MOSCOW, November 26 - RIA Novosti . Religion can be conceived in our civilization by the existence of a particular population of bacteria in our microflora that "reprogram" our minds on faith in supernatural entities, say biologists from Moscow State University in a paper published in the journal Biology Direct.
In recent years, biologists have discovered many examples of parasites that not only uses the host organism for growth, but also directly control its behavior. For example, the Wolbachia bacterium causes the insects to actively proliferate and thus distribute itself, and the larvae of flies, bees gorbatok forced to run from the hive and to behave like a "zombie".
Mushrooms of the genus Ophiocordyceps learned to directly control the behavior of ants, causing them to die in a well-defined point on the anthill to infect as many new victims as possible.
The most common parasite of domestic cats, Toxoplasma-celled creature, goes even further. It can change the behavior of a mammal infected her, causing irreversible changes in the brain that makes mice "Fearless" at the sight and smell of cats and humans - suicidal and irrational actions.
Alexander and Yuri Panchin, biologists from Moscow State University, and colleague Alexander Tuzikov assume that part or all of the religions that exist in the world today can be a "product" of the activities of microbes with similar characteristics, living in our intestines, or other body parts .
For the benefit of their presence says several factors. Firstly, there is no doubt that the intestinal microflora controls our appetite, tendency to obesity and even food preferences, affecting the nerve cells of the intestine and brain, and can produce signaling molecules of the brain and various proteins that can affect mood and behavior.
Secondly, modern historians and evolutionists now believe that religion and other forms of belief spread in the past and today, about the same as the epidemic of various microbes and viruses, while in the cultural space, using the "infectious" ideas-memes in Richard terminology Dawkins.
According to Russian biologists, there is no reason to believe that this process can not occur in the biological space through the original "biomemov", in the role of bacteria which can act like medihlorianam in the famous "Star Wars", giving the miraculous powers of Jedi and Sith.
In favor of this, in their opinion, it is the fact that all the major religions include public rituals that promote the spread of disease - for example, circumcision in Judaism, evharistiya in Christianity, the Hajj in Islam, and skating on the ground and bathing in the Ganges in Hinduism.
For these same reasons, according Panchin and Tuzikova, representatives of many branches of religion may have a negative attitude to contraception, safer sex, vaccination and other health elements that protect us from viruses and bacteria.
Where can hide these religious "medihloriany"? As the authors say, they can be located in the intestine, and in the human brain, like toxoplasma, able to penetrate the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain.
How can they be found? At the moment, as acknowledged by the Russian biologists to test this hypothesis it is difficult, because our microflora contains a huge number of bacteria and viruses, whose total number is 10 times the number of cells in our body, and the number of species of which more than a few hundred thousand.
Today, biologists are studying them in a very schematic form, but in the near future, as noted Panchin and Tuzikov, will create new sequencing technologies, which will help to uncover the role of each microbe in our body and see if any of them are similar to the "hawkers" religion. Moreover, if this hypothesis is correct, then the use of antibiotics should lead to a decrease in religion, in principle it is possible to verify immediately.
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