Very interesting article but if genetics plays such a large role in antisocial personality traits what is to be done about that? Discourage people who have those traits from reproducing? Prevent them from doing so? Dangerous territory indeed. More interesting would be the question of waht types of interventions can be successful in dissuading those with antisocial personalities from acting on their worst impulses? One might suppose that in highly cohesive social enviornments that discourage antisocial behaviors that at least some mitigation is possible?
I think there are no simple implications for social policy of a proper understanding of the role of genetics, but that understanding would help to avoid interventions that won’t work and would help to design interventions that might work better.
Your point is correct. Even conservatives don't realize how important genes are. Also, when someone like Henderson points to, say, lack of a father at home, he ignores the non-genetic cultural defects of the mother. I'd like to think having a father at home is important, me being a father, but plenty of widows have raised kids who turned out well.
The second-most important ignorance, however, after ignoring genes, is "non-shared environment". In IQ, for example, environment used to be "everything but genes". People thought of it as parental income, books at home, quality of teachers, etc. All those turn out to be trivial in effect, if I remember right. Most of "environment" is things we can't measure-- perhaps randomness in how your genes translate into fetal brain development, interaction between genes from your mother and your father, which direction your cells decided to grow in day 40 in the womb. Important, but not stuff we can influence with public or private policy.
Yes, you're right here. It has not been sufficiently appreciated that much of "non-shared environment" is not really even "environment" in the normal sense of the word, nor in the sense of being processes where culture and society could readily intervene.
It would be really good if we had some say of measuring how important effects such as randomness of fetal brain development actually are. Likely, it is a lot (and often overlooked).
Very interesting article but if genetics plays such a large role in antisocial personality traits what is to be done about that? Discourage people who have those traits from reproducing? Prevent them from doing so? Dangerous territory indeed. More interesting would be the question of waht types of interventions can be successful in dissuading those with antisocial personalities from acting on their worst impulses? One might suppose that in highly cohesive social enviornments that discourage antisocial behaviors that at least some mitigation is possible?
I think there are no simple implications for social policy of a proper understanding of the role of genetics, but that understanding would help to avoid interventions that won’t work and would help to design interventions that might work better.
Your point is correct. Even conservatives don't realize how important genes are. Also, when someone like Henderson points to, say, lack of a father at home, he ignores the non-genetic cultural defects of the mother. I'd like to think having a father at home is important, me being a father, but plenty of widows have raised kids who turned out well.
The second-most important ignorance, however, after ignoring genes, is "non-shared environment". In IQ, for example, environment used to be "everything but genes". People thought of it as parental income, books at home, quality of teachers, etc. All those turn out to be trivial in effect, if I remember right. Most of "environment" is things we can't measure-- perhaps randomness in how your genes translate into fetal brain development, interaction between genes from your mother and your father, which direction your cells decided to grow in day 40 in the womb. Important, but not stuff we can influence with public or private policy.
Yes, you're right here. It has not been sufficiently appreciated that much of "non-shared environment" is not really even "environment" in the normal sense of the word, nor in the sense of being processes where culture and society could readily intervene.
It would be really good if we had some say of measuring how important effects such as randomness of fetal brain development actually are. Likely, it is a lot (and often overlooked).