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by forty 1804 days ago
Genes are certainly affecting the behavior somehow. That doesn't mean they are relevant. Cultural and educational factors have certainly a much bigger impact on behavior than any gene related effects.

Example of flawed reasoning similar to yours: genes have probably an impact on the way we speak (it's impacting the shape of our tongue somehow, etc etc). So maybe the French have their accent due to some genetic factors, and we could predict someone's accent looking at their genes. Well it turns out in practice, if you have "French genes" and are born and raised in a US environment, you'll have an American accent indistinguishable from someone with "US genes"

The same goes with criminal behavior.

1 comments

If genes are affecting behavior [I assume you mean variation within the species], then why wouldn't they be relevant? Relevant to what?

I agree culture is the biggie (education is part of culture).

Your example gets at a correlation that can be used to make good predictions. Better-than-chance bets. The example I gave with drug addiction supposes the reader already believes that genes have a causal relationship with drug addiction. That is, a propensity to be, say, an alcoholic can be in your genome and not a result of environmental factors.