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The Taste of Pain
An anonymous reader writes "The more the human genome is unraveled and previously non-genetic based attributes are now associated with a specific genetic function, such as physical and emotional pain and taste, it seems, to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes." A related article links your sense of taste to your risk for cancer, heart disease, etc.
I still lean towards nurture myself, but there is obviously a lot of complexity that we'll need to unravel before we know exactly where the balance lies.
The thing that worries me most about tagging personality to genes is that it gives some scientific justification for being racially prejudiced. I mean, if a certain genetic pool is genetically predisposed to a certain personality trait, then it only makes sense to assume that people of that group are likely to have the same traits. There's unlikely to be any hard tie between appearance and a trait, but any limited pool will harbor all traits equally, I think.
One could argue that "nature" gives rise to a similar argument - that a given culture is predisposed to give rise to certain personality traits. This even seems quite likely. So what's the difference between being prejudiced against a genetic family or a culture?
Well, to me the difference is critical. I can't escape my genetic makeup, but I can escape my culture if I choose to. (And personally this is something I've done, to an extent). Criticizing a culture is not as damning as criticizing a gene.
In any case, I do still lean towards nurture being the prime factor, and I feel that much of the research in neural networks supports this. I certainly hope we're not doomed to live out our genes. My guess is that genes provide the interface to the world, but the mind interprets it based on experience.
Cheers.
to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes
Ok, so if our personalities were more influenced by Genes, then why aren't all Australians violent people that steal, rape and kill?
I seriously think that enviorment has alot more to do with it than anything. Perhaps there are Genes that make people lean slightly more towards agressive behaviors. But I think it's much more enviormental than anything else.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
When was the last time you "thought as you pleased". Can you really control what you think? Honestly i know i cant do it 100%. Your concious mind is basically along for the ride with your un-concious mind. When you see something or hear something you really dont have much control over what goes through your mind afterwards. If everyone has such free will why do we all act so similar. Of the billions of combinations of activities a person can do every day why do we all choose nearly the same thing; get up, go to work/school, eat at 'regular' times, sleep later that night. Look around sometime and ask yourself if the people areound you really have some master plan that involves them being there at that exact time. Some people get upset when other people say that people may not be entirely responsible for their actions. This means that significant parts of our goverment, society, and justice system are flawed. If people's genes make them do it why are we putting them in jail for? I do not think we should not punish criminals for their acts but it raises questions about what we really want to expect out of people. Obviously we wantto improve society all the time but does blaming people and accusing them of just being "mean" or "evil" do any good? People are just going to act in all different ways forever and i dont believe that you can blame their genes for what they do but i also think it is unerasonable to blame the person for everything they do. Blaming a person does just as much good as blaming their genes.
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Most of the genes that play a role in behavior are explored in mice, and were discovered in the mouse genome project; in mice, you don't need to worry about inflicting only tolerable amounts of pain. So, most developments in neurogenetics come from the mouse genome project, or the C. elegans (a little tiny worm my colleagues upstairs like to study) genome project, not the human genome project.
The human genome project, as yet, has not produced a stirring new mandate for nature vs. nurture. In fact, since human beings have less than half as many different individual genes as was expected (we have less than 50,000; before the genome came out 100,000 was the most popular prediction) a great deal of our complexity/diversity must arise from something other genetics. That is to say, more complexity arising during our development, less complexity "pre-programmed". The behavior of little tiny worms is almost entirely controlled by genetics, but I wouldn't generalize from that.
Of course, we are going to find genes that influence our behavior in complex ways. There is no doubt about this; it was already known, for example, that some genes existed that impart a predilection for alchoholism. Finding such genes, individually, and further clarifying what they do should NOT be taken as an indicator of what role genes, in general, may play in specifying the diversity observed in human consciousness and behavior.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Environmeent has been scientificly proven to be the most important factor in one's personality development for a long time. I could point you a any number of twin studies that confirm thst, but you all know how to use google, so I won't waste my time.
There IS considerable statistical evidence that "gays are born that way." The proportion of world populations tends to average between 10-15% gay, despite wide differences in cultures, morals, religions, and lifestyles. That is a very strong link to there being a genetic prediliction, rather than a cultural one.
Odyssey, a show on NPR, just had a discussion about some of these same issues and the realaudio link can found here:
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http://www.wbez.org/frames.asp?readerURL=../sch
It was quite good, and I think the consensus of their panel (an MIT chemical biologist, a University of Chicago geneticist, and another panel member, I forget from where) was that we are a long way off from reducing human behavior to genes alone.
jeff
Exactly.
This is why I hate New Scientist. I think its very possible that they exist solely to keep the population misinformed.
DNA is not a complete blueprint on how to build a human being. This is why clones don't look exactly like what they are a clone of.
Besides, listening solely to geneticists on human behavior is like listening to somebody who's only designed CPUs talk about artificial intelligence; chances are, they aren't giving you the complete picture, most likely because they themselves don't have it. The human brain is self-organizing to a degree, and does much of this based on environmental influences. A clone of you would not have your memories, would not act like you, would not think like you, and would not even look exactly like you.
While I think that genetics can make us lean a little one way or the other when it comes to things like personality types, the development of a human being is such a complex process, you cannot simply attribute the way a person behaves solely to one thing.
And, of course, the whole "genetics determine personality and behavior" is just a convenient and legitimate-sounding way for some people to shirk personal responsibility. "No your honor, I didn't want to kill him, but the men in my family are genetically pre-disposed towards agressive, often murderous behavior! My dad killed my mom, so I can't be blamed for shooting that guy, because it was the murderer genes I inherited that made me do it!"