(01-05-2024, 04:06 PM)quintessentone Wrote:(01-05-2024, 12:47 AM)Ninurta Wrote: OH! Looky what I found: a Wikipedia article about the 'God Gene'. If spirituality may be inherited through DNA, then why not psychic abilities, too? After all, they are rally just another form of spirituality from religion.
Here is a paper on the 'God Gene' at PubMed.
.
I seem to be encountering studies that don't quite follow previous clinical research to the letter, rather they veer off course and the PubMed study seems to do this as well. And it appears they could not understand a previous study's methodology.
Quote:Although our study may not directly replicate Hamer's (it is not clear which A/C polymorphism he examined), students enter into this dialogue by testing whether they too see an association between VMAT2 variation and spirituality.
Also the students (low numbers for a study?) are all in liberal arts, so right there we have a biased leaning perhaps? towards the more creative hence spiritual?
So I'm not sure at this point whether the DNA gene is diluted, so to speak, within the generations or the DNA genes are mixed up in different percentages or perhaps deleted altogether or has any bearing at all.
I think they could not replicate Hamer's study because he never published in in the scientific literature. Instead, he published a mass-market book, which didn't really lay it out the same way a scientific paper does. Specifically, I think they didn't really understand which SNP's they were trying to assess. They knew which gene to look at, but not the specific SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms).
My own DNA data is just a long list of SNPs, a long listing of C, T, G, or A at specific positions within the genome. I've been tested at two services, and each one has 600,000 or 700,000 SNPs listed, but each reads slightly different SNPs. So I took both of those raw data files and combined them into a single file, which lists about 1.2 million unique SNP locations. However, without knowing which SNP to look at specifically, I have no way to assess whether I have the mutation that turns the gene off, or whether I have the original SNP that defaults to on. Without knowing which SNP to look at, there is also the potential that neither service tested for that specific SNP anyhow.
The sample size was low because an actual study was not the primary objective. Instead, they were trying to teach science principles to Liberal Arts students. So the sample size was just a single class. They self-tested just to make it personal and more interesting to the students to hold their attention. They did apparently publish a spread sheet on the internet in case other colleges wanted to run the same class, and add their results to the initial one to increase the sample size across multiple colleges, but when I went to look at the spread sheet, it's no longer on the internet.
ETA:
Apparently, the mutation resides in the intron region of the VMAT2 gene, the part that tells the gene to turn on or turn off. That gene has 15 SNPs to choose from in the intron region:
Quote:The human VMAT2 gene consists of 16 exons and 15 introns and has been localized to chromosome 10q25.
Source
I read elsewhere that the gene is on chromosome 10, "10q25" here. I don't know what the "q25" part means, not being a geneticist myself.
Apparently, this same study links a reduced risk of Parkinson's Disease (PD) to "overexpression" of the VMAT2 gene:
Quote:This study adds to the previous evidence suggesting that variability in VMAT2 promoter region may confer a reduced risk of developing PD, presumably via mechanisms of gene overexpression.
I take that to mean that if the gene is turned "on" (expressed) and then cranked up to 10 ("overexpression"), then it also confers a reduced risk of Parkinson's Disease.
.