Jonathan Flint, UCLA behavioral geneticist and Depression Grand Challenge Executive Committee member, shared background about the theory of the “warrior gene” in a blog post written for the Oxford University Press. Since the 1990s, criminal defense lawyers have tried to argue that a mutation in the “warrior gene” mitigates responsibility for aggressive behavior. Flint highlights a 2021 New Mexico Supreme Court case which definitively ended the argument that a single gene mutation determines overall behavior.
While there isn’t a single gene (like a “warrior gene”) that can be blamed, there still is the possibility that we can blame someone’s genetic constitution in aggregate. Flint argues that this is not the end for genetic determinism. Almost all behavior is heritable to some extent – it arises from the combination of thousands of individual genetic variants, which individually have a miniscule affect (.01%). Flint highlights that scientists are getting better at predicting behavioral outcomes from the combination of variants (a technique that is central for the Depression Grand Challenge to understand the causes of depression).
Read more at Oxford University Press’s Blog.
