Genetics is far from idiotic, it's popular conceptions of genetics as absolutely deterministic that are idiotic. Yes genetics works better statistically than on individuals but it still predicts with accuracy. An extra chromosome 23 predicts subnormal intelligence with superb accuracy.
Genetics is far from idiotic, it's popular conceptions of genetics as absolutely deterministic that are idiotic. Yes genetics works better statistically than on individuals but it still predicts with accuracy. An extra chromosome 23 predicts subnormal intelligence with superb accuracy.
In general it is not possible to determine any aspect of someone's character from their genetic profile, unless they have a specific abnormality like the one you cite.
It is not generally possible to distinguish between the effects of genetic factors, the progress of development in the womb (eg exposure to hormones) and experiences during & after birth when examining behaviour or intellectual performance.
The brain is so plastic, the initial genetic pattern is barely visible in the adult, unless, as you say, there is a significant abnormality. Add to that the way that genes are switched on & off even in the living animal, and you have a perfect storm of data.
The genetic inheritance of a normal individual cannot be in any way used to predict their intellectual or emotional behaviour.
And that is demonstrated in the way that the variance in the results of tests of mental characteristics within groups that can be determined genetically (gender, eye colour) is much bigger than the variance between such groups.
I omit race from that statement because race can't be determined genetically - there has been way too much mixing over the centuries. And that, in itself, suggests strongly that anyone thinking there is a link between race & intelligence "because of genetics" is not - shall we say politely - quite a full pound; or that they have an agenda that has nothing to do with science.
There is no specific addiction gene but there are genetic variations that can confidently predict a tendency for addiction. Is a tendency for addiction an emotional behavior?
If you remain here for much time, you'll notice that I often mention ratios. Often with an accompanying, "And I don't know what that ratio is in individual instances or as a generality." The influence ratios of genetics, environment and nurture are a frequent topic of debate. I am not one to completely dismiss any of them. People generally have no issue with genetic influence until it touches a 3rd rail issue like intelligence. Another ratio appears; how many are looking at the technical merits of the issue and how many don't like a possible resultant conclusion. History shows that the idea has led to some awful things and "where does this lead/what is the objective" is an influencer with me. There is too much that is unknown for me to argue the amount of influence under various situations.
Recently an eye surgeon discussing a spot on my wife's eye said that if she was white, she would be more concerned about it being cancer but because she is highly melanated it is more likely to be melanosis than malignant. More likely was not the only decision point and she had a biopsy. Melanosis.
As a retired test engineer my bias is toward the idea that testing does tell you something although I can tell you about things with more precision than people.
"There is no specific addiction gene but there are genetic variations that can confidently predict a tendency for addiction."
Well there is definitely a genetic component to alcoholism. I won't speak for other addictions,, which can be based on intermittent reward more than on substances, but the evidence for alcoholism being genetic is very strong. For one thing it is attenuated over time (millennia); Chinese have had alcohol longer than anyone and you won't see a lot of Chinese in drunk tanks. Alcoholics tend to have fewer children and so pass on the genes less.
In those societies most recently introduced to alcohol like native Americans it can be so bad that the stuff is banned in some places, with a majority of adults who have tried it end up being hooked.
In a conversation with a coworker who is Navajo I asked why the Navajo didn't open casinos like the other tribes to bring in money. His reply was, "We already have alcohol and drug addiction. Should we add gambling addiction to our misery?" Just one man's opinion but he clearly saw a generalized tendency for addiction in his tribe. But he could have been speaking from stated views of tribal leadership too.
What you wrote is a strong case for alcoholism being specific to alcohol, neither affirming nor denying a generalized tendency for addiction in general.
The people I've been chatting to would say "drugs & alcohol" too. It's not surprising when you think about what their families have been through, and how badly they still get treated sometimes. The Navajo rez has terrible problems with the mess left behind from uranium mining, from what I've been told.
The Standing Rock Sioux are trying to replace their casino income with wind generation - they got good funding for it after the occupation in 2016/17, and North Dakota has a lot of wind to spare. The casino is a good employer there, though, & I didn't hear much about the tribe itself having a gambling problem - they mostly take cash off the townspeople.
Interesting what you can pick up if you're willing to chat with people!
It's widely accepted that there are many illnesses that are made more likely by minor genetic variations, and that alcoholism in particular has a genetic component in some cases, although isolating specific genes is difficult so it may still turn out that it's the product of either nurture or some specifically epigenetic changes.
