Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 21 by Mary Robinette Kowal & Paul Jessup & Ekaterina Sedia & Neil Clarke

Author:Mary Robinette Kowal & Paul Jessup & Ekaterina Sedia & Neil Clarke [Kowal, Mary Robinette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2008-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Cheer Up Emo Kid: Being Depressed (or Gay) is Not All in Your Genes

Ekaterina Sedia

In recent years, popular science journals have been full of articles excitedly reporting “genetic markers” for depression, sexual orientation, alcoholism, IQ, and any number of other behavioral traits. The scientific journals cheerfully publish heritability statistics, which are often mistaken for estimates of genetic contributions to behavior, and used as justification to start looking for genes. And the common assumption is that there is a gene (or several) for just about everything.

Genetic explanations are a double-edged sword — on one hand, they remove the stigma sometimes attributed to a choice of an unpopular behavior; on the other, they have been used to justify mandatory sterilizations and other violations of human rights. The current fashion for uncovering genes underlying everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia is not exactly new, but quite pervasive. Without much proof, a sizeable chunk of the population is branded as “hardwired” for depression and other mental illness, and most of the population is convinced that genes affect human behavior in a straightforward way. They are wrong.

Sorry, but your depression is probably not due to your genes. It is a popular view seemingly substantiated with many news articles, but the evidence for this is a lot less impressive than what popular media would have you believe.

Behavior Genetics — History and Methods

Untold sums of money have been spent on research designed to demonstrate that complex human behaviors, be they alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia or even homosexuality (which, tellingly, has been mostly studied in the same manner as the aforementioned mental health conditions) are genetically predetermined or, at the very least, have a genetic component, and considering the investment, the results to date are slim to nonexistent. Moreover, the methodology of such studies is flawed beyond repair, since the main tools have not changed since the 19th century when Francis Galton, Darwin’s half-cousin, set out to prove that “eminence” is a trait that runs in families. To no one’s surprise, he demonstrated that relatives of well-known people also tended to be successful.

One obvious criticism of Galton’s studies is that they confound inheritance (”nature”) with environment (”nurture”), and to remedy the situation Galton sought to employ tools such as twin studies, and some very troubling mathematical models to separate the influences of genes and environment. The long-since discredited science of eugenics was founded on these. So why, even though eugenics was abandoned long ago, due primarily to its association with Nazi ideology (one of the largest twin studies was conducted by Mengele in Auschwitz, who personally experimented on, examined, and murdered close to 3,000 twins), do its methods still persist? Short answer: psychologists, who do a good proportion of these studies, tend to confuse “heritability’”(a statistical variable which basically measures how well a given trait would respond to selection in a given environment, useful for agriculture) with “inherited” — determined by genes. (Lush, 1949) It is not shocking when news reporters confuse the two, producing gems like “Intelligence is 60% Genetic!” It is much more troubling when the scientists performing the studies do the same.

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