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.

Comments

Nature vs. Nurture

[localman]

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.

Enviorment, not Genes for personality...

[TibbonZero]

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.

Various complaints about the blurb

[sam_handelman]

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.