Sokolowski – nature vs. nurture controversy

So now we know that it is not nature alone, and it is not nurture alone, and we can’t even add them together and say, “well it’s 30% nature and it’s 70% nurture” that is also wrong. What it is, it’s an interaction between nature and nurture, and interaction between genes and the environment, and that’s an interplay between the genes and the environment, and I’ll talk to you more about how the environment, the genes are listening to the environment, and that’s what we mean by epigenetics – the genes are listening to what the environment is doing. And as a result of that listening more or less protein is made.  

So one thing that we need to wipe out of our thinking is deterministic thinking. We don’t talk about a gene for this, or a gene for that, and if you read in the paper that there’s a gene for being violent, someone has quoted the scientist wrong, or the scientist was describing their research wrongly, and the work that we’ve done in my lab really shows that even in the cases where we have a single gene, we’ve identified it, we cloned it, we know there’s two DNA variants, it predisposes animals to behave differently, all we have to do is alter the early environment of those animals and we completely change the gene expression, and also the behavior. So the allelic variation does not have a fixed effect in any way on the phenotype, and we can also go in later in life and boost up the gene expression in animals, and cure, or if you like- or restore the more normal behavior or that level of behavior, so that’s what the common, modern day way of thinking, it’s about gene-by environment interactions, the nature/nurture controversy is dead.