Genetic Disorder Quotes

If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

In addition to single-gene genetic disorders, there are just five causes of all disease: poor diet, chronic stress, microbes, toxins, and allergens, all of which wash over our DNA causing changes in our gene expression, and turning off or on different genes and messages that affect our metabolism.

The defining feature of a major depression is loss of pleasure. If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a “genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

Environment does not cause ADD any more than genes cause ADD. What happens is that if certain genetic material meets a certain environment, ADD may result. Without that genetic material, no ADD. Without that environment, no ADD. The formative environment is the family of origin.

I thought the doctor's diagnosis was the first step to mending her. I know now that a diagnosis is taken in like an orphaned dog. We brought it home, unsure how to care for it, to live with it. It raised its hackles, snarled, hid in the farthest corner of the room; but it was ours, her diagnosis. The diagnosis was timid and confused, and genetically wired to strike out.

the most common genetic disorder caused by inbreeding is spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA causes the death of the cells in the spinal cord, and is often fatal or severely disabling.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.

Because of patent licensing fees, it costs $25,000 for an academic institution to license the gene for researching a common blood disorder, hereditary haemochromatosis, and up to $250,000 to license the same gene for commercial testing. At that rate, it would cost anywhere from $46.4 million (for academic institutions) to $464 million (for commercial labs) to test one person for all known genetic diseases.

Consumption, after all, was a flattering malady, a genetic disorder enriching the soul even as it slowly destroyed the body. Tuberculosis was a horror, an invisible contamination proliferating within you and then spreading to anyone near you.

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

Child, before you go off on him, try to remember that he’s a guy. That predisposes him to stupidity. Don’t get me wrong, I love my son, but sometimes his male genetic disorder makes it hard.

twin studies of anxiety have revealed that genetic factors account for roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of an individual’s tendency to be generally anxious or to have a specific anxiety disorder.50

They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.

Old measures of health not only have failed to improve significantly but have stayed the same: some have even worsened. Mainstream newspapers and magazines often report disease in an ethnocentric manner that shrouds its true cost among African Americans. For example, despite the heavy emphasis on genetic ailments among blacks, fewer than 0.5 percent of black deaths—that’s less than one death in two hundred—can be attributed to hereditary disorders such as sickle-cell anemia. A closer look at the troubling numbers reveals that blacks are dying not of exotic, incurable, poorly understood illnesses nor of genetic diseases that target only them, but rather from common ailments that are more often prevented and treated among whites than among blacks.

I am hereby requesting the complete medical histories of my natural mother, natural father, and their families. Please list any/all childhood diseases or surgeries known for each birth parent: Please list any/all genetic disorders known for each birth parent:

When I learned my mom was going to die of cancer at the age of forty-five, I felt the same way. I didn’t even believe in God, but I still felt that he owed me something. I had the gall to think How dare he? I couldn’t help myself. I’m a selfish brute. I wanted what I wanted and I expected it to be given to me by a God in whom I had no faith. Because mercy had always more or less been granted me, I assumed it always would be. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t granted to my friend whose eighteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver either. Nor was it granted to my other friend who learned her baby is going to die of a genetic disorder in the not-distant future. Nor was it granted to my former student whose mother was murdered by her father before he killed himself. It was not granted to all those people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when they came up against the wrong virus or military operation or famine or carcinogenic or genetic mutation or natural disaster or maniac. Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking If there were a God, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery?— understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary— is having first been nailed to the cross. That

Since the 1980s, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) has been on the rise, not just among children, but now among the adult population as well. The sudden rise of adult ADD, while it may have genetic components, certainly receives a major boost from our kinetic, hyper-speed, information-bombarded society. Victims of adult ADD are likely to initiate more tasks and projects that they'll ever finish, get bored easily, seek thrills readily, have a propensity to be late while loathing having to wait, and not be averse to taking foolish risks.

Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers.

A genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets. Depression

The effect of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the user's experience and behavior depends in part on his or her personality and genetic predisposition, which can vary to a great extent from person to person. As symptoms of psychiatric disorders can sometimes be elicited after one-off use, people with a genetic tendency to depression or psychosis should be discouraged from using psychoactive mushrooms.

All of us risk being taken advantage of to some degree, but what would it be like to go through life this irremediably vulnerable, biologically unable to peel your heart from your sleeve and lock it safely inside?

At the time, the Wikipedia page read, “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD; also known as complex trauma disorder) is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated experience of interpersonal trauma in a context in which the individual has little or no chance of escape.” And then, a paragraph down: “C-PTSD is a learned set of responses, and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. It is environmentally, not genetically, caused. Unlike most of the diagnoses it is confused with, it is neither inborn nor characterological, not DNA based, it is a disorder caused by lack of nurture.

There was almost certainly a genetic contribution to Einstein’s dopaminergic traits. One of his two sons became an internationally recognized expert on hydraulic engineering. The other was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty, and died in an asylum. Large population studies have also found a genetic component of a dopaminergic character. An Icelandic study that evaluated the genetic profile of over 86,000 people discovered that individuals who carried genes that placed them at greater risk for either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to belong to a national society of actors, dancers, musicians, visual artists, or writers.

We face no such difficulty if we see that what is being transmitted genetically is not ADD or its equally ill-mannered and discombobulating relatives, but sensitivity. The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.

The mind emanates from the interface between neurophysiological processes and interpersonal relationships. Experience selectively shapes genetic neuronal potential and thus directly influences the structure and function of the brain.

You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.

We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance. The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few. Passion may mislead us furiously. Reason may mislead us just as much. Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us. So might previous events in our lives. It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.

With schizophrenia, we know that we are dealing with a range of disorders of varying severity which arise from a mosaic of one or more factors – genetic, biochemical, neurological – interacting in complex ways with the person's environment and personality.

About half of patients with pure anxiety disorders develop major depression within five years. Insofar as depression and anxiety are genetically determined, they share a single set of genes (which are tied to the genes for alcoholism). Depression exacerbated by anxiety has a much higher suicide rate than depression alone, and it is much harder to recover from. “If you’re having several panic attacks every day,” says Ballenger, “it’s gonna bring Hannibal to his knees. People are beaten into a pulp, into a fetal position in bed.

