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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.
The taste buds on your tongue are simply sensors, like your eyes, ears, nose, and hands. In fact, taste buds represent the least of all complex sensors of the human body. A taste bud is simply a receptor, waiting to bind to a molecule in solution in your mouth. Once the receptor binds to the molecule, it generates a signal that says, "bitter!" or "sweet!". Combinations of types of "bitter" and "sweet" represent the taste of the food, excluding molecules in the gas phase which are picked up by the nose. I read there were 27 or so types of "bitter" and only two types of "sweet".
Even a human nose is more sensitive than human taste buds. There are over a hundred different types of receptors in the human nose. (And thousands in the dog nose.) Looking at one's ears or eyes, the complexity involved in generating a highly analog signal, over time, and having that signal correctly analyzed is incredible.
And..we are not yet even talking about cerebral functions like reason, imagination, moods, memory, or even behavioral instinct!
Yes, finding the genes that code for the receptors of the tongue is really great. But do not assume that the amazing complexity of the human body, even excluding the brain, will be fully understood for quite a bit of time.
Salis
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It seems to me, on a philisophical note, that as the genome continues to be explored, we will continue to be surprised at what's found. However, the really interesting part will be when the project is finished, and we discover what was NOT found.
_Am
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.
You scientist schmucks.
Ack, I really need to quit watching mob movies.
(FYI: This was meant to be funny, it's saturday ... loosen up a bit ...)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
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
I still think it's a combination of the two. My cousin and I attended the same private school as children, yet she completed K through 12 at the school, while I only spent 4 years there. Our IQ's are nearly identical, but she had the better learning environment.
She's currently a doctor, while I work as a civilian for the government.
I wish luck would've been more on her side. Poor girl.
Sadly, I must cut this post short; I need to file a grievance with the Union, blame my co-workers for my ineptitude, and take the rest of the day off.
Dammit, someone changed my Freecell settings again... I'm taking a coffee break.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
"...it seems, to me, that our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes."
What made it seem like that to you? Genes, I guess.
If he hadn't left us so prematurely, I'm sure the recent spate of genetic determinism would have given him enough material for another edition or two of The Mismeasure of Man .
RIP, Mr. Gould. You tried.
Chicken, pain tastes like chicken..
my sig
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.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.
In this case it's well worth it to RTFA:
She's lovely
Maybe it's just in my genetic makeup to fancy raven haired beauties who lick lollypops... Rrr.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
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.
It cannot be completely blamed neither upon genetics or enviromnent. It's a mix.
The body, including the brain, is mostly determined by the genes. The brain is a net of interconnected neurons, that everyone knows. What not everyone knows is that whatever we knows is not actually "recorded" on the neurons, but in the synapsis, that is, the brain interconnections.
We learn and reason mostly by electrical impulses flowing through the aformentioned net. There are basically 2 types of impulses: inhibitive and excitative. The results of a reasoning (that is, initial input everything you can "sense", final output your reaction) depends on how these impulses flow, what depends what sort of impulse reaches each neuron.
The ways these impulses flows depends on each neuron and each neuron is more likely to propagate one sort of impulse rather than the other (e.g 30% chance to propagate inhibitive and 70% excitative). But the sort of impulse that flows through a neuron can make it change its tendency (say, if a neuron gets more inhibitive impulses than excitative, in time the neuron raises its own lilkeliness to propagate inhibitive impulses).
Thus, the learning process depends, initially on two factors: the structure at time 0 (the initial structure, e.g. the brain when you are born) and the structure at the time a person receive the impulses (the brain after experimenting and processing all the impulses one got up to now). That means, genetics influence your behaviour because your brain is biased by the structure it has when you are born, but the environment is the one that provides the impulses, and because the sort of impulses can change the neuron's tendencies, you may not develop some tendencies you had when you were born.
In the end, your personality is a result of what you were in the beginning and by everything that happens. You may have a tendency to kill, but not develop it because a nice environment, and otherwise you may be initially a good natured person, and yet because a bloody murderer if you live in an environment that demands it.
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.
Yea, I can only wish. My father is quite the ladies' man while I am reading slashdot.
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.
I think it is because we all like food and shelter and that is what it takes to get it.
So tell me... what got you inflicted with the baby-producing disease known as heterosexuality? Were you born that way? Of course not, you decided somewhere along the way that you just simply like the opposite sex. Is my sarcasm showing yet?
If you felt like your sexual choices were natural, then why do you assume (out of ignorance) that gays didn't feel their sexual development was natural as well? Why would anyone choose to be discriminated against???
