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"Genetic Determinism"
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Genetic determinism, essentialism and reductionism: semantic clarity for contested science
Research linking genetic differences with human social and behavioural phenotypes has long been controversial. Frequently, debates about the ethical, social and legal implications of this area of research centre on questions about whether studies overtly or covertly perpetuate genetic determinism, genetic essentialism and/or genetic reductionism. Given the prominent role of the ‘-isms’ in scientific discourse and criticism, it is important for there to be consensus and clarity about the meaning of these terms. Here, the author integrates scholarship from psychology, genetics and philosophy of science to provide accessible definitions of genetic determinism, genetic reductionism and genetic essentialism. The author provides linguistic and visual examples of determinism, reductionism and essentialism in science and popular culture, discusses common misconceptions and concludes with recommendations for science communication.In this Perspective, Harden reviews the terms genetic determinism, genetic essentialism and genetic reductionism to provide consensus and clarity about the meaning of these terms. She discusses common misconceptions, illustrates examples and concludes with recommendations for science communication.
Journal Article
The genomic case against genetic determinism
Animal studies reveal that the molecular wiring of the brain can be altered by heredity, the environment, and their interaction. A deeper molecular understanding of these interactions could be a potent antidote to societal concerns of genetic determinism for human behavior, but this requires a paradigm that extends beyond traditional genome-wide association study (GWAS).
Journal Article
The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating
Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.
Journal Article
Wheat individual grain-size variance originates from crop development and from specific genetic determinism
Wheat grain yield is usually decomposed in the yield components: number of spikes / m2, number of grains / spike, number of grains / m2 and thousand kernel weight (TKW). These are correlated one with another due to yield component compensation. Under optimal conditions, the number of grains per m2 has been identified as the main determinant of yield. However, with increasing occurrences of post-flowering abiotic stress associated with climate change, TKW may become severely limiting and hence a target for breeding. TKW is usually studied at the plot scale as it represents the average mass of a grain. However, this view disregards the large intra-genotypic variance of individual grain mass and its effect on TKW. The aim of this study is to investigate the determinism of the variance of individual grain size. We measured yield components and individual grain size variances of two large genetic wheat panels grown in two environments. We also carried out a genome-wide association study using a dense SNPs array. We show that the variance of individual grain size partly originates from the pre-flowering components of grain yield; in particular it is driven by canopy structure via its negative correlation with the number of spikes per m2. But the variance of final grain size also has a specific genetic basis. The genome-wide analysis revealed the existence of QTL with strong effects on the variance of individual grain size, independently from the other yield components. Finally, our results reveal some interesting drivers for manipulating individual grain size variance either through canopy structure or through specific chromosomal regions.
Journal Article
Young Adults’ Belief in Genetic Determinism, and Knowledge and Attitudes towards Modern Genetics and Genomics: The PUGGS Questionnaire
In this paper we present the development and validation a comprehensive questionnaire to assess college students' knowledge about modern genetics and genomics, their belief in genetic determinism, and their attitudes towards applications of modern genetics and genomic-based technologies. Written in everyday language with minimal jargon, the Public Understanding and Attitudes towards Genetics and Genomics (PUGGS) questionnaire is intended for use in research on science education and public understanding of science, as a means to investigate relationships between knowledge, determinism and attitudes about modern genetics, which are to date little understood. We developed a set of core ideas and initial items from reviewing the scientific literature on genetics and previous studies on public and student knowledge and attitudes about genetics. Seventeen international experts from different fields (e.g., genetics, education, philosophy of science) reviewed the initial items and their feedback was used to revise the questionnaire. We validated the questionnaire in two pilot tests with samples of university freshmen students. The final questionnaire contains 45 items, including both multiple choice and Likert scale response formats. Cronbach alpha showed good reliability for each section of the questionnaire. In conclusion, the PUGGS questionnaire is a reliable tool for investigating public understanding and attitudes towards modern genetics and genomic-based technologies.
Journal Article
Genome-wide association study reveals the genetic determinism of serum biochemical indicators in ducks
Background
The serum is rich in nutrients and plays an essential role in electrolyte and acid–base balance, maintaining cellular homeostasis. In addition, serum parameters have been commonly used as essential biomarkers for clinical diagnosis. However, little is known about the genetic mechanism of the serum parameters in ducks.
