AVPR1a polymorphism & "ruthlessness"

i-637c9b473f50f7051c0358caa65d8c3d-Genghis_Khan.jpgA few months ago I blogged a paper, Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA. Now these results have hit the press with really wack titles. Jake at Pure Pedantry and Joseph at Corpus Callosum offer the appropriate scientific caution. Caution is warranted, but I think the next decade at the intersection of behavioral economics & genetics is going to be very big. Papers such as Heritability of ultimatum game responder behavior & Heritability of cooperative behavior in the trust game are just the tip of the iceberg.

Tags

More like this

The post below on AVPR1A and fidelity alluded to the fact that this locus has been implicated in many other behavioral traits. I spent some of today digging through the literature. So check it.... AVPR1a and SLC6A4 Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated with Creative Dance Performance AVPR1A and OXTR…
Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA: Since variation in the length of a repetitive element in the vole AVPR1a promoter region is…
Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings: Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one female, and defend…
I wasn't sure whether to put the quotes around "Ruthlessness Gene," or "Discovered."  I suppose I could have just left them out entirely, but I have this urge to spice things up a bit with punctuation marks.  Don't blame me...it's genetic. Now, there is yet another correlation between a snippet of…

Here's a hyperchristian take on this discovery:

Ruthless Behavior by Pro-Aborts May Be Genetic?

Nature News Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the money-grabbing tendencies of those with a Machiavellian...

URL: http://www.covenantnews.com/abortion/archives/040630.html

But here's a much more interesting, if off-topic, item, which I hope someone who knows much more about this than I can explain or debunk:

My hands are mine, but my feet are my sister

79 Comments Posted by Amanda Marcotte in Science, Signs of the Non-Apocalypse, Feminism Friday

So I just listened to a recent edition of Radio Lab about bioengineering and chimeras and the possibilities of blending genes, and in the show was this really amazingly cool story. Basically, this woman they interview needed a kidney transplant. (That's not the cool part.) They go to family members first, of course, and they tested their DNA for a match. And they found that her sons.....were not her sons. They were her husband's sons, but they weren't a genetic match to her. So they retested her, same result. So they desperately tested a lot of different tissues around her body, after she demonstrated that she did in fact give birth to these boys, and they found out that the reason for all this was some of her body had one set of DNA and another had another. Her blood had one, but her reproductive system had another.

I felt bad for the lady. Obviously, this whole situation unnerved her and rattled her to the bone, and it's too bad. I can't help but think that if I found out that I've got the genetic material to make two people, I'd be stoked.* What great cocktail party banter! You could probably convince people you had superpowers and shit. I don't truck with the more superstitious need to have individuality strongly defined in religious or biological terms--a person is a social construct that I think is best defined around the concept of the lived experience of having your consciousness and your body and your memories. But most people probably don't think very much about the constructed nature of identity, and thus a revelation like this was pretty rattling. Most people think what you are is what you are, that your race and ethnicity and gender are set in stone and that your unique personhood is something special. But really, it's not. Human beings are what we socially define them to be, and the boundaries can be blurred as the social understandings of these things are blurred.

(more...)

By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 13 Apr 2008 #permalink

I hope someone who knows much more about this than I can explain or debunk

Easy: chimerism!