Gotta Have a Gene for This, a Gene for That
But this running with the genes just ain't where it's at... A great paper in the current issue of American Political Science Review, "Candidate Genes and Political Behavior" by Charney and English, takes down the contemporary trend in the social sciences to find a gene that makes one vote Republican, a "God gene," a gene that makes you trade on Wall Street, and so on. The major problem is that all of the studies is that they rely on a false, reductionist view of the gene that has been massively discredited over the last few decades in biology. Some key quotes: Genes do not regulate the extent to which they are capable of being transcribed in any obvious, unidirectional manner. Rather, the extent to which a gene can be transcribed is controlled by the epigenome, the complex biochemical regulatory system that turns genes on and off, is environmentally reponsive, and can influence phenotype via environmentally induced changes to gene transcribability8 with...
