After All

So is it nature not nurture after all?

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However, contrary to the domestication hypothesis, they are far from unique in this ability. For example, the reigning champions of the ability to follow human hand signals are the bottlenose dolphin and the grey seal. None of this is to diminish the benefits of dog ownership. They keep us company and may even improve our physical health.

In a study published last year in Nature Scientific Reports, Swedish researchers examined the relationship between dog ownership and cardiovascular health in a sample of nearly 3. As part of the public healthcare system, the Swedish government maintains registers of hospital visits and cause of death for all Swedish citizens and residents.

After All (Cher and Peter Cetera song)

Also, all dogs in Sweden must be registered with the government. The researchers were thus able to link health and dog ownership data. Even after the researchers statistically controlled for age, education, and socioeconomic status, dog owners were significantly less likely to have had a heart attack and significantly less likely to have died from cardiovascular disease than non-dog owners were.

While stressing that the results must be interpreted cautiously because they are correlational, the researchers suggest two possible explanations for the findings.

A further argument made in Blueprint is that even those effects that are environmental may also be genetically influenced. Instead, the socioeconomic status of parents might be viewed as a measure of their educational outcomes, which are heritable. James believes that if, as a society, we accept the heritability argument, then it will lead to blaming the poor for their own plight and privileging the rich for their good fortune.

The Guardian ran an editorial earlier this year in response to a paper that Plomin and others published in which they stated that: Eric Turkheimer, leader of the Genetics and Human Agency Project at the University of Virginia, wrote a critique of the paper in which he accused the authors of describing genetic effects that could just as well have been environmental.

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Asked if his findings support a rightwing, neo-Darwinian vision of society, Plomin responds: Rightwing values might lead someone to say that we should educate the best and forget the rest, but my view is that the intellectual capital of a society depends on the many not just the few. If we do manage to iron out environmental differences, Plomin notes, we then have to accept the genetic differences that remain. Because, the more we reduce environmental differences, the more we highlight genetic differences.

In other words, if we want equality of opportunity, then the price is having to acknowledge a genetically loaded inequality of outcome.

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The psychologist believes that we have to go with the science, not settle on a story that suits our political sympathies. At the moment, mental health follows the classical medical model by diagnosing a disorder and then seeking to deal with its cause. But genetic research suggests there are no clear lines in mental disorders, rather a spectrum on which we are all genetically placed.

The example that Plomin gives is depression. If, say, there were 1, DNA differences found between two control groups of depressed and non-depressed people, it might be that in the general population the average person would have of these depression-causing differences.

And many people far fewer. Those with the fewest would be at least risk of becoming depressed and those with the most, at the greatest risk. You can ameliorate the symptoms, which is what they do now with schizophrenia.

Such thinking will no doubt be anathema to the very large and growing psychotherapeutic community, but for anyone who is baffled by the seemingly arbitrary diagnoses that have long been a characteristic of mental health, it makes a certain sense. Plomin believes that psychiatry is already adjusting to the findings by reclassifying some disorders as spectra; for example, schizophrenia spectrum disorder and autistic spectrum disorder.

As we come to the end of a long and thought-provoking discussion, I ask him how he thinks his book will be received.

For the rest of us, the temptation to jump to hasty conclusions may well prove too great. The social stakes, after all, are high. The possibilities for exploitation and abuse of genetic information are ones that have long been rehearsed in science fiction , and remain all too easy to imagine.

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