|
Behavioral and Psychiatric Genetics: How Blank is “the Blank Slate”?| old_uid | 9175 |
|---|
| title | Behavioral and Psychiatric Genetics: How Blank is “the Blank Slate”? |
|---|
| start_date | 2010/10/20 |
|---|
| schedule | 14h-15h30 |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| summary | This presentation takes as its launching point the concept of "the blank slate," as developed in Steven Pinker's book of that name. I show that Pinker overemphasized the influence of heritability, and that he was significantly confused about the meaning and roles of "environment." After clarifying the nature of the shared and nonshared environments, I indicate how newer study designs developed by Caspi and Moffitt have been able to use the environment as a lens to establish significant genetic effects on violent behavior, depression, and psychosis. I also discuss how these studies relate more broadly to neuroscience and brain science. In spite of these advances, very recent single-gene discoveries in the areas of psychosis and schizophrenia are shown to have very small effects, and are also evidentially weak. These schizophrenia gene results include current genome-wide association studies (GWAS). With these clarifications and studies as backdrops, the talk closes with an account of color of the “slate” today, and a projection about the future of behavioral and psychiatric genetics, including the role of emergent simplification heuristics. |
|---|
| responsibles | Kostyrka, Laplane |
|---|
| |
|