Understanding the Nature of Human Behaviour through Genetic Framework

Abstract

If one wants to understand the behavior and the biology of human behavior, the biology of abnormal human behavior, one is not going to get very far if one decides all one needs to understand is what hormones have to do with behavior, what early environment, what neurons, what evolution, what genes do; instead one should try to integrate all these different approaches (Pfaff et al. 106). This paper will focus mostly on behavior genetics and the key question here is how you figure out if a behavioral trait has a genetic component. And what behavioral geneticists do is not just sit there and come up with evolutionary models and connive a new species and decide, is it going to be pair bonding or that sort of thing; nor do they sit and look at sequences of DNA and transposable genetic elements. What behavioral geneticists look at is patterns of behavior shared amongst relatives vs. non-relatives; what patterns of behavior run in families (Anholt and Mackay 96). As we will see, this is not a trivial question to get at but with the underlying assumption very broadly, if behaviors are more in common amongst relatives than among non-relatives then there is a hint we may be looking at a genetic component.

Back to a caveat that should be abundantly clear which is that there is zero reason to think about do genes have something to do with behavior; genes as deterministic, genes as inevitable, genes as meaning things that cannot change that are impervious to environment. Instead, the fact is that the genetic function is utterly intertwined with the environment that regulates it- genes as propensities, tendencies; it is much more sophisticated model of genes, one that is going to become much clearer as we progress through the article.