gene-environment interaction
razib | March 16, 2010Over the past week I've been asked via email and on message boards about about David Shenk's new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. Since I haven't read the book I can't really comment, but I did finally listen to Will Wilkinson's interview with Shenk on bloggingheads.tv. It seems to me that Will exhibited more clarity and precision in one sentence in relation to the term heritability than Shenk did in 10 minutes. It is true there are many people who don't understand that 80% heritable does not mean that a trait is "80%…
ddobbs | December 14, 2009
Last Friday I was on "To the Best of Our Knowledge," the excellent talk show put out by Wisconsin Public Radio, talking with Anne Strainchamps about my Atlantic article. Strainchamps is a good interviewer and we got some interesting calls. Those who missed it can listen to the hour-long segment here (Look for the "Listen to Archive" link just below the program description.)
And now I'm off to drive across the frozen north. More later.
ddobbs | June 17, 2009Big psych news of the day is that a big JAMA study debunked the "depression gene" -- that is, this big new study (by Risch et alia, in JAMA, today) found that, contrary to a famous earlier big study (Caspi et alia, in Science, 2003), the short ("bad") form of a particular gene called 5-HTT does NOT make a person more vulnerable to depression. Or, to flip it:: Caspi 2003 had found that having a short version of 5-HTT, which affects processing of serotonin, put someone at more risk of depression if they experienced (as adults) repeated stressful life events. Risch 2009, crunching data from a…