role of psychedelic drugs in spirituality
    And many other related and relevant subjects

    As stated previously, for now I will only contribute about once a week. Since your contributions will need my approval before they are posted, their appearance may be delayed by a week. I will accept any thoughtful comments, pro or con. The only thing rejected will be material that is “off the wall.” 

    Your input is important. Let me hear from you.

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    One of major themes of the “Did Man Create God?” book is that much of what we are, including our capacity for spirituality, is determined by our genes and by our biological make up. Thus, in addition to discussing new relevant findings about evolution, in this blog I will also be reviewing new findings on the biology and genetics of human behavior, especially good versus evil – the control of which is generally believed to be within the domain of religious instruction.
    Over the many years I spent taking care of children with Tourette Syndrome and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), one of the major presenting problems was the presence of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) - in short, constant talking back and nerdy acting out. Ever since the advent of Freud, such behavior was blamed on poor parenting. The stress of the resultant finger pointing often led to divorce. One of the exciting aspects of working with Tourette syndrome, a disorder universally recognized as being primarily genetic, was the finding that it was a spectrum disorder, meaning that in addition to the tics, ADHD, obsessive compulsive behavior (OCD), ODD, conduct disorder, depression, and many other behavioral problems were present. These were commonly assumed to be due to problems with early childhood environment and laid at the feet of the parents. Being associated with a genetic disorder, Tourette syndrome, indicated that in reality they all had a strong genetic component.
    I was intrigued by a recent report 1 that examined the neurobiology of angry teens. Sara Whittle and her colleagues had 137 teenagers and their parents participate in interactive sessions to evaluate levels of angry, aggressive, belligerent, and argumentative conflict. The teens were then examined with a MRI to examine different aspects of brain structure. As described in Chapters 28 and 30, the amygdala is part of the temporal lobe and the limbic system and regulates emotion, especially anger. The authors found that the children who exhibited the most prolonged aggressive and angry  responses to conflict had larger amygdala volumes. Variations in the size and symmetry of two other structures, the anterior cingulate and the orbital frontal cortex (see chapters 26 and 28) were also involved.
     Since twin studies have shown that the behaviors in question have a strong genetic component the changes observed in brain structure were likely to have been caused by a variant set of genes. These behaviors are common in children with conduct disorder, fifty percent of whom develop antisocial personality as adults. These studies provide one more piece of evidence showing that parents usually are not to blame for oppositional defiant behavior of their children – genes and neurobiology are. Skillful parenting, good environment and strong religious beliefs can help to moderate it, but  the absence of these things is not its cause.

1 Prefrontal and amygdala volumes are related to adolescent’s affective behaviors during parent-adolescent interactions. Whittle, S. et al. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sciences 105:3652-7, 2008

        

    One of the issues that creationists seem to have the most difficulty with is the concept of natural selection. Weather is one of the strongest selective forces in evolution  – especially long-term changes of either too dry or too wet. Since humans have not lived through such meteorological extremes, those skeptical of evolution doubt its power. Perhaps a more convincing example is needed. Speaking of power, how would you feel if you lived in an environment were a single misstep meant instant death - unless you had a minor inherited variation in your body form that saved you? 
    In the tropical forests of Southwest Asia, there are more gliding animals (frogs, snakes, lizards, geckos) than anywhere else on earth, over 45 species in all. As described in Science 1 anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy of the University of California, Santa Cruz asked - why? He concluded the answer was “rougosity” or the vertical distance to the ground between treetops of different heights. In this setting rougosity is highest when the distance straight to the ground is the greatest. In these forests, most of the plant and animal life occurs in the sun rich canopy at the tops of the trees. Imagine two geckos (like the cute little ones in the Geico insurance ads) sitting on a branch hundreds on feet off the ground. One had a genetic mutation that led him to be born with an excess of floppy skin, the other had no excess skin. They both get distracted and step off the branch and both instinctively spread their legs wide. The excess skin of one allows him to glide safely to a branch 30 feet below. The other plunges to his death.  All of the offspring of the one with excess skin also have excess skin and are protected from sudden death by missteps. All the other geckos without excess skin remain at risk of sudden death. It should surprise no one that after a few dozen generations, all the geckos in this part of the forest were gliding geckos.
    This is an unusually beautiful example of the power of strong selective forces to drive the rapid evolution of new species, in this case 45 new species in one area of the forest. In a later blog I will provide some examples of strong selection for certain genes in humans.


1 Snapshots from the Meeting – Evolution of Gliding  Science 320: 609 (2 May), 2008

        

     Today is the official release date of the book and the date I have started this blog. The purpose of this blog is two-fold.
    The first purpose is to update new facts, discoveries and ideas that are relevant to the book, as I find them. I subscribe to about 12 different magazines and journals on science, biology, nature, medicine, neuroscience and other subjects. Anything that I find relevant to the subjects covered in the “Did Man Create God?” book will be covered. If readers come across items they think are relevant to the subject let me know and I will be happy to include them.
    The second purpose is to provide answers to reader’s questions, complaints, or other issues. I realize the subject matter of this book may be controversial and even disturbing to some readers. I will welcome and be respectful of all opinions and thoughts. All I ask is that you do the same. No profanity or other inappropriate comments. The purpose of the book is to allow people have their thinking brain and their spiritual brain be at peace. The purpose of the blog is the same.
    I will attempt to make entries at lest once a week. Since I have many things on my plate I cannot respond daily.
   
    The first issue involves a very nice email I received from Dr. Michael Persinger. Dr. Persinger, Ph.D. is a faculty member in the Departments of Psychology and Biology, Behavioral Neuroscience, and Biomolecular Sciences at Laurentian University, Subbury, Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs.
       He kindly commented that “Did Man Create God?”  was “One of the most integrative, innovative and revolutionary books I have read in decades.” 
       I covered his book and other studies extensively in The Spiritual Brain chapter (p390-394). One of the many research items he published involved studies showing that placing magnets (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) over the temporal lobes elicited feelings of spirituality and transcendence in many subjects. I also reviewed (p376-378) a report by Granqvist and colleagues from Sweden. They carried out a blinded study and stated they could not reproduce this finding. Dr. Persinger, in turn, faulted different aspects of their study.
        Dr. Persinger sent me the following note: “ Did you ever read the actual correspondence between this group and us? If you are interested my comments and the actual emails can be found on our website.  Access www.laurentian.ca (main page), then go to the yellow tool bar and access Academic Matters. This will take you to programs. Access Behavioural Neuroscience Program. Once there, click "news" and the entire history is there, including the email exchanges. We logged it at that time (2005) because we thought it might have historical significance and we thought anyone should be able to see the total correspondence.”
    I was not aware of this link and readers of this blog who are interested in this intriguing piece of neuroscience will find the above interesting reading. As I stated in the book (p378) this interchange represents what science is all about – a lively interaction between scientists with varying views.

        

We are running a bit late with the book's publication. However, the book will be officially out on May 5, 2008.

        

The blog is for updates and comments by the author and for readers who
would like to leave comments. If you have specific questions for the author
he will make every effort to make a timely reply.