A Quote by Steven Pinker
So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.
Related Quotes
We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations.
The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.
Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.
Epigenetics doesn't change the genetic code, it changes how that's read. Perfectly normal genes can result in cancer or death. Vice-versa, in the right environment, mutant genes won't be expressed. Genes are equivalent to blueprints; epigenetics is the contractor. They change the assembly, the structure.
All the work on heritability was never based on looking at genes; it was based on the similarity between identical twins or between parents and children. Now that geneticists can look at genes, they can't find genes that account for more than 10 percent of the variation in any human trait.
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: If our genes are inherited, and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self delusion.
People need to realize that their thoughts are more primary than their genes, because the environment, which is influenced by our thoughts, controls the genes.
Growth is kinda built into everyone's genes. It's built into management's genes, the salesman's genes, the investors' desires. People expect companies to grow.
If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.
A person's health isn't generally a reflection of genes, but how their environment is influencing them. Genes are the direct cause of less than 1pc of diseases: 99pc is how we respond to the world.
There's this very interesting and complicated connection between our environment and our genes and the traits that come out of the environment plus genes. And there's huge potential. I mean we see amazing abilities. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth.
Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior.
It's a very complex network of genes making products which go into the nucleus and turn on other genes. And, in fact, you find a continuing network of processes going on in a very complex way by which genes are subject to these continual adjustments, as you might say - the computer programmer deciding which genes ultimately will work.
Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.
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