

Not in Our Genes - gruseom
http://www.bryanappleyard.com/not-in-our-genes/

======
tokenadult
This article reaches a mostly correct conclusion but not from the strongest
line of reasoning. I am blessed with the opportunity to attend the weekly
behavioral genetics seminar ("journal club") at my alma mater university each
week during the school year. That journal club includes many of the pioneers
of the Minnesota Twin Family Study. A new book about the research conducted
here has just been published by Harvard University Press

<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055469>

so readers all over the English-speaking world will get a lot of the inside
story of what has been discovered in research on monozygotic ("identical")
twins reared apart. In the local journal club I have learned about
professional articles that dispel common misconceptions about human behavioral
genetics.

Turkheimer, E. (2012). Genome wide association studies of behavior are social
science. In K. S. Plaisance & T.A.C. Reydon (Eds.) Philosophy of Behavioral
Biology (pp. 43-64). New York, NY: Springer.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer%20GWAS%...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer%20GWAS%20EWAS%20Final.pdf)

"If the history of empirical psychology has taught researchers anything, it is
that correlations between causally distant variables cannot be counted on to
lead to coherent etiological models."

Johnson, W., Turkheimer, E., Gottesman, I. I., & Bouchard, T. J. (2009).
Beyond heritability: Twin studies in behavioral research. Current Directions
in Psychological Science, 18, 217-220. [I am personally acquainted with three
of the four co-authors of this paper, one of whom regularly exchanges links
with me by email.]

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20\(2009\).pdf)

"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the
environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with
controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet
North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently
differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental
research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20\(2008\).pdf)

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an
index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the
effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that
somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There
are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of
them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size."

To sum up, the submitted article is correct insofar as it asserts that genes
are not destiny in human behavior. Monozygotic twins are from time to time
quite discordant even in characteristics that are deemed "highly heritable"
with reference to the experience of other twin pairs. The shuffle of genes
that you or I receive from parents at the beginning of life does not determine
our behavior, but simply establishes a biological substrate for the "reaction
surface" that each of us present to our individual environments. Other factors
that are properly called "environmental," both at the societal and individual
level of analysis, can and do overcome the odds influenced by individual
genomes.

------
chaud
If you don't have a background in this area and are interested in learning a
little more about epigenetics, there is a good NOVA program on it:
<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genes/>