The indigenous Americans and Australians I have spoken to - some of whom are recovering alcoholics and some are well-respected therapists - say that the problems with drugs & alcohol in indigenous communities are to do with cultural stress & inherited trauma which is again thought to be an epigenetic phenomenon. When parents & grand parents were stolen as children & placed in residential schools where they were abused, starved, beaten for speaking their own language and isolated from their parents, it's not surprising that there are problems in many families with parenting style and skills. They are finding that encouraging people to re-learn their culture is a great help, and they are developing successful treatments for both addiction and PTSD that are a good cultural fit with indigenous beliefs.
Some tribes are trying prohibition but this is generally no more successful than it was in the 20's.
In the early days of colonisation, indigenous societies had no cultural patterns available to them to deal with booze, when the settlers had had centuries to develop coping strategies - almost like the European diseases for which indigenous people had no antibodies.
The Chinese, equally, have been exposed to alcohol for centuries - although they did experience serious problems when the British introduced opium for the first time.
Most therapists these days regard addiction as an illness rather than a behaviour, but I'm not saying there aren't tendencies - particularly to illness & sometimes even mental illness - that relate to genetics.
But the big general stuff, like "intelligence"? Far too complex to tie to any gene, or even a bunch of genes. Most people who spout off about it can't even define what they mean by it, in any rational sense. Environment, upbringing, what your grandma ate & how much practice you've had at intelligence tests all strongly affect the outcomes, even when the test was designed by someone who comes from the same cultural background as you.
I'm all for applying a battery of aptitude tests to see who might do well with the chance to train for a job, as long as the tests are broadly related to the job, and there are a wide enough range of tests to give the employer some sort of general picture. Your example of the military using a battery of aptitude tests is a good example - and even then half the people who passed the tests didn't make it through the training. But I do wonder if some of the people who failed the tests would have done better? Did they waste some good applicants? Testing is tricky stuff when you're dealing with people.
There are companies (and worse, schools) that use a "general intelligence test" to evaluate people & that's just silly. I did one for IBM many years ago, got offered the job but turned it down because I didn't want to work with the kind of person who thought those tests were fair. They were clearly so biased, I lost interest. Happy days when you could afford to turn down a job!
The trouble with testing people's psychology is that often it tells you more about the people who designed the test than the people taking it. Medical tests are different, as are the sort of tests you can do on a newly designed widget.
The culling process that I mentioned was not necessarily about eliminating people who were unsuited to the field. The tests were curved, and each question was weighted by its history. If I missed a question considered to be harder (more people historically got it wrong) than someone missing an easier question resulted in me acing the test and the other person getting a 99. The people scoring at the bottom were culled, though it was a bit like ranking the Apostles. The people who were culled might have been capable, but the objective was a heartless best attempt to find the "most" capable.
The psychology part was (I think) pertaining to suitability for combat. Most of the military people who went to Vietnam (my war) never fired their rifle. Many of those people were subject to incoming fire and were wounded or killed even though they were not active combatants. You didn't want somebody who was likely to have a cold rifle barrel at the end of contact because he was laying low. Laying low during a mortar attack and during a small arms firefight are different in that one is logical, the other is a hazard to your comrades. Psychology probably has some validity as a predictor, some.
While I would never argue that tests are flawless or without any bias, there are times when they are appropriate when they are the best that we can do.
People who can design THAT level of testing get my complete admiration - and probably had experience on the front line as well as book learning. Marking those tests was as difficult as designing them, too - they had to be the result of a lot of iterations of adjustment, re-testing the test & checking what happened in reality.
But that's a test for a very specific situation. General intelligence tests have to be more, well, general. And it's so much harder to evaluate how accurate they are - there's no validation tests that can be guaranteed to be correct and objective, whereas your military test had one very specific and very objective deciding factor: were the guys who passed able to operate under fire?
There's a big difference between using psychological testing in such a very specific situation with such a specific success criterion, & using data from thousands of tests to make grand statements about whole populations.
When you do that, you can make reasonable claims about the statistics you generate, but you need to know the background of how the tests were carried out in some detail to evaluate their real value. I've seen many examples of "standardised" tests that could easily be misinterpreted, and seen papers showing that people who had practiced those tests & been given detailed feedback about their results were able to improve their scores significantly. In those circumstances, well-prepared candidates are going to appear more intelligent and the results are going to be completely unreliable but still have the veneer of respectable science.