Virtually all the authors of popular books on the subject assert that ADD is a heritable genetic disorder. With some notable exceptions, the genetic view also dominates much of the discussion within professional circles, a view I do not agree with. I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA. Heredity does make an important contribution, but far less than usually assumed. At the same time, it would serve no purpose to set up the false opposition of environment to genetic inheritance. No such split exists in nature, or in the mind of any serious scientist. There are many biological events involving body and brain that are not directly programmed by heredity, and so to say that ADD is not primarily genetic is not in any sense to deny its biological features — either those that are inherited or those that are acquired as a result of experience. The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features — including the underlying biology itself — are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world. There is in ADD an inherited predisposition, but that’s very far from saying there is a genetic predetermination. A predetermination dictates that something will inevitably happen. A predisposition only makes it more likely that it may happen, depending on circumstances. The actual outcome is influenced by many other factors.

In subsequent experiences I frequently found the mothers of schizophrenic children to be extraordinarily narcissistic individuals like Mrs. X. This is not to say that such mothers are always narcissistic or that narcissistic mothers can’t raise non-schizophrenic children. Schizophrenia is an extremely complex disorder, with obvious genetic as well as environmental determinants. But one can imagine the depth of confusion in Susan’s childhood produced by her mother’s narcissism, and one can objectively see this confusion when actually observing narcissistic mothers interact with their children. On an afternoon when Mrs. X. was feeling sorry for herself Susan might have come home from school bringing some of her paintings the teacher had graded A. If she told her mother proudly how she was progressing in art, Mrs. X. might well respond: “Susan, go take a nap. You shouldn’t get yourself so exhausted over your work in school. The school system is no good anymore. They don’t care for children anymore.” On the other hand, on an afternoon when Mrs. X. was in a very cheerful mood Susan might have come home in tears over the fact that she had been bullied by several boys on the school bus, and Mrs. X. could say: “Isn’t it fortunate that Mr. Jones is such a good bus driver? He is so nice and patient with all you children and your roughhousing. I think you should be sure to give him a nice little present at Christmastime.” Since they do not perceive others as others but only as extensions of themselves, narcissistic

There is a significant hereditary contribution to ADD but I do not believe any genetic factor is decisive in the emergence of ADD traits in any child. Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and function. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. It is determined, for the most part, by the environment. To put it differently, genes carry potentials inherent in the cells of a given organism. Which of multiple potentials become expressed biologically is a question of life circumstances. Were we to adopt the medical model — only temporarily, for the sake of argument — a genetic explanation by itself would still be unsuitable. Medical conditions for which genetic inheritance are fully or even mostly responsible, such as muscular dystrophy, are rare. “Few diseases are purely genetic,” says Michael Hayden, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher into Huntington’s disease. “The most we can say is that some diseases are strongly genetic.” Huntington’s is a fatal degeneration of the nervous system based on a single gene that, if inherited, will almost invariably cause the disease. But not always. Dr. Hayden mentions cases of persons with the gene who live into ripe old age without any signs of the disease itself. “Even in Huntington’s, there must be some protective factor in the environment,” Dr. Hayden says.

Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15

A genetic fundamentalism permeates public awareness these days. It may be summed up as the belief that almost every illness and every human trait is dictated by heredity. Simplified media accounts, culled from semidigested research findings, have declared that inflexible laws of DNA rule the biological world. It was reported in 1996 that according to some psychologists, genes determine about 50 percent of a person’s inclination to experience happiness. Social ability and obesity are two more among the many human qualities now claimed to be genetic. True or not, narrow genetic explanations for ADD and every other condition of the mind do have their attractions. They are easy to grasp, socially conservative and psychologically soothing. They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person’s physiology or emotional makeup. As I have personally experienced, feelings of guilt are almost inevitable for the parents of a troubled child. They are all too frequently reinforced by the uninformed judgments of friends, neighbors, teachers or even total strangers on the bus or in the supermarket. Parental guilt, even if misplaced, is a wound for which the genetic hypothesis offers a balm

G. Davies et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Cognitive Functions and Educational Attainment in UK Biobank (N=112 151),” Molecular Psychiatry 21 (2016): 758–67; M. T. Lo et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses for Personality Traits Identify Six Genomic Loci and Show Correlations with Psychiatric Disorders,” Nature Genetics 49 (2017): 152–56.

Yet the ailment is virtually nonexistent in Iceland. There is a higher prevalence of the disorder in the northeastern United States than in Iceland. Perplexed by the results, psychologists theorize that over the centuries Icelanders developed a genetic immunity to the disease. Those who got SAD died out, taking their gene pool with them. Survival of the felicitous.

Robert Hare has pointed out that sociologists are more likely to focus on the environmental or socially modifiable facets of the disorder, so prefer the term sociopathy, whereas psychologists and psychiatrists prefer to include the genetic, cognitive, and emotional factors as well as the social factors when making a diagnosis, and therefore would opt for psychopathy.

If you are dyslexic, then any of your siblings has a 50 percent chance of also suffering from dyslexia, thus pointing to the strong genetic determinism of this developmental disorder. At least four genes have now been implicated in dyslexia—and interestingly, most of these genes affect the ability of neurons to migrate to their final locations in the cortex during pregnancy.

What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this. Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15 Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16 If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short. We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.

When I got home, I thought about the fact that Einstein supposedly used to stock his wardrobe with the same suits and shoes so he’d never have to think about what he was going to wear. I lack the intellect it takes to solve problems that way. I’ve advanced nothing in the field of psychology, and my paper on PTSD was given little attention; I wrote that psychological disorders with a genetic link, such as borderline personality disorder, might seem impossible to treat, while PTSD, which is based in trauma that has been experienced, seems easy to tackle, at least to the layperson. The opposite is true. It can be difficult to find the right medication for genetic disorders, but they can be sufficiently treated. Conversely, PTSD never goes away. One might think that our genes are so elementary that we cannot escape them, but our experiences have the ability to do far greater damage.

Collectively this work suggests that the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are reciprocally related. That is, in order for the amygdala to respond to fear reactions, the prefrontal region has to be shut down. By the same logic, when the prefrontal region is active, the amygdala would be inhibited, making it harder to express fear. Pathological fear, then, may occur when the amygdala is unchecked by the prefrontal cortex, and treatment of pathological fear may require that the patient learn to increase activity in the prefrontal region so that the amygdala is less free to express fear. Clearly, decision-making ability in emotional situations is impaired in humans with damage to the medial and ventral prefrontal cortex, and abnormalities there also may predispose people to develop fear and anxiety disorders. These abnormalities could be due to genetic or epigenetic organization of prefrontal synapses or to experiences that subtly alter prefrontal synaptic connections. Indeed, the behavior of animals with abmormalities of the medial prefrontal cortex is reminiscent of humans with anxiety disorders: they develop fear reactions that are difficult to regulate. Although objective information about the world may indicate that a situation is not dangerous, because they cannot properly regulate fear circuits, they experience fear and anxiety in these safe situations.

