Human Biology Open Access Pre-Prints

Document Type

Open Access Preprint

Anticipated Volume

90

Anticipated Issue

4

Abstract

Hereditarians have claimed that recent advances in psychological and psychiatric genetics support their contention that individual and group socially important aspects of behavior and cognition are largely insensitive to environmental context. This has been countered by anti- hereditarians who (correctly) claim that the conclusion of genetic ineluctability is false. Anti- hereditarians, however, sometimes use problematic arguments based on complexity and the ignorance that comes with complexity and a demand for mechanistic, as opposed to variational, explanations for the ways in which genes affect phenotype. I argue here, as a committed anti-hereditarian, that the complexity gambit and the demand for mechanisms open anti-hereditarian arguments to counter-attack from hereditarians. Re-focusing the argument onto issues about to which uses heritability, genotypic scores, and genome wide association studies may be appropriately applied and reemphasizing the point that context matters are stronger measures to counter hereditarian claims.

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