genetic determinism

The CRISPR babies scientist has been fired. (If not worse.) From the news: “CRISPR-baby scientist fired by university” Investigation by Chinese authorities finds He Jiankui broke national regulations in his controversial work on gene-edited babies.” “He provoked international outcry last November when he revealed that he had used the gene-editing technique CRISPR– Cas9 to modify human embryos in an effort to make them resistant to HIV; the embryos were then implanted into a woman and produced twin girls, Nana and Lulu, in November. According to the investigation’s findings, He is fully to blame for the gene-editing project, and flouted regulations. (David Cyranoski, Nature) The girls’ father was HIV-positive. The main reason some of us forebore to dance on the guy’s Read More ›

If so, it’s remarkable outcome for genome mapping: So it has been dawning on us is that there is no prior plan or blueprint for development: Instructions are created on the hoof, far more intelligently than is possible from dumb DNA. That is why today’s molecular biologists are reporting “cognitive resources” in cells; “bio-information intelligence”; “cell intelligence”; “metabolic memory”; and “cell knowledge”—all terms appearing in recent literature.1,2 “Do cells think?” is the title of a 2007 paper in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences.3 On the other hand the assumed developmental “program” coded in a genotype has never been described. It is such discoveries that are turning our ideas of genetic causation inside out. We have traditionally thought of cell Read More ›

It had to happen: Someone making epigenetics stand in for the selfish gene, an all-purpose gene-splain: If epigenetic research utilizing these new technologies will successfully shed some light in disease prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, then the research can expand to study epigenetics related to human behavior and moods. Aggression, violence, adultery, sexual preferences, risk-taking, happiness, depression, and even spirituality may all be affected by gene regulation, including epigenetics, via mechanisms not yet precisely defined. There also is much evidence that diet, sleep, fasting, exercise, and stress regulate gene expression but here, too, the way they do it needs to be explored. Incorporating these new epigenetic technologies when examining the multiple biological factors that regulate gene expression will better illuminate whether Read More ›

That guy at Nature who rides “Genetic determinism rides again” was right. Now, from ScienceDaily: For the first time, locations on the human genome have been identified that can explain differences in meaning in life between individuals. This is the result of research conducted in over 220,000 individuals by Professor Meike Bartels and PhD student Bart Baselmans from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The researchers identified two genetic variants for meaning in life and six genetic variants for happiness. The results were published this week in the scientific journal Scientific Reports. The fact that genetic variants for a meaning in life have been found indicates that everyone is different and that differences between people in complex processes such as a meaning Read More ›

Reviewing behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, a history of medicine prof writes, Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra Y chromosome (XYY genotype) were prone to violence. Hereditarian books such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Nicholas Wade’s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritance (see N. Comfort Nature 513, 306–307; 2014) exploited their respective scientific and cultural moments, leveraging the cultural authority of science to advance a discredited, undemocratic agenda. Although Blueprint is cut from different ideological cloth, the consequences could Read More ›