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"Over a decade ago, "all human behavioral traits are heritable" was stated as the first law of behavior genetics". A new study looked at whether trust was affected by genetics.
The authors found that "genetic influences are smaller for trust, and propose that experiences with or observations of the behavior of other people shape trust more strongly than other traits".
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"Trust" Not Influenced By Genetics
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I'm wearing PAMPERS!!
(Score: 1) by opinionated_science on Thursday April 10 2014, @07:56PM
The word "trait" is the neutral word from biology. It is in common usage for (Mendelian) genetics. (http://www.uni.edu/walsh/genetics.html). It did not used to be "rigorous", but with the human genome sequence in hand, it is now known at the molecular level - well *almost*, but every new genome helps... The use SNP microarrays to probe recombination blocks (sites where chromsomes tend to mix), is providing ever clear maps of what constitutes a genetic trait, although I agree the language is not unambiguous.
The field of epigenetics has shown that it is not just genetics but environment too (via methylation, it appears).
The problem I was trying to articulate is even with a genetic control, "trust" is a poorly defined metric. Humans in society are not the same as lab animals. There are a great many things that go into making a person, and family/society groups dominate that.
For example, a problem with using twins is the fundamental biology that they are genotype identical, but not phenotype identical. Usually one is slightly larger....you want to bet that doesn't make a difference?
(Score: 1) by hellcat on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:17AM
And I studied 'traits' within psychology. The word itself can be neutral, but our definition of the trait itself is influenced by many factors: personal, cultural, academic and probably social. And I find the soft science's ability to define almost anything to be rather poor.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, and would up the ante. We *think* we have a handle on what influences (any given) trait, but the complexity of genetic expression into phenotype also increases at apparently faster rates.
I remember learning about introns and exons - junk dna. Exons don't do anything we were taught. Chuckle. Mitochondrial dna, not important. Ha. Genetic repair machinery - infallable. Ha. Humans must have a 100,000 genes, because we're so much more complex than a mouse. Double ha.
By the way, I'm not the one laughing here, I'm paraphrasing Mother Nature. She always has the last laugh.
(sorry for the long delay - long overdue vacation - of two days - way overworked!)
(Score: 1) by opinionated_science on Wednesday April 16 2014, @11:30AM
wrong way around! Exons are the coding (i.e. turned into amino acids/protein) and the Introns are the spacing. Note, despite the comment misconception, many(!) biologists never really thought it was "junk DNA", since biology is necessarily quite conservative with resources. However, not knowing what is does specifically, gets communicated to the outside world as "junk". We now now it is really very important.
There is no correlation between number of genes and organism complexity (I think this is called the C-paradox).
The mechanism of alternative splicing is one such way in which greater complexity is obtained from few genes. The same stretch of DNA can produce different proteins, and these proteins can also be modified to function in different roles.
Look around the natural world, and complex "preprogrammed" behaviour is everywhere. It may be something that is a "threshold" effect - you need a certain amount of "complexity" to get certain forms of intelligence, say. Just rambling...