I'm currently reading Steven Pinker's 'The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature' (a birthday present from my younger brother), which I'd highly recommend. I seem to be on sort of an evolutionary psychology roll at the moment, having recently finished Matt Ridley's 'Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human' (also highly recommended) as well. The genetic aspect of psychology was always something that bored me at A-Level (leading to a less than great mark in the subject), but both these books manage to make the subject fascinating and are incredibly readable (although some basic knowledge of evolution and biology will probably help quite a bit).
One of the benefits of reading these books is allowing you to see just how cack the media (even scientific journals) are at reporting any genetics-related discoveries. Take this comment from the Times' 'Comment Central':
Here's what's wrong with Robert Mugabe. His AVPR1a is too long.
Brace yourself for a new wave of scientific work linking genes with behaviour. Nature brings a cracking example with research suggesting that the behaviour of the world's most reprehensible despots is derived from their genetic code.
Is it really still such a radical idea that we're (largely) biological beings?
Clearly the comment is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it (along with Nature) still demonstrates the sensationalist tone usually adopted by the media when it comes to these kind of issues. The Nature article mentioned has more details on the actual study and it's findings, which are slightly less conclusive than suggested above:
Ebstein and his colleagues decided to look at AVPR1a because it is known to produce receptors in the brain that detect vasopressin, a hormone involved in altruism and 'prosocial' behaviour. Studies of prairie voles have previously shown that this hormone is important for binding together these rodents' tight-knit social groups.
Ebstein's team wondered whether differences in how this receptor is expressed in the human brain may make different people more or less likely to behave generously.
To find out, they tested DNA samples from more than 200 student volunteers, before asking the students to play the dictator game (volunteers were not told the name of the game, lest it influence their behaviour). Students were divided into two groups: 'dictators' and 'receivers' (called 'A' and 'B' to the participants). Each dictator was told that they would receive 50 shekels (worth about US$14), but were free to share as much or as little of this with a receiver, whom they would never have to meet. The receiver's fortunes thus depended entirely on the dictator's generosity.
About 18% of all dictators kept all of the money, Ebstein and his colleagues report in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior 1. About one-third split the money down the middle, and a generous 6% gave the whole lot away.
Long and short
There was no connection between the participants' gender and their behaviour, the team reports. But there was a link to the length of the AVPR1a gene: people were more likely to behave selfishly the shorter their version of this gene.
So: As correlation doesn't imply causation, the most that the study demonstrates is that selfish people are more likely to have a shorter version of the AVPR1a gene, although 200 students seems far too small a sample size to base even such a tentative conclusion on. (The fact that, as far as I'm aware, none of the "selfish" students were
actual dictators - or showed signs of becoming one - also slightly undermines the idea that a short AVPR1a gene is a significant cause of running a country along totalitarian lines). Clearly, if this is a factor in selfish behaviour, it's far from enough to make someone a potential Hitler.
But that's not quite as sexy or eye-catching as the idea that actions of people like Stalin were
"Dictated by their DNA".
