Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

"Instead, 'one large group of scientists,' a 'vanguard' that Shenk has labeled 'the interactionists,' insists that the old genes-plus-environment model (G+E) must be jettisoned and replaced by a model they call GxE, emphasizing 'the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment.' They don't discount heredity, as the old blank-slate hypothesis of human nature once did. Instead, they assert that "genes powerfully influence the formation of all traits, from eye color to intelligence, but rarely dictate precisely what those traits will be."

That's a pretty good summation of current human behavioral genetics research. An earlier comment of mine here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=842315

cited and linked to a recent publication on this issue,

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220.

with some interesting new ideas from researchers who have been working on human behavioral genetics longer than most HN readers have been alive.

Agreed. GxE is certainly better then G+E, but that doesn't mean there's a genius in all of us.

I see this kind of response to progress in science all the time. If you change the way you conceive of a problem, like genes and environment, people suddenly think that all the beliefs about genetics from the past are wrong. But GxE doesn't mean that genetics isn't important all of a sudden, simple because in the days of G+E it was important. In fact, I would argue that GXE makes G MORE critical.

In a computer science class I took, our professor would multiply our homework and our exam grades instead of adding them. This way, even if you aced your homework, a 0 on an exam would give you a 0 overall (a solution to the inherent problems of team projects). The same is true for genetics- you can have all the good environment you want, if you ain't got the genes you're screwed (Down's syndrome). Of course, the same is true for environment; take a child with the best genes in the world and put it in a box during the early periods of its life, and it will never learn language well enough to even take an IQ test.

This reminds me when epigenetics started getting a lot of press, IDers were coming out in droves saying, "look! Richard Dawkins is wrong! The evolutionists are wrong!". But epigenetics doesn't mean evolution is wrong any more than GxE means that genetics aren't pretty damn significant.

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