This is a highly disturbing statement. The author of this article appears to go with a common assumption that is both unproven, and in my experience, thoroughly untrue. If anything, selflessness and reliousness have a negative correlation. I have certainly seen no positive correlation between altruistic behavior and religiousness.

In fact, looking at the historical effects of religiousness, I see a strong correlation between religious society and outgroup hatred and violence. I think these authors need to go back to the drawing board on this one.

There may be genetic predispositions for both religiousness and altruism. However, this study appears to have only been one of linking religiousness to genetics with the altruism bit completely assumed and unexamined.

With any suggestion that altruism and religion are linked either to each other, the person making such a suggestion should be required to explain the treatment of women in many theocratic societies, the hostility of the religious right in the U.S. toward homosexuals, health care providers, and members of other religions.

I'm off to write an email to the author.

I contacted Laura Koenig. She was nice enough to send me the complete text of the article. This is the complete text of the reply that I sent to her. I truly hope she takes no offense at my criticism. As an afterthought, I will send her another link to this blog site so that she may publicly reply to my comments, if she so chooses.

I should also point out that, as noted in her email to me, her study is not the first to find a positive relationship between these two variables [religiousness and altruism]. The article references others and discusses the criteria used.

The body of my correspondence to Ms. Koenig follows:

Thank you very much for providing me this level of detail. I really do appreciate it. Your article has certainly convinced me that there is indeed a level of genetic tendency toward religiousness.

Unfortunately, I now know that such studies as the ones you reference ignore a key factor of the problems caused by religion. I saw no mention of any questions pertaining to violence or outgroup hostility. I would have expected that if such factors exist, they would count as negatives against the altruistic behaviors for which you chose to monitor.

Given the current political climate of fundamentalist violence in the U.S. and abroad, I find this quite disappointing. While there were questions about helping homeless people, there were no questions about throwing beer bottles at homosexuals, shooting doctors who perform abortions, or flying airplanes into office buildings. In fact, there was not a single mention of the word violence or hostility in the entire article, including the sections on antisocial behavior.

While I appreciate your desire to study the genetic predispositions to certain behaviors, I feel that there is a political bias, even in the scientific community, against reporting any negative bias toward the effects of religion, despite bombings in Ireland and Israel, anti-clinic violence, anti-gay violence, and a long long history of warfaring to forcibly spread religion.

In the future, I hope that scientists will be freer in their ability to study additional religious effects.

Thank you again for your time in replying to my inquiry and for the complete text of your research. Despite my disagreement with some of the finer points of the study, I appreciate your willingness to provide me with these details.

P.S. I would also like to apologize for my hasty initial comment. I am a tad hypersensitive to anything that hints at a possibility that atheists are less moral than religious individuals due to the current near total lack of respect for the atheist viewpoint and individual atheists in our society.

That said, I do still maintain that religion causes far more problems than it prevents and produces lower rather than higher morality, as evidenced by the extreme acts of violence in the name of religion.

I agree with you Misanthropic. Religion will be the end of the human race unless people wake up to the fact the we are all one big happy family in this universe. Stupid Muslims still believe in 2007 that they will get 72 virgins when they die for GOD. If GOD loves us and has made man, why would he want us to kill?

Mr. Scott, you atheists are responsible for most of the murders. The Communists in the USSR they killed 66million, China 150million, not to mention The Holocaust in Cambodia that the Jew Rabbis are so silent about.

Michael, you raise some good questions. In the Jewish Holocaust, it is said that close to one third of world Jewry perished. Some jews ask, why did the Jewish tribal G-D allow this? If there is no after life, then the Nazi camp guards are now in the same place that the inmates went.