5 ms·

One of the biggest takeaways I got from 'Behave' is it isn't really nature vs nurture. Often one's 'nurture' (upbringing, and experiences) can change your epig

One of the biggest takeaways I got from 'Behave' is it isn't really nature vs nurture. Often one's 'nurture' (upbringing, and experiences) can change your epigenetics, and those with abusive childhoods have higher risks for all sorts of things including cardiovascular disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions and anxiety and depression. I'm not really sure everyone can chose 'joy'. Some simply don't have the innate temperament required to build strong relationships, and some have it literally beat out of them. Some folks are dealt a bad hand of both nature and nurture, and it makes me wonder the extent to which we 'choose' anything, or if we're all destined to mostly follow the ruts we're born into.

nextos 3y ago
Genetics is great, but a bitter lesson from the last decade for those who believed it was the major driver of disease is that the environment has a stronger effect. If we ignore Mendelian traits, i.e. rare diseases, ankylosing spondylitis and type 1 diabetes appear to have the largest contribution from genetics. Yet, penetrance is