A. Okbay et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies 74 Loci Associated with Educational Attainment,” Nature 533 (2016): 539–42; M. T. Lo et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses for Personality Traits Identify Six Genomic Loci and Show Correlations with Psychiatric Disorders,” Nature Genetics 49 (2017): 152–56; G. Davies et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Cognitive Functions and Educational Attainment in UK Biobank (N=112 151),” Molecular Psychiatry 21 (2016): 758–67.

How had I not been able to guess this? Not that it was due to alien technology, but that they were working with a platform. They were manipulating a virtual platform like the ones astrolabes could project! One that only the Enyi Zinariya could see and access. I felt a sting of shame as I realized why I hadn’t understood something so obvious. My own prejudice. I had been raised to view the Desert People, the Enyi Zinariya, as a primitive, savage people plagued by a genetic neurological disorder. So that’s what I saw.

A study from New York's Mount Sinai Hospital found that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors were capable of being passed on to their children. Our genes change all the time when chemical tags attach themselves to the DNA and turn genes on or off. The study found that some of these tags--found in the genes of those survivors -- were also found in their children. The changes led to an increased incidence of stress disorders. This passing down of environmentally altered genes is called *epigenetic inheritance.*

Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on. They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats. And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?" In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always requires the right environment. Now, if you're a gardener you know that. If you are growing plants in your backyard and you want them to grow into healthy, functioning beings, botanical beings, you want to provide them with the right nurturing, the right nutrition, minerals, water, sunlight and so on. So the real question is how do we provide the conditions for further development for people whose development was impaired in the first place? Now we know how to do that. We are just not doing it.

The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.

There are a small number of debilitating conditions with a strong genetic basis, such as muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease. These are rare, affecting about one person in ten thousand or even fewer. They do not pose a significant threat to the survival of the species. If, however, we add up the numbers of people plagued by depression or ADD or the other common psychological problems people in this society struggle with, including alcoholism and anxiety, we will have identified no less than a third of the North American population. Genetic explanations for these conditions assume that after millions of years of evolution, nature would permit a very large number of disordered genes, handicapping a third of humankind, to pass through the screen of natural selection — a highly unlikely proposition.

gene, the mutation of whose DNA building blocks accelerated after the split between humans and chimpanzees, around 5.5 million years ago. The theory has also been put forward that the human brain is still evolving, on the grounds that a genetic variant of ASPM is thought to have originated only 5,800 years ago and then spread rapidly through the population. A genetic variant of the microcephalin gene (D allele of MCPH1), which regulates brain size, is thought to have only entered the DNA of Homo sapiens during the last ice age, around 37,000 years ago—yet 70 percent of the current world population carries this variant. A rapid increase of this kind is only possible if a variant confers a clear evolutionary advantage. Genes whose mutations are associated with human language have also been found. Mutations of the FOXP2 gene cause language and speech disorders that run in families. And ASPM and microcephalin also appear to have a linguistic connection.

A dramatic illustration of how environment shapes personality is the story of the Gilmore family. On January 17, 1978, in Utah, the convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad, his unyielding refusal to appeal his death sentence having gained him a measure of international notoriety. The shattering story of his childhood, blighted by family violence, alcoholism and spite was chronicled later by his brother Mikal Gilmore in the memoir Shot in the Heart. Mikal, the youngest of four boys, was born when Gary was eleven years old. If children reared in the same family shared the same environment, the differences between siblings would have to be due to genetic inheritance. In the case of the Gilmores, it is easy to see why Mikal, born at a time when the family was enjoying a period of relative stability, would feel he had been brought up in a different world, why the misery of his childhood, as he put it, had been so radically different from the misery of his brothers’ childhood. Even without such vast chasms in experience, the environment of siblings is never the same. Environment has far greater impact on the structures and circuits of the human brain than was realized even a decade ago. It is what shapes the inherited genetic material. I believe it to be the decisive factor in determining whether the impairments of ADD will or will not appear in a child. Many variables will influence the particular environment a child experiences. Birth order, for one, automatically places siblings in dissimilar situations. The older sibling has to suffer the pain of seeing parental love and attention directed toward an intruder. The younger sibling may need to learn survival in an environment that harbors a stronger, potentially hostile rival, and never comes to know either the special status or the burden of being an only child. The full weight of unconscious parental expectations is far more likely to fall on the firstborn. Historical studies of birth order have established it as an important influence on the shaping of the personality, comparable with sex.

With the rise of molecular genetics, it has become possible to search for possible changes (mutations, polymorphisms) in target genes. Much effort has gone into investigating variations in genes that contribute to serotonin transmission, because serotonin-related drugs have antidepressant and anxiolytic properties. This assumes, however, that the treatment mechanism is the same mechanism that gives rise to the disorder.53 Although this is consistent with the old chemical imbalance hypothesis, it is not a conclusion that should simply be accepted without careful assessment. Nevertheless, studies of the genetic control of serotonin have found interesting results. For example, people with a certain variant (polymorphism) of a gene controlling a protein involved in serotonin transmission are more reactive to threatening stimuli, and this hyperreactivity is associated with increased amygdala activity during the threat.54 Further, it has been reported that this variant of the gene can account for 7 percent to 9 percent of the inheritance of anxiety.55

Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate.

The human brain is the most complex entity in the universe. It has between fifty and one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, each branched to form thousands of possible connections with other nerve cells. It has been estimated that laid end to end, the nerve cables of a single human brain would extend into a line several hundred thousand miles long. The total number of connections, or synapses, is in the trillions. The parallel and simultaneous activity of innumerable brain circuits, and networks of circuits, produces millions of firing patterns each and every second of our lives. The brain has well been described as “a supersystcm of systems.” Even though fully half of the roughly hundred thousand genes in the human organism are dedicated to the central nervous system, the genetic code simply cannot carry enough information to predetermine the infinite number of potential brain circuits. For this reason alone, biological heredity could not by itself account for the densely intertwined psychology and neurophysiology of attention deficit disorder. Experience in the world determines the fine wiring of the brain. As the neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it, “Much of each brain’s circuitry, at any given moment in adult life, is individual and unique, truly reflective of that particular organism’s history and circumstances.” This is no less true of children and infants. Not even in the brains of genetically identical twins will the same patterns be found in the shape of nerve cells or the numbers and configuration of their synapses with other neurons. The microcircuitry of the brain is formatted by influences during the first few years of life, a period when the human brain undergoes astonishingly rapid growth. Five-sixths of the branching of nerve cells in the brain occurs after birth. At times in the first year of life, new synapses are being established at a rate of three billion a second. In large part, each infant’s individual experiences in the early years determine which brain structures will develop and how well, and which nerve centers will be connected with which other nerve centers, and establish the networks controlling behavior. The intricately programmed interactions between heredity and environment that make for the development of the human brain are determined by a “fantastic, almost surrealistically complex choreography,” in the apt phrase of Dr. J. S. Grotstein of the department of psychiatry at UCLA. Attention deficit disorder results from the miswiring of brain circuits, in susceptible infants, during this crucial period of growth.

