Religions could have arisen in our civilization due to the existence of a special population of bacteria in our microflora, which “reprogram” our brain to believe in supernatural beings, say biologists from Moscow State University in an article published in the journal Biology Direct.
In recent years, biologists have discovered many examples of parasites not only using the host to grow, but also directly controlling its behavior. For example, the Wolbachia bacterium causes insects to actively reproduce and thereby spread themselves, and the larvae of humpback flies make bees escape from the hive and behave like "zombies".
Mushrooms from the genus Ophiocordyceps have learned to directly control the behavior of ants, forcing them to die at a strictly defined point above the anthill in order to infect as many new victims as possible.
The most common parasite of domestic cats, the single-celled creature Toxoplasma, goes even further. It is able to change the behavior of a mammal infected with it, causing irreversible changes in the brain, which make mice "fearless" at the sight and smell of cats, and people - prone to suicide and irrational actions.
Alexander and Yuri Panchin, biologists from Moscow State University, and their colleague Alexander Tuzikov suggest that some or even all religions that exist in the world today may be the "product" of the activity of microbes with similar properties that live in our intestines or in other parts of the body …
Several factors speak in favor of their presence. Firstly, there is no doubt that the intestinal microflora controls our appetite, propensity to obesity and even food preferences, acting on the nerve cells of the intestine and brain, and is able to produce signaling molecules in the brain and various proteins that can influence mood and behavior.
Secondly, modern historians and evolutionists today believe that religions and other forms of beliefs spread in the past and today in much the same way as epidemics of various microbes and viruses, albeit in the cultural space, using "infectious" ideas-memes in Richard's terminology Dawkins.
According to Russian biologists, there is no reason to believe that this process cannot take place in biological space, by means of peculiar "biomemes", which can be played by bacteria, like the medichlorians in the famous "Star Wars" that give miraculous powers to the Jedi and Sith.
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In favor of this, in their opinion, is the fact that all major religions include social rituals that contribute to the spread of disease - for example, circumcision in Judaism, Eucharist in Christianity, Hajj in Islam and rolling on the ground and bathing in the Ganges in Hinduism.
For the same reasons, according to the Panchins and Tuzikov, representatives of many branches of religion may have a negative attitude towards contraception, protected sex, vaccinations and other elements of hygiene that protect us from viruses and germs.
Where can these religious "medichlorians" be hiding? According to the authors of the article, they can be found both in the intestine and in the human brain itself, like toxoplasma, capable of penetrating the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain.
How can you find them? At the moment, as Russian biologists admit, testing this hypothesis is difficult, since our microflora contains a huge number of bacteria and viruses, the total number of which is 10 times the number of cells in our body, and the number of species of which exceeds several hundred thousand.
Today biologists study them in a very schematic form, but in the near future, as Panchins and Tuzikov note, new sequencing technologies will be created that will help reveal the role of each microbe in our body and understand if there are such "peddlers" of religion among them. In addition, if this hypothesis is correct, then the use of antibiotics should lead to a decrease in religiosity, which can, in principle, be tested already now.
