Over at the Psychology Today blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist, Satoshi Kanazawa is getting a lot of attention for a really odd argument. The title basically sums it up, “If Barack Obama Is Christian, Michael Jackson Was White.”

Honestly, not much good can follow a title like that, but let’s move on. Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is arguing that President Obama is at least partially Muslim, regardless of what church he goes to or what creed he accepts. Obama is a Muslim because it’s in his genes:

[...] the fact that Barack Obama’s father was a Muslim Kenyan, descended from a long line of Muslims, will remain true until the day he dies, and nothing he ever does in his life can change half of his genes that he inherited from his father. His genes are for keeps. The fact that he has attended Christian church for the past 20 years is not going to change that. Michael Jackson looked white much longer than Barack Obama sat in the pews of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church. Obama is still as (half) Muslim as the day he was born.

Part of his argument makes sense. If a segment of the human population has interbred for a long time, they’re likely to have certain genetic markers in common which could be used to identify them. Call this a genetic fingerprint that would identify the a certain group.

Historically, I think it’s questionable whether or not Islamic Kenyans have maintained enough of a closed group to develop a fingerprint. Islam is a very diverse religion, and in many cases it seemed to live comfortably along side other religious groups for centuries. When Monophysite Christian and Muslim groups intermingled, what does that do to the group genetics?

But more to the point, what does defining a person’s religion by their genetic markers do for us? Is it a useful definition? Since what we’re looking for when we ask about someone’s religion is some understanding of their beliefs, I can’t see that it is. Unless Kanazawa is going to suggest that some people are genetically predisposed to accepting the Trinity while other are predisposed to a more straight-forward monotheism, I just don’t see the point.

Joachim Krueger, another blogger at Psychology Today, is even less impressed:

If religion is inherited through the Y-chromosome, he is fully Muslim; if it is inherited through the mitochondrial DNA, he is fully Christian; if the religious gene is located somewhere else, he has a 50-50 chance of being one or the other, and the premise of Satoshi’s post is moot. Now, Satoshi knows all this. I therefore conclude that his post is meant to entertain, enrage, and befuddle. That’s too bad because the primary purpose of these blogs is to help, advise, and educate. Am I wrong?