Government By The Industry, For The Industry Vice President George Bush sat in his chair across from four Monsanto executives. They had come to the White House with an unusual request. They wanted more regulation. They were venturing into a new technology, the genetic modification of food, and they were actually asking the government to oversee their emerging industry. But this was late 1986. Ronald Reagan was president and the administration was busily deregulating business. Bush needed convincing. “We bugged him for regulation,” said Leonard Guarraia, one of the executives at the meeting. “We told him that we have to be regulated.”[1] Monsanto was about to make a multibillion-dollar gamble. With this new technology, they could engineer and patent a whole new kind of food. Later, by buying up seed companies around the world, Monsanto could replace the natural seeds with their patented engineered seeds and control a hefty portion of the food supply. But there was fear among Monsanto’s ranks—fear of consumers’ and environmentalists’ reactions. Their fear was borne of experience. Years earlier, Monsanto had assured the public that their Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the Vietnam War, was safe for humans. It wasn’t. Thousands of veterans and tens of thousand of Vietnamese who suffered a wide range of maladies, including cancer, neurological disorders, and birth defects, blame Monsanto.

Genes can be activated or turned off by factors in the environment. In the Cree population of northwestern Ontario, for example, diabetes is found at a rate five times the Canadian national average, despite the traditionally low incidence of diabetes among native peoples. The genetic makeup of the Cree people cannot have changed in a few generations. The destruction of the Crees’ traditional physically active ways of life, the substitution of high-calorie diets for their previous low-fat, low-carbohydrate eating patterns and greatly increased stress levels are responsible for the alarming rise in diabetes rates. Although heredity is involved in diabetes, it cannot possibly account for the pandemic among Canada’s native peoples, or among the rest of the North American population, for that matter. We will see that in similar ways changes in society are causing more and more children to be affected by attention deficit disorder. It is easy to jump to hasty conclusions about genetic information. Some studies have identified certain genes, for example, that are said to be more common among people with attention deficit disorder or with other related conditions, such as depression, alcoholism or addiction. But even if the existence of these genes is proven, there is no reason to suppose that they can, on their own, induce the development of ADD or any other disorder. First, not everyone with these genes will have the disorders. Second, not everyone with the disorders will be shown to carry the genes.

Kiara ached as her father left her alone with the two men she wasn’t so sure about. Her heart heavy, she locked the door, then frowned at the mocking expression on Syn’s face as he walked over to Nykyrian. “What the hell was that action?” Syn asked him. “I think it’s something called ‘paternal concern.’” Syn scowled at his bland explanation. “What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth.” Nykyrian shrugged. “No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny.” “Get the fuck out. No way. You’re screwing with my head again, aren’t you?” “No. I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up.” Syn shivered. “Yeah but it’s really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What’s next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals?” Kiara gave Syn an irritated grimace. “Don’t your parents ever worry about either of you?” Syn arched a brow. “What parents?” A ripple of apprehension went through Kiara that she might have been insensitive to them. “Are they dead?” “Careful,” Nykyrian said, returning to the kitchen. “You might not want an answer to that question.” She tried to understand his cryptic response. “What do you mean?” Syn laughed evilly. “Kip wasn’t born, he was spawned.” Now she was completely confused. “Who’s Kip?” Syn indicated Nykyrian with his thumb. “You were a tubie?” Nykyrian glanced up from his dinner preparations. “Syn has a brain disorder that causes him to lie most of the time. Ignore him.” Syn snorted. “I don’t lie. I merely tell the truth creatively.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

It is common to assume that multi-racialism is inevitable, and that racial identity will disappear as races mix. Americans prefer to think that the “tragic mulatto,” welcome in neither community, was either a myth or a reflection of outmoded racist thinking. Research suggests things may not be so simple. A 2003 study of 90,000 middle-school and high-school students found that black/white mixed-race children had more health and psychological problems than children who were either black or white. They were more likely to be depressed, sleep badly, skip school, smoke, drink, consider suicide, and have sex. White/Asian children showed similar symptoms. The principal author concluded that the cause was “the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households.” The authors of a 2008 study reached the same conclusion: “When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. . . . Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted.” A study of white/Asian children found that they were twice as likely as mono-racial children—34 percent vs. 17 percent—to suffer from psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression or drug abuse. Yoonsun Choi of the University of Chicago found that in Seattle middle schools, a clear racial identity seemed to protect against certain problems. Bi-racial children were the group most likely to smoke, take drugs, have been in fights, hurt someone badly, or carry a gun. Prof. Choi believes mixed-race children suffer because no racial group accepts them. “There is some indication that a strong ethnic identity helps protect kids from these [undesirable] behaviors,” she said.

Neo-Darwinism and Mutations In order to find a solution, Darwinists advanced the "Modern Synthetic Theory," or as it is more commonly known, Neo-Darwinism, at the end of the 1930s. Neo- Darwinism added mutations, which are distortions formed in the genes of living beings due to such external factors as radiation or replication errors, as the "cause of favorable variations" in addition to natural mutation. Today, the model that stands for evolution in the world is Neo-Darwinism. The theory maintains that millions of living beings formed as a result of a process whereby numerous complex organs of these organisms (e.g., ears, eyes, lungs, and wings) underwent "mutations," that is, genetic disorders. Yet, there is an outright scientific fact that totally undermines this theory: Mutations do not cause living beings to develop; on the contrary, they are always harmful. The reason for this is very simple: DNA has a very complex structure, and random effects can only harm it. The American geneticist B. G. Ranganathan explains this as follows: First, genuine mutations are very rare in nature. Secondly, most mutations are harmful since they are random, rather than orderly changes in the structure of genes; any random change in a highly ordered system will be for the worse, not for the better. For example, if an earthquake were to shake a highly ordered structure such as a building, there would be a random change in the framework of the building which, in all probability, would not be an improvement. Not surprisingly, no mutation example, which is useful, that is, which is observed to develop the genetic code, has been observed so far. All mutations have proved to be harmful. It was understood that mutation, which is presented as an "evolutionary mechanism," is actually a genetic occurrence that harms living things, and leaves them disabled. (The most common effect of mutation on human beings is cancer.) Of course, a destructive mechanism cannot be an "evolutionary mechanism." Natural selection, on the other hand, "can do nothing by itself," as Darwin also accepted. This fact shows us that there is no "evolutionary mechanism" in nature. Since no evolutionary mechanism exists, no such any imaginary process called "evolution" could have taken place.