On the other hand, if you clearly believe you decided to be straight, then embrace freedom and let others make their own choices.
Either way, your tired old thinking is so... twentieth century!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
This has linked COMT with a gene. (for those who didn't read the article it "cleans up" after a dopamine chemical linked in sensing pain)
Is it really all that revealing that COMT production is genetically based. Anymore than it is to say insulin production is genetically based.
Regardless, the whole "nature v. nurture" debate is a futile argument when it comes to explaining individual action and the personality that defines those actions.
Esp. when one has a much more reliable and immediate explanation for one's actions, which is to say conscious "choice." Something which we have a much more intimate connection to.
(Sure it's easy to say our conscious choices are mere illusion created from a chain of causation in a reductionist universe... of course doing requires that "illusion" to believe in the reality of reductionism.)
At best genetics and enviorrment are probability guidelines in judging the possible future actions/personalities of an individual. However they are a piss poor way to explain human actions as a whole.
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!"
Trying to prove their ideas "scientifically" is an idea that has been taken up by the far left and the far right in the past, and many of the scientific conclusions of both left and right have over time been shown to be ridiculous. On the left you have the Marxist tradition of "scientific socialism" that "scientifically proves" that there is a dialectically material force of history that will lead to the unstoppable triumph of communism. On the right you have eugenics, the Bell Curve, and "science" proving socially darwinistic ideas, and that human behavior is genetically determined. These ideas, both the scientific socialist and eugenic science ideas were very popular in the late 19th century and early 20th century, but time has shown massive gaps in both of these body of ideas, and they both also lead to some extent to the massive exterminations carried out under Hitler and Stalin. But aside from the toll of ideas, is the simple fact that I think time has shown that many of these so-called scientific ideas have a lot of holes in them.
When a scientist points his telescope at the sky, it doesn't really have much of a social effect on earth nowadays (although centuries ago, Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy for touting the Copernican system, and Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his works on Copernican astronomy). When the lens is pointed at humans however, especially human behavior, you are sure that there will be plenty of people grabbing "scientific" research and using it to push their social agendas. So much so, that I have an enormous amount of skepticism about virtually any "scientific" model of human behavior, including psychiatry and psychology. That someone has "scientific" proof of some aspect of human behavior, in this case, that it's predetermined by genetics, really has to be taken with a grain of salt. As do anthropological and sociological studies that show humans are generally better off cooperating and working for the greater good (social anarchism) as opposed to competing (capitalism). These kind of ideas usually break down into left wing and right wing people either supporting or disputing the theories, breaking down among political lines, and so on and so forth, I can't think of anything more unscientific than that. That it's been scientifically proven that "our personalities appear to be much less influenced by out environment and more by our genes" is the epitomy of what sounds like political propaganda - the nurture versus nature debate is an ancient philosophical debate, and from my discussions with scientists who know more about the genome project than I do, they are barely able to use the information they have cataloged to solve medical problems (despite the hype - which is needed for funding), never mind have scientifically set in stone the answer to a fundamental philosophical question about human nature. I take this news with a huge grain of salt.
Why such loaded words? According to the research cited, subjects felt different amounts of pain from the same stimulus. If I feel pain that I'd rate at 6 on a scale of 0 to 10, and after the same stimulus someone else rated their pain a 3, all that says is I am feeling more pain than the other person. It does not say anything about how well I can withstand pain.
It extremely common for people to believe that the same amount of tissue damage causes the same amount of pain for anyone. However, pain researchers knew long before this study that this belief is a fallacy. [Pain: The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wall, Columbia University Press, 2000.]
Perception of pain is a complex event, modified by genetics, culture, experience, anxiety level, perceived purpose of the pain, expected duration, etc. This study is looking at a single variable, and the only thing really interesting is that it suggests that some of the inherited variability is tied to a alleles of a specific gene.
Denise
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus
Ask any modern psychologist and they'll tell you that the only people who talk about Nature versus Nurture are Psych 101 students. The concept is old and buried (as the field has come to the realization that psychological principles are more unified in nature).
A correlary would for someone to say that big iron and dumb terminals are the way of the future because your Comp Sci 101 handbook published in 1978 says so.
Someone else mentioned the pseudo-science of eugenics and social darwinism. Both are known to be BS. The problem is that it took a long time for the field of psychology to shake them and become a formal science.
The problem is that most people think it is so "obvious" that the field can be mastered in a sixteen week freshman level course. People like that are the Script Kiddies of the psych world.
What is music when you despise all sound?