Does God know about us or not? - Denyse O'Leary

From – Denyse O’Leary: (from my continuing series on the human mind)“The evolutionary psychologist knows why you vote -- and shop, and tip at restaurants”

Evo psych also accounts for anger over trivial matters (it was once key to our survival),

It feels like emptying Darwin's wastebasket.

and There's a gene for that... or is there?

After media buzz about a genetic component to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), one British paper asked "Are some children just born bad?", suggesting that "previous thinking was flawed and some children, through no fault of the parents, are simply bad seeds."

We are only beginning to learn about epigenetics, the system within our cells that governs whether, when, and how a gene will be expressed. It threatens to upend the nonsense, except for one thing: We just haven't heard much about that compared to all these "genes for."

In any event, the 1000 Genomes Project has found about 15 million gene variants in humans, "more than half of which had never been observed before." And that's not the only unexpected recent finding. More than one percent of Scottish men in the "Scotland's DNA" project were determined to be direct descendants of the Saharan Berber and Tuareg tribes. Did any genetic determinist predict that?

Similarly, on the controversial subject of genetics and intelligence (the "genius gene"), scientists used to estimate that about half a dozen genes affected it, then later upped the number to two hundred genes. Another estimate is about a thousand. One psychologist explained, "We can't find the effects of any individual genes that are large enough to seem worth worrying about."

Is there a good reason to believe that life's origin must be a fully natural event? Note: The Science Fictions – cosmology series is here. The human evolution series is here. The Science Fictions: the human mind series is here.