I recently expressed distress with the attitude that anything we don’t choose is in our genes.
In comments, political scientist Darren Schreiber noted how difficult it remains to internalize a more general perspective in research:
The actual science being done on the role of genetics and environment is proving to be more and more nuanced. If a male suffers from severe malnourishment, this can have effects that are passed to its children and grandchildren, without actually changing the genetic code and though the only connection to the descendants is through the contribution of sperm. This and other epigenetic phenomena (like fetal environment) perhaps help to explain a part of the “missing heritability” problem where estimates from twins studies are vastly higher than the explanatory power found using techniques like genome wide association studies (GWAS).
And psychology researcher Ilan Dar-Nimrod pointed to a review he did with Steven Heine that what they call the “genetic essentialist biases” on topics including “race, gender, sexual orientation, criminality, mental illness, and obesity.” They find genetic essentialist biases to occur in the general population and also in media portrayals of scientific research.
When writing on the misunderstanding of “genetic” the other day, I’d realized the connection to essentialism–in fact, I’d discussed the topic with the world’s leading researcher on the psychology of essentialism–but I hadn’t been aware of the research that had been done specifically on this topic.