Genetics is far from idiotic, it's popular conceptions of genetics as absolutely deterministic that are idiotic. Yes genetics works better statistically than on individuals but it still predicts with accuracy. An extra chromosome 23 predicts subnormal intelligence with superb accuracy.
But that's an extreme example, an anomaly.
In general it is not possible to determine any aspect of someone's character from their genetic profile, unless they have a specific abnormality like the one you cite.
It is not generally possible to distinguish between the effects of genetic factors, the progress of development in the womb (eg exposure to hormones) and experiences during & after birth when examining behaviour or intellectual performance.
The brain is so plastic, the initial genetic pattern is barely visible in the adult, unless, as you say, there is a significant abnormality. Add to that the way that genes are switched on & off even in the living animal, and you have a perfect storm of data.
The genetic inheritance of a normal individual cannot be in any way used to predict their intellectual or emotional behaviour.
And that is demonstrated in the way that the variance in the results of tests of mental characteristics within groups that can be determined genetically (gender, eye colour) is much bigger than the variance between such groups.
I omit race from that statement because race can't be determined genetically - there has been way too much mixing over the centuries. And that, in itself, suggests strongly that anyone thinking there is a link between race & intelligence "because of genetics" is not - shall we say politely - quite a full pound; or that they have an agenda that has nothing to do with science.
There is no specific addiction gene but there are genetic variations that can confidently predict a tendency for addiction. Is a tendency for addiction an emotional behavior?
If you remain here for much time, you'll notice that I often mention ratios. Often with an accompanying, "And I don't know what that ratio is in individual instances or as a generality." The influence ratios of genetics, environment and nurture are a frequent topic of debate. I am not one to completely dismiss any of them. People generally have no issue with genetic influence until it touches a 3rd rail issue like intelligence. Another ratio appears; how many are looking at the technical merits of the issue and how many don't like a possible resultant conclusion. History shows that the idea has led to some awful things and "where does this lead/what is the objective" is an influencer with me. There is too much that is unknown for me to argue the amount of influence under various situations.
Recently an eye surgeon discussing a spot on my wife's eye said that if she was white, she would be more concerned about it being cancer but because she is highly melanated it is more likely to be melanosis than malignant. More likely was not the only decision point and she had a biopsy. Melanosis.
As a retired test engineer my bias is toward the idea that testing does tell you something although I can tell you about things with more precision than people.
"There is no specific addiction gene but there are genetic variations that can confidently predict a tendency for addiction."
Well there is definitely a genetic component to alcoholism. I won't speak for other addictions,, which can be based on intermittent reward more than on substances, but the evidence for alcoholism being genetic is very strong. For one thing it is attenuated over time (millennia); Chinese have had alcohol longer than anyone and you won't see a lot of Chinese in drunk tanks. Alcoholics tend to have fewer children and so pass on the genes less.
In those societies most recently introduced to alcohol like native Americans it can be so bad that the stuff is banned in some places, with a majority of adults who have tried it end up being hooked.
In a conversation with a coworker who is Navajo I asked why the Navajo didn't open casinos like the other tribes to bring in money. His reply was, "We already have alcohol and drug addiction. Should we add gambling addiction to our misery?" Just one man's opinion but he clearly saw a generalized tendency for addiction in his tribe. But he could have been speaking from stated views of tribal leadership too.
What you wrote is a strong case for alcoholism being specific to alcohol, neither affirming nor denying a generalized tendency for addiction in general.
The people I've been chatting to would say "drugs & alcohol" too. It's not surprising when you think about what their families have been through, and how badly they still get treated sometimes. The Navajo rez has terrible problems with the mess left behind from uranium mining, from what I've been told.
The Standing Rock Sioux are trying to replace their casino income with wind generation - they got good funding for it after the occupation in 2016/17, and North Dakota has a lot of wind to spare. The casino is a good employer there, though, & I didn't hear much about the tribe itself having a gambling problem - they mostly take cash off the townspeople.
Interesting what you can pick up if you're willing to chat with people!
It's widely accepted that there are many illnesses that are made more likely by minor genetic variations, and that alcoholism in particular has a genetic component in some cases, although isolating specific genes is difficult so it may still turn out that it's the product of either nurture or some specifically epigenetic changes.
