Gene-Environment Interaction Quotes

There's this very interesting and complicated connection between our environment and our genes and the traits that come out of the environment plus genes. And there's huge potential. I mean we see amazing abilities. Marie Curie, Albert Einstein. All sorts of arts, and literature and so forth. These are not typical traits of everybody on earth.

The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.

The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior-like the deepest capacities for emotional respone which drive and guide it-is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.

All illnesses have some heredity contribution. It's been said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger.

It's often meaningless to talk about a genetic trait without also discussing the environment in which that trait appears. Sometimes, genes don't work at all until the environment awakens them.

The more that I looked at DNA, the more I realized it was nature and nurture. It's how genes and your environment work together to produce the person you are.

When we talk about genes for anything, like a gene for being gay or a gene for being aggressive or something of that sort, that a gene for anything may not have been a gene for that thing under different environmental conditions.

They say your genetics are going to set your direction regardless of what happens, but I think there's more to it than that.

Our experience in fooling around with the genes of mice has taught us that many of the traits that interest us are not definite products of specific mutations but emergent phenomena arising from extremely complex interactions between genes, environment, and life experience.

One of the things that got me interested in genetics was the relationship between genes and environment. We are all dealt a certain deck of cards, but our environment can influence the outcomes.

We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment - by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.

Yes, genes are important for understanding our behavior. Incredibly important - after all, they code for every protein pertinent to brain function, endocrinology, etc., etc. But the regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.