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“Oh, It’s Genetic” — Genetics, Disease, and Behavior
One of the most crazy making yet widespread and potentially dangerous notions is:
“Oh, that behavior is genetic.”
Now what does that mean?
It means all sorts of subtle stuff if you know modern biology, but for most people out there what it winds up meaning is: a deterministic view of life, one rooted in biology and genetics.
Genes equal things that can’t be changed. Genes equal things that are inevitable and that you might as well not waste resources trying to fix, might as well not put societal energies into trying to improve because it’s inevitable and it’s unchangeable. And that is sheer nonsense.
It is widely thought that conditions like ADHD are genetically programmed, conditions like schizophrenia are genetically programmed. The truth is the opposite. Nothing is genetically programmed.
There are very rare diseases, a small handful, extremely sparsely represented in the population, that are truly genetically determined. Most complex conditions might have a predisposition that has a genetic component, but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.
The whole search for the source of diseases in the genome was doomed to failure before anybody even thought of it, because most diseases are not genetically predetermined. Heart disease, cancer, strokes, rheumatoid conditions, addictions — none of them are genetically determined. For example, let’s take a look at breast cancer — out of 100 women with breast cancer, only 7 women will carry the breast cancer genes, 93 do not. And out of 100 women who do have the genes not all of them will get cancer. So..