The key point is that these patterns, while mostly stable, are not permanent: certain environmental experiences can add or subtract methyls and acetyls, changing those patterns. In effect this etches a memory of what the organism was doing or experiencing into its cells—a crucial first step for any Lamarck-like inheritance. Unfortunately, bad experiences can be etched into cells as easily as good experiences. Intense emotional pain can sometimes flood the mammal brain with neurochemicals that tack methyl groups where they shouldn’t be. Mice that are (however contradictory this sounds) bullied by other mice when they’re pups often have these funny methyl patterns in their brains. As do baby mice (both foster and biological) raised by neglectful mothers, mothers who refuse to lick and cuddle and nurse. These neglected mice fall apart in stressful situations as adults, and their meltdowns can’t be the result of poor genes, since biological and foster children end up equally histrionic. Instead the aberrant methyl patterns were imprinted early on, and as neurons kept dividing and the brain kept growing, these patterns perpetuated themselves. The events of September 11, 2001, might have scarred the brains of unborn humans in similar ways. Some pregnant women in Manhattan developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which can epigenetically activate and deactivate at least a dozen genes, including brain genes. These women, especially the ones affected during the third trimester, ended up having children who felt more anxiety and acute distress than other children when confronted with strange stimuli. Notice that these DNA changes aren’t genetic, because the A-C-G-T string remains the same throughout. But epigenetic changes are de facto mutations; genes might as well not function. And just like mutations, epigenetic changes live on in cells and their descendants. Indeed, each of us accumulates more and more unique epigenetic changes as we age. This explains why the personalities and even physiognomies of identical twins, despite identical DNA, grow more distinct each year. It also means that that detective-story trope of one twin committing a murder and both getting away with it—because DNA tests can’t tell them apart—might not hold up forever. Their epigenomes could condemn them. Of course, all this evidence proves only that body cells can record environmental cues and pass them on to other body cells, a limited form of inheritance. Normally when sperm and egg unite, embryos erase this epigenetic information—allowing you to become you, unencumbered by what your parents did. But other evidence suggests that some epigenetic changes, through mistakes or subterfuge, sometimes get smuggled along to new generations of pups, cubs, chicks, or children—close enough to bona fide Lamarckism to make Cuvier and Darwin grind their molars.

The rise of the theater of the absurd, it has been argued, "seems to mirror the change in the predominant form of mental disorders which has been observed and described since World War II by an ever-increasing number of psychiatrists. " Whereas the "classical" drama of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Ibsen turned on conflicts associated with classical neuroses, the absurdist theater of Albee, Beckett, loncsco, and Genet centers on the emptiness, isolation, loneliness, and despair experienced by the borderline personality. The affinity between the theater of the absurd and the borderline's "fear of close relationships, " "attendant feelings of helplessness, loss, and rage," "fear of destructive impulses, " and "fixation to early omnipotence" inheres not only in the content of these plays but-more to the point of the present discussion-in their form. The contemporary playwright abandons the effort to portray coherent and generally recognized truths and presents the poet's personal intuition of truth. The characteristic devaluation of language, vagueness as to time and place, sparse scenery, and lack of plot development evoke the barren world of the borderline, his lack of faith in the growth or development of object relations, his "often stated remark that words do not matter, only action is important," and above all his belief that the world consists of illusions. "Instead of the neurotic character with well-structured conflicts centering around forbidden sex, authority, or dependence and independence within a family setting, we see characters filled with uncertainty about what is real." This uncertainty now invades every form of art and crystallizes in an imagery of the absurd that reenters daily life and encourages a theatrical approach to existence, a kind of absurdist theater of the self.

However, since nearly everybody in the world carried the comfort gene, they believed that many people probably suffered from genetic anomalies involving the gene. For example: People who were overly desirous of joining the majority—that might prove to be a genetic disorder. And people who felt depressed when they were alone, by themselves—conceivably, another disorder. People who joined protest marches, went to sports games, who sought out situations where they would be surrounded by lots of like-minded people—a potential genetic disorder.

Fourth, along these same lines, some diagnoses remind us of a more central role of the body in a person’s struggle. Psychiatric diagnoses remind us that we are embodied souls. We know this clearly from Scripture! But functionally speaking, we sometimes over-spiritualize troubles with emotions and thoughts. When you consider the spectrum of psychiatric diagnoses, it is clear that years of research demonstrate that some diagnoses may have a stronger genetic (inherited) component of causation than others. These include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorder, and perhaps more severe and recalcitrant forms of depression (melancholia), anxiety, and OCD.2 Another way of saying this is that although psychiatric diagnoses are descriptions and not full-fledged explanations, it doesn’t mean that a given diagnosis or symptom holds no explanatory clues at all. Not all psychiatric diagnoses should be viewed equally. Some do indeed have long-standing recognition in medical and psychiatric history, occur transculturally, and therefore are not merely modern, Western “creations” that highlight patterns of deviant or sinful behavior, as critics would say. Observations that have held up among various

In his book-length review of the executive functions, Dr. Russell Barkley (2012) explored the reasons that these skills evolved in humans in the first place. He makes the compelling case that it was the selection pressures associated with humans living in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, which made it selectively advantageous to have good self-regulation skills. That is, these abilities became more important to survival as humans became more interdependent with and reliant on dealings with people who were not family. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and executive dysfunction continue to have effects on the myriad relationships and social interactions in daily life. These connections include romantic and committed relationships/marriage, relationships with parents, siblings, children, and other relatives, friendships, and interactions with employers, coworkers, and customers. The executive functions in relationships also figure in the capacity for empathy and tracking social debt, that is, the balance of favors you owe others and favors owed to you. The ability to effectively organize behavior across time in goal-directed activities gains you “social collateral.” That is, the more you deliver on promises and projects, the more that you will be sought out by others and maintain bonds with them. Some of the common manifestations of ADHD and executive dysfunction that may create problems in relationships include: • Distractibility during conversations • Forgetfulness about matters relevant to another person • Verbal impulsivity—talking over someone else • Verbal impulsivity—saying the “wrong thing” • Breaking promises (acts of commission, e.g., making an expensive purchase despite agreeing to stay within a household budget) • Poor follow-through on promises (acts of omission, e.g., forget to pick up dry cleaning) • Disregarding the effects of one’s behavior on others (e.g., building up excessive debt on a shared credit card account) • Poor frustration tolerance, anger (e.g., overreacting to children’s behavior) • Lying to cover up mistakes • Impulsive behaviors that reduce trust (e.g., romantic infidelity)

(DSM-5), created by the American Psychiatric Association, which catalogs symptoms as a means to a diagnosis—typically a “disorder,” which is genetic or “organic” in origin, not environmental or learned. By assigning a genetic cause, we naturally imagine our sickness to be part of who we are. When we become a diagnosis, it decreases incentive to change or try to explore root causes. We identify with the label. This is who I am.