Results
This study measured 18 serum parameters in 320 samples of the F
2
segregating population generated by Mallard × Pekin duck. The phenotypic correlations showed a high correlation between LDH, HBDH, AST, and ALT (0.59–0.99), and higher coefficients were also observed among TP, ALB, HDL-C, and CHO (0.46–0.87). And then, we performed the GWAS to reveal the genetic basis of the 18 serum biochemical parameters in ducks. Fourteen candidate protein-coding genes were identified with enzyme traits (AST, ALP, LDH, HBDH), and 3 protein-coding genes were associated with metabolism and protein-related serum parameters (UA, TG). Moreover, the expression levels of the above candidate protein-coding genes in different stages of breast muscle and different tissues were analyzed. Furthermore, the genes located within the high-LD region (r
2
> 0.4 and − log
10
(
P
) < 4) neighboring the significant locus also remained. Finally, 86 putative protein-coding genes were used for GO and KEGG enrichment analysis, the enzyme-linked receptor protein signaling pathway and ErbB signaling pathway deserve further focus.
Conclusions
The obtained results can contribute to new insights into blood metabolism and provide new genetic biomarkers for application in duck breeding programs.
Journal Article
Behavioral Genetics and Human Agency: How Selectively Deterministic Theories of Free Will Drive Unwarranted Opposition to Behavioral Genetic Research and Undermine Our Moral and Legal Conventions, Part I
This article argues that a pervasive but confused theory of free will is driving unwarranted resistance to behavioral genetic research and undermining the concept of personal responsibility enshrined in our moral and legal conventions. We call this the theory of ‘free-will-by-subtraction’. A particularly explicit version of this theory has been propounded by the psychologist Eric Turkheimer, who has proposed that human agency can be scientifically quantified as the behavioral variation that remains unexplained after known genetic and environmental causes have been accounted for. This theory motivates resistance to research that suggests genetic differences substantially account for differences in human behavior because that is seen to reduce the scope of human freedom. In academic philosophy, free-will-by-subtraction theory corresponds to a position called ‘libertarian incompatibilism’, which holds that human beings are not responsible for behavior that has extrinsic causes yet maintains that free will nonetheless exists because some fraction of human behavior is self-caused. However, this position is rejected by most professional philosophers. We argue that libertarian incompatibilism is inconsistent with a secular materialist outlook in which all human behavior is understood to have extrinsic causes whether those causes are known to science or not — an outlook Turkheimer shares. We show that Turkheimer sustains this contradiction by adopting an untenable position we call ‘epistemic libertarianism’, which holds that extrinsic causes of our behavior only infringe on our freedom if we know about them. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of secular materialist philosophers support a position called ‘compatibilism’, which maintains that free will is compatible with the comprehensive extrinsic causation of human behavior. We show that compatibilism neutralizes the threat that genetic explanation poses to human agency and rescues a generous conception of personal responsibility that aligns with our moral intuitions.
Journal Article
Assessing the phenotypic variation, heritability and genetic advance in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) candidate lines grown under rainfed semi-arid region of Algeria
The genetic improvement of any breeding population largely depends upon the magnitude of genetic variability present. This study was carried out to estimate parameters of the genetic variation among 13 quantitative traits of bread wheat evaluated at INRAA-Setif institute (Algeria) during the 2020–2021 crop season in a rainfed environment. 34 genotypes including four control checks were planted in a randomized complete block design with three replications. Genotypes showed significant variations for almost all the studied traits. Proline content, spikes weight, and grain yield exhibited a high genotypic coefficient of variation along with moderate to high heritability coupled with a high genetic gain, suggesting the implication of additive gene action. The number of spikes, spikes weight, and thousand kernel weight were significantly and positively correlated with grain yield at both phenotypic and genotypic levels. Path analysis results showed that spikes weight is an important route through which most of the measured traits influenced indirectly grain yield. Lines L1, L20, L28, L16, and L18 exhibited a sizeable grain yield advantage, which suggests they are potential candidates for future release and could be incorporated into the wheat breeding programs as parents to improve yield in the rainfed environments of Algeria
Journal Article
Noise Can Induce Bimodality in Positive Transcriptional Feedback Loops Without Bistability
Transcriptional positive-feedback loops are widely associated with bistability, characterized by two stable expression states that allow cells to respond to analog signals in a digital manner. Using a synthetic system in budding yeast, we show that positive feedback involving a promoter with multiple transcription factor (TF) binding sites can induce a steady-state bimodal response without cooperative binding of the TF. Deterministic models of this system do not predict bistability. Rather, the bimodal response requires a short-lived TF and stochastic fluctuations in the TF's expression. Multiple binding sites provide these fluctuations. Because many promoters possess multiple binding sites and many TFs are unstable, positive-feedback loops in gene regulatory networks may exhibit bimodal responses, but not necessarily because of deterministic bistability, as is commonly thought.
Journal Article