So now we know that it is not nature alone, and it is not nurture alone, and we can\u2019t even add them together and say, \u201cwell it\u2019s 30% nature and it\u2019s 70% nurture\u201d that is also wrong. What it is, it\u2019s an interaction between nature and nurture, and interaction between genes and the environment, and that\u2019s an interplay between the genes and the environment, and I\u2019ll talk to you more about how the environment, the genes are listening to the environment, and that\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So one thing that we need to wipe out of our thinking is deterministic thinking. We don\u2019t talk about a gene for this, or a gene for that, and if you read in the paper that there\u2019s a gene for being violent, someone has quoted the scientist wrong, or the scientist was describing their research wrongly, and the work that we\u2019ve done in my lab really shows that even in the cases where we have a single gene, we\u2019ve identified it, we cloned it, we know there\u2019s 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\u2019s what the common, modern day way of thinking, it\u2019s about gene-by environment interactions, the nature\/nurture controversy is dead. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So now we know that it is not nature alone, and it is not nurture alone, and we can\u2019t even add them together and say, \u201cwell it\u2019s 30% nature and it\u2019s 70% nurture\u201d that is also wrong. What it is, it\u2019s an interaction between nature and nurture, and interaction between genes and the environment, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1271","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1272,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1271\/revisions\/1272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}