In the United States alone, the cost of veterinary care associated with genetic diseases in purebred dogs is estimated at a billion dollars each year! One out of every four purebred dogs is afflicted with a genetic problem serious enough that it can only be ended by euthanasia. Many dogs suffer silently with incurable diseases for their entire lives.

Nature loves small errors (without which genetic variations are impossible), humans don’t—hence when you rely on human judgment you are at the mercy of a mental bias that disfavors antifragility.

People with ADD are hypersensitive. That is not a fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born. It is their inborn temperament. That, primarily, is what is hereditary about ADD. Genetic inheritance by itself cannot account for the presence of ADD features in people, but heredity can make it far more likely that these features will emerge in a given individual, depending on circumstances. It is sensitivity, not a disorder, that is transmitted

Theories revolved around genetics, neurological development, family stressors, and environmental triggers.

Girls in Salinas, the Dominican Republic, turn male and grow penises when they enter puberty due to a rare genetic disorder. Approximately 1% of the children born in this village experience this transition by the time they reach 12. It is so common that it is no longer perceived as abnormal and the youngsters are simply called “guevedoces” – which literally means “penis at 12”.

Scheff continued, “The drugs being given to the children are toxic—they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage, and fatal skin disorders.15 “If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.16

The late biologist Peter Medawar provides a compelling analogy to illustrate the fallacy. An inherited disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU) is caused by a rarely occurring abnormal gene that results in a failure to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine in the body. As the amino acid starts accumulating in the child’s brain, he becomes profoundly retarded. The cure is simple. If you diagnose it early enough, all you do is withhold phenylalanine-containing foods from the diet and the child grows up with an entirely normal IQ. Now imagine two boundary conditions. Assume there is a planet where the gene is uncommon and phenylalanine is everywhere, like oxygen or water, and is indispensable for life. On this planet, retardation caused by PKU, and therefore variance in IQ in the population, would be entirely attributable to the PKU gene. Here you would be justified in saying that retardation was a genetic disorder or that IQ was inherited. Now consider another planet in which the converse is true: Everyone has the PKU gene but phenylalanine is rare. On this planet you would say that PKU is an environmental disorder caused by a poison called phenylalanine, and most of the variance in IQ is caused by the environment. This example shows that when the interaction between two variables is labyrinthine it is meaningless to ascribe percentage values to the contribution made by either. And if this is true for just one gene interacting with one environmental variable, the argument must hold with even greater force for something as complex and multifactorial as human intelligence, since genes interact not only with the environment but with each other.

We execute prisoners and send them to death, but we never stopped to ask what led them to commit those hideous crimes. You have a lot to learn. Serial killers show signs of psychological disorders such as psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder. Are they not sick? Is this not a proof of genetic and neurological mutation? Do they deserve death? The answer is No.

They say that he vast majority of individuals with neurological disorders or genetic predispositions do not engage in criminal behavior. Really?A baby is born innocent, and like some children who develop criminality in their early ages while living in the best environment, there are who become doctors in the darkest environment. Therefore, individuals growing up in adverse environments and still achieving success, such as becoming doctors, highlights the resilience and potential for positive growth that exists within every individual. This is not just a piece of the puzzle, but the entire puzzle. If you grow up in a great environment, but you have an urge of committing crime, you simply will and this is called genetic predispositions and/or neurological abnormalities, which is inherited.

Remember that what you have is a neurological condition. It is genetically transmitted. It is caused by biology, by how your brain is wired. It is not a disease of the will, nor a moral failing, nor some kind of neurosis. It is not caused by a weakness in character, nor by a failure to mature. Its cure is not to be found in the power of the will, nor in punishment, nor in sacrifice, nor in pain. Always remember this. Try as they might, many people with ADD have great trouble accepting the syndrome as being rooted in biology rather than weakness of character.

in believing that anxiety disorders typically arise from failed efforts to resolve basic existential dilemmas, Dr. W. is, as we will see, running against the grain of modern psychopharmacology (which proffers the evidence of sixty years of drug studies to argue that anxiety and depression are based on “chemical imbalances”), neuroscience (whose emergence has demonstrated not only the brain activity associated with various emotional states but also, in some cases, the specific structural abnormalities associated with mental illness), and temperament studies and molecular genetics (which suggest, rather convincingly, a powerful role for heredity in the determination of one’s baseline level of anxiety and susceptibility to psychiatric illness). Dr. W. doesn’t dispute the findings from any of those modes of inquiry. He believes medication can be an effective treatment for the symptoms of anxiety. But his view, based on thirty years of clinical work with hundreds of anxious patients, is that at the root of almost all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about what he calls the “ontological givens”—that we will grow old, that we will die, that we will lose people we love, that we will likely endure identity-shaking professional failures and personal humiliations, that we must struggle to find meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we must make trade-offs between personal freedom and emotional security and between our desires and the constraints of our relationships and our communities. In this view, our phobias of rats or snakes or cheese or honey (yes, honey; the actor Richard Burton could not bear to be in a room with honey, even if it was sealed in a jar, even if the jar was closed in a drawer) are displacements of our deeper existential concerns projected onto outward things. Early

Perhaps the most surprising recent finding uncovered by the large collaborative effort on the genetics of schizophrenia is that some of the same genes that create a risk for schizophrenia also create a risk for bipolar disorder. What’s more, a different group of genes that creates a risk for schizophrenia also creates a risk for autism spectrum disorders.

We have the technology right now to effectively eradicate Huntington's disease from the planet, along with many other genetic disorders. But the messy realities of human existence--of economics, emotions, politics, and the rest--override the technological possibilities.

There is no denying the fact that we humans are a voracious bunch of animals. Its almost as if our insatiable appetite is trying to fill a bottom less belly carved out by the past hungers our ancestors experienced. That’s why the most gluttonous survived. We are also a fickle and forgetful species. There’s one thing, though, we’ve never been able to forgive or forget, and that’s hunger. Even if we tried to forget, it wasn’t long before another famine came along to retell a very old story. Which is why we should all be excused for our rapaciousness -its literally been hardwired into our DNA.

