Rex Kerr
1 min readMar 4, 2023

--

You need to explain heritability of behavioral traits in separated twin studies if you're going to credibly dispute that genes affect cognition and behavior.

Also, why you get dozens or hundreds of hits in genome-wide association studies like this one for risky behavior: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0309-3

Or this one for anxiety: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31906708/

Of course, the point of behavior is to be flexible on short timescales. Genes don't implement behavior directly: they implement how your cognitive architecture develops and is run (including how that process is affected by experience). There's tremendous flexibility granted by our cognitive architecture...but differences in genes still reflect in different biases.

And, finally, you can use the word "evolution" in different contexts, but the connotations and conclusions are all wrong if you don't have a descent-with-modification scheme of some sort. For instance, if everyone in the population just ups and switches from monarchy to democracy, all the arguments about the reproductive fitness differences from monarchy and democracy go out the window. You just switch, for whatever reason, potentially on timescales far shorter than reproduction.

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

Responses (1)