The indigenous Americans and Australians I have spoken to - some of whom are recovering alcoholics and some are well-respected therapists - say that the problems with drugs & alcohol in indigenous communities are to do with cultural stress & inherited trauma which is again thought to be an epigenetic phenomenon. When parents & grand parents were stolen as children & placed in residential schools where they were abused, starved, beaten for speaking their own language and isolated from their parents, it's not surprising that there are problems in many families with parenting style and skills. They are finding that encouraging people to re-learn their culture is a great help, and they are developing successful treatments for both addiction and PTSD that are a good cultural fit with indigenous beliefs.
Some tribes are trying prohibition but this is generally no more successful than it was in the 20's.
In the early days of colonisation, indigenous societies had no cultural patterns available to them to deal with booze, when the settlers had had centuries to develop coping strategies - almost like the European diseases for which indigenous people had no antibodies.
The Chinese, equally, have been exposed to alcohol for centuries - although they did experience serious problems when the British introduced opium for the first time.
Most therapists these days regard addiction as an illness rather than a behaviour, but I'm not saying there aren't tendencies - particularly to illness & sometimes even mental illness - that relate to genetics.
But the big general stuff, like "intelligence"? Far too complex to tie to any gene, or even a bunch of genes. Most people who spout off about it can't even define what they mean by it, in any rational sense. Environment, upbringing, what your grandma ate & how much practice you've had at intelligence tests all strongly affect the outcomes, even when the test was designed by someone who comes from the same cultural background as you.
I'm all for applying a battery of aptitude tests to see who might do well with the chance to train for a job, as long as the tests are broadly related to the job, and there are a wide enough range of tests to give the employer some sort of general picture. Your example of the military using a battery of aptitude tests is a good example - and even then half the people who passed the tests didn't make it through the training. But I do wonder if some of the people who failed the tests would have done better? Did they waste some good applicants? Testing is tricky stuff when you're dealing with people.
There are companies (and worse, schools) that use a "general intelligence test" to evaluate people & that's just silly. I did one for IBM many years ago, got offered the job but turned it down because I didn't want to work with the kind of person who thought those tests were fair. They were clearly so biased, I lost interest. Happy days when you could afford to turn down a job!
The trouble with testing people's psychology is that often it tells you more about the people who designed the test than the people taking it. Medical tests are different, as are the sort of tests you can do on a newly designed widget.
The culling process that I mentioned was not necessarily about eliminating people who were unsuited to the field. The tests were curved, and each question was weighted by its history. If I missed a question considered to be harder (more people historically got it wrong) than someone missing an easier question resulted in me acing the test and the other person getting a 99. The people scoring at the bottom were culled, though it was a bit like ranking the Apostles. The people who were culled might have been capable, but the objective was a heartless best attempt to find the "most" capable.
The psychology part was (I think) pertaining to suitability for combat. Most of the military people who went to Vietnam (my war) never fired their rifle. Many of those people were subject to incoming fire and were wounded or killed even though they were not active combatants. You didn't want somebody who was likely to have a cold rifle barrel at the end of contact because he was laying low. Laying low during a mortar attack and during a small arms firefight are different in that one is logical, the other is a hazard to your comrades. Psychology probably has some validity as a predictor, some.
While I would never argue that tests are flawless or without any bias, there are times when they are appropriate when they are the best that we can do.
People who can design THAT level of testing get my complete admiration - and probably had experience on the front line as well as book learning. Marking those tests was as difficult as designing them, too - they had to be the result of a lot of iterations of adjustment, re-testing the test & checking what happened in reality.
But that's a test for a very specific situation. General intelligence tests have to be more, well, general. And it's so much harder to evaluate how accurate they are - there's no validation tests that can be guaranteed to be correct and objective, whereas your military test had one very specific and very objective deciding factor: were the guys who passed able to operate under fire?
There's a big difference between using psychological testing in such a very specific situation with such a specific success criterion, & using data from thousands of tests to make grand statements about whole populations.
When you do that, you can make reasonable claims about the statistics you generate, but you need to know the background of how the tests were carried out in some detail to evaluate their real value. I've seen many examples of "standardised" tests that could easily be misinterpreted, and seen papers showing that people who had practiced those tests & been given detailed feedback about their results were able to improve their scores significantly. In those circumstances, well-prepared candidates are going to appear more intelligent and the results are going to be completely unreliable but still have the veneer of respectable science.
Thanks for articulating more fully what I intended in my comment.
Some people need stuff spelled out for them in detail...
Didn't mean to step in but it was related to another conversation I was involved in!