Language Log has an excellent critique of the media stories around AVPR1a and its effect on male behavior. This sort of media criticism is warranted, but I don't know exactly how headline writing will clearly communicate that a given dependent variable might have myriad independent variables. Huntington's disease was easy to write a headline for; trying to juice up a story about genes which explain 0.3% of the variation in height is going to be a taller order....
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I saw this news story in Nature a couple days ago about finding a gene for "ruthlessness." I realized that I always say the same thing about these behavioral genetics stories -- stories where they claim to find a gene for ____ (where blank is a behavioral abstraction like empathy). These studies…
Over the years I've blogged a fair amount on the AVPR1A gene. Variation on this locus has been associated with differences altruism in humans and mating preferences in voles. Now a new paper is out in PNAS, at some point in the near future (not online, but will be here), which shows differences in…
Brandom Keim at Wired says Genes Don't Explain African AIDS Epidemic:
Seen in the wrong light, the numbers could present Africa's AIDS tragedy as a biological inevitability. Several press accounts do exactly that. The New York Times credits the mutation for "explaining why the disease is more…
People, scientists included, are always looking for simple, comprehensible explanations for complex phenomena. It's so satisfying to be able to easily explain something in a sound bite, and sound bites are so much more easily accepted by an audience than some elaborate, difficult collection of…