There is no denying the fact that we humans are a voracious bunch of animals. Its almost as if our insatiable appetite is trying to fill a bottomless belly carved out by the past hungers our ancestors experienced. That’s why the most gluttonous survived. We are also a fickle and forgetful species. There’s one thing, though, we’ve never been able to forgive or forget, and that’s hunger. Even if we tried to forget, it wasn’t long before another famine came along to retell a very old story. Which is why we should all be excused for our rapaciousness -its literally been hardwired into our DNA.

Scheff continued, “The drugs being given to the children are toxic—they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage, and fatal skin disorders.15 “If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.16 “In 2003, two children, ages six and twelve, had debilitating strokes due to drug toxicities. The six-year-old went blind. They both died shortly after. Another fourteen-year-old died recently. An eight-year-old boy had two plastic surgeries to remove large, fatty, drug-induced lumps from his neck.”17 “This isn’t science fiction. This is AIDS research.

If all genetic brain disorders were eliminated, people might be happier, but there would be a terrible price.

The solfeggio is a six-note scale and is also nicknamed “the creational scale.” Traditional Indian music calls this scale the saptak, or seven steps, and relates each note to a chakra. These six frequencies, and their related effects, are as follows: Do 396 Hz Liberating guilt and fear Re 417 Hz Undoing situations and facilitating change Mi 528 Hz Transformation and miracles (DNA repair) Fa 639 Hz Connecting/relationships Sol 741 Hz Awakening intuition La 852 Hz Returning to spiritual order Mi has actually been used by molecular biologists to repair genetic defects.115 Some researchers believe that sound governs the growth of the body. As Dr. Michael Isaacson and Scott Klimek teach in a sound healing class at Normandale College in Minneapolis, Dr. Alfred Tomatis believes that the ear’s first in utero function is to establish the growth of the rest of the body. Sound apparently feeds the electrical impulses that charge the neocortex. High-frequency sounds energize the brain, creating what Tomatis calls “charging sounds.”116 Low-frequency sounds drain energy and high-frequency sounds attract energy. Throughout all of life, sound regulates the sending and receiving of energy—even to the point of creating problems. People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder listen too much with their bodies, processing sound through bone conduction rather than the ears. They are literally too “high in sound.”117 Some scientists go a step further and suggest that sound not only affects the body but also the DNA, actually stimulating the DNA to create information signals that spread throughout the body. Harvard-trained Dr. Leonard Horowitz has actually demonstrated that DNA emits and receives phonons and photons, the electromagnetic waves of sound and light. As well, three Nobel laureates in medical research have asserted that the primary function of DNA is not to synthesize proteins, but to perform bioacoustic and bioelectrical signaling.118 While research such as that by Dr. Popp shows that DNA is a biophoton emitter, other research suggests that sound actually originates light. In a paper entitled “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” which was featured in Stanley Krippner’s book Psychoenergetic Systems, a team of researchers led by Richard Miller showed that superposed coherent waves in the cells interact and form patterns first through sound, and secondly through light.119 This idea dovetails with research by Russian scientists Peter Gariaev and Vladimir Poponin, whose work with torsion energies was covered in Chapter 25. They demonstrated that chromosomes work like holographic biocomputers, using the DNA’s own electromagnetic radiation to generate and interpret spiraling waves of sound and light that run up and down the DNA ladder. Gariaev and his group used language frequencies such as words (which are sounds) to repair chromosomes damaged by X-rays. Gariaev thus concludes that life is electromagnetic rather than chemical and that DNA can be activated with linguistic expressions—or sounds—like an antenna. In turn, this activation modifies the human bioenergy fields, which transmit radio and light waves to bodily structures.120

The Power of Functional Nutrition: A Personalized Approach to Wellness Functional nutrition is a holistic, science-based approach to health that focuses on addressing the root causes of illness rather than just treating symptoms. By understanding the unique biochemical and genetic makeup of each individual, functional nutrition provides personalized strategies to optimize overall well-being. Unlike conventional methods that rely heavily on medications, functional nutrition considers how diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors affect the body's systems. It aims to balance key nutrients and identify food sensitivities, nutrient deficiencies, or imbalances that contribute to health issues. This approach is especially beneficial for managing chronic conditions like autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, and mental health concerns. A key principle of functional nutrition is the belief that no one-size-fits-all solution exists. Each person has unique needs, and what works for one individual may not be effective for another. By assessing specific health markers, a functional nutritionist can develop customized plans that target an individual's nutritional gaps and support optimal function. Incorporating functional nutrition into your wellness routine can lead to significant improvements in energy levels, mental clarity, and digestive health. It empowers individuals to make informed dietary choices that are aligned with their body's specific needs, leading to long-term health benefits. Functional nutrition offers a route to long-term wellness by emphasizing prevention and treating the root causes of health issues. If you're looking to enhance your health holistically, consider adopting a functional nutrition plan to achieve better balance and vitality in your life.

Bipolar disorder, previously known as manic depression, is a mental disorder characterized by periods of depression and periods of abnormally elevated mood that each last from days to weeks. If the elevated mood is severe or associated with psychosis, it is called mania; if it is less severe, it is called hypomania. During mania, an individual behaves or feels abnormally energetic, happy or irritable, and they often make impulsive decisions with little regard for the consequences. There is usually also a reduced need for sleep during manic phases. The risk of suicide is high; over a period of 20 years, 6% of those with bipolar disorder died by suicide, while 30-40% engaged in self-harm. Other mental health issues, such as anxiety disorders and substance use disorders, are commonly associated with bipolar disorder. While the causes of this mood disorder are not clearly understood, both genetic and environmental factors are thought to play a role.

the theory that sugar can induce hyperactivity or any other kind of high isn’t supported by the research. The notion that sugar intake could lead to what was then called “the neurotic child” was first proposed in the medical literature in 1922, and later gained popularity during the 1970s, when researchers were first studying attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But these early studies failed to control for many other factors that we know now can play a role in a child’s ADHD management, including their sleep schedule, parents’ stress levels, and genetics.

