Louisville Process Theology Network

Nature and Nuture

Sep 15, 2009

It seems that some geneticists believe that Biology has superseded Sociology. Is there more to us that our genetic inheritance?

From the Summer, 2009, issue of ?“The Wilson Quarterly,?” Page 75:



?“For more than a century, sociologists have been trying to tease answers to such questions as who votes, gets ahead, commits crimes, or goes to college. But while social scientists were producing complex narrative accounts of myriad causal factors, biologists decoded some three million units of human DNA.

Then geneticists released a tsunami of papers purporting to reveal a genetic basis for phenomena ranging from voting behavior to car wax preferences. What?’s a sociologist to do?


?…Northwestern sociologist Jeremy Freese is willing to concede that ?‘behavioral geneticists are (roughly) correct in concluding that virtually every outcome sociologists have cared to study about individuals is genetically heritable to a nontrivial degree.?’

Consider, he suggests, early sexual activity among adolescents: If genetic differences are a partial cause of height, and height is a partial cause of attractiveness, and attractiveness is a partial cause of positive interactions, and positive interactions are a partial cause of self-esteem, and self-esteem is a partial cause of delayed first intercourse, then age at first intercourse is genetically influenced.

The important point is that ?‘sociological thinking is fundamental to explaining why.?’


?…Sociologist Bernice A. Pescosolido of Indiana University, Bloomington, with five collaborators, investigated the effects of a DNA variant present in some people called the GABRA2 gene, which is associated with alcoholism. While there is strong evidence that GABRA2 is linked to alcohol dependency, the gene doesn?’t automatically produce alcoholism the same way Gregor Mendel?’s pea plants reliably passed on traits.

GABRA2 seems to have little or no effect on women, and the predisposition towards alcoholism of those with GABRA2 ?‘virtually washes away?’ for men with supportive families, Pescosolido and her colleagues found.?”