Disease and Genetic Disorders

Symptoms of Systemic Inflammation Symptoms are far ranging, including everything from general fatigue to weight gain.44 Even if you are less concerned about overall health and more worried about your banged-up knees and elbows, pay close attention to this. Studies show low-grade systemic inflammation makes you more susceptible to tendinopathy and joint pain.45 While most people have one or two of these symptoms, you should seek medical guidance if several of these describe you: Weight gain (especially around the midsection) Fatigue, brain fog, general lethargy, insomnia Joint and muscle pain, spasms, muscle cramps Depressed mood and anxiety Digestive discomfort (gas, diarrhea, constipation, stomach cramps and pains) Skin disorders, including easily irritated skin, persistent redness or puffiness, eczema, and psoriasis Frequent infections, colds, and illnesses Frequent allergic reactions and allergy symptoms Symptoms of local chronic inflammation (in a specific region of the body) are more specific: Pain, swelling, irritation, or redness lasting longer than six weeks Progressive muscle weakness Progressive reductions in range of motion Causes and Risk Factors for Chronic Inflammation While some of these are out of your control—like genetics and age—you can influence most of these risk factors:

The two sides of this trade-off at the root of mental conflict are supported by genetic studies that have found two global pathways to mental disorders.44,45 One pathway is via internalizing, that is, inhibition, anxiety, self-blame, neurosis, and depression. The other pathway is via externalizing, that is, by pursuing self-interest with little inhibition in ways that often lead to social conflicts and addiction. For the first group of patients, social selection has worked all too well; they are acutely attuned to what others want, and they work hard to please others. For the second group, the tendency to pursue self-interest leaves them with limited moral moorings or committed social support. Most of us muddle along somewhere in between. These two global strategies are closely related to fast and slow life history strategies and their possible relationship to mental disorders.46 Early adversity has been proposed to discount the perceived value of long-term benefits and set behavior to take advantage of opportunities now, even at the expense of long-term relationships.47,48,49 This may help explain the association of early adversity with borderline personality.50

What’s been clear for almost forty years is that the levels of circulating insulin in animals and humans will be proportional to body fat. “The leaner an individual, the lower his basal insulin, and vice versa,” as Stephen Woods, now director of the Obesity Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, and his colleague Dan Porte observed in 1976. “This relationship has also been shown to occur in every commonly used model of altered body weight, including…genetically obese rodents and overfed humans. In fact, the relationship is sufficiently robust that it exists in the presence of widespread metabolic disorder, such as diabetes mellitus, i.e., obese diabetics have elevated basal insulin levels in proportion to their body weight.

Even if a certain tendency is dominant, that doesn’t mean it becomes widespread throughout the population. There are quite a few rare disorders where genetically there is a dominant gene, but these conditions don’t, as a result, become common. Thankfully, in most cases these are checked at a fixed number, and remain rare disorders. Dominant genes are nothing more than one among many elements in tendency distribution. Other elements would include the survival of the fittest, natural selection, and so on. This is personal conjecture, but I think six fingers are too many for human beings.

The increased risk for bipolar illness among identical twins is even true if the identical twins are separated at birth and raised by different families. Although the adoption of identical twins by separate families is rare, it does happen on occasion. In some cases, scientists have been able to locate the twins later in life to determine how similar or different they are. These "natural" experiments can tell us a great deal about the relative importance of genes versus environment because the separately raised identical twins have identical genes but their environments are different. Such studies highlight the importance of strong genetic influences in bipolar disorder.

The obvious alternative to blaming the parent is to conclude that there is something amiss or lacking in the child. If we are not given to doubt our parenting, we assume the source of our trouble must be the child. We take refuge in the child-blaming thought that we have not failed, but our children have failed to live up to the expected standards. Our attitude is expressed in questions or demands such as Why don't you pay attention? Stop being so difficult! Or, Why can't you do as you're told? Difficulty in parenting often leads to a hunt to find out what is wrong with the child. We may witness today a frantic search for labels to explain our children's problems. Parents seek the formal diagnoses of a professional or grasp at informal labels — there are, for examples, books on raising the “difficult” or the “spirited” child. The more frustrating parenting becomes, the more likely children will be perceived as difficult and the more labels will be sought for verification. It is no coincidence that the preoccupation with diagnoses has paralleled the rise in peer orientation in our society. Increasingly, children's behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place. Medical explanations help by removing guilt but they hinder by reducing the issues to oversimplified concepts. They assume that the complex behavior problems of many children can be explained by genetics or by miswired brain circuits. They ignore scientific evidence that the human brain is shaped by the environment from birth throughout the lifetime and that attachment relationships are the most important aspect of the child's environment. They also dictate narrow solutions, such as medications, without regard to the child's relationships with peers and with the adult world. In practice, they serve to further disempower parents.

Trauma and stress experienced in difficult situations can be passed on genetically as well. The gene itself does not alter, but the imprint left on it in the traumatized parent is passed to the child. The child is then often found to have stress disorder even if they’ve never had a traumatic experience themselves. That’s the theory of epigenetic inheritance

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

It turns out that bipedal species of kangaroos not only display a left-forelimb preference but also, lacking a corpus callosum—that bundle of neurons connecting the cerebral hemispheres—resemble some persons with autism, a disorder sometimes connected to both left-handedness and an underdeveloped corpus callosum. These findings about kangaroos have been used as evidence for both environmental claims and genetic claims about the etiology of left-handedness.

Genetics plays a role in determining who gets an anxiety disorder, what type it is (e.g., worry, compulsive

Genetic variability evolves over many millennia, yet we know that the rates of anxiety disorders have skyrocketed in just the last century, not to mention the last decade. I believe this has to do partly with changes in lifestyle, diet, sleep and work patterns, and especially our relationship with stress. Our world is unquestionably complex

Meiosis is an elegant process but in any organism errors in meiosis sometimes occur. These errors may be the result of mistakes in separation of the chromosomes during division or of an incorrect exchange of genetic information during chiasma formation. Many genetic disorders in humans can be traced back to errors in the formation of the gametes in meiosis. Mistakes in meiosis can result in an abnormal number of chromosomes in an egg or sperm cell. If this egg or sperm is then involved in fertilization, the zygote will exhibit an abnormal number of chromosomes. The child produced from this zygote (following mitosis and differentiation) will have cells with too few or too many chromosomes

Other important alterations to the genetic code involve so-called promoters and inhibitors, pieces of genes that regulate the gene’s ability to make products. Some of these products regulate the behavior of neurotransmitters. So promoters and inhibitors are like the gas and brake pedals of a gene as they control the delivery of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine in the brain. For serotonin, implicated in depression, bipolar disorder, sleep and eating disorders, schizophrenia, hallucinations and panic attacks, as well as psychopathy, the breakdown enzyme is MAO-A. MAOA, the gene that produces this enzyme (and lacks its hyphen), has a promoter that comes in either a short form or a long form. The version of the MAOA gene with the short promoter has been associated with aggressive behavior and is called the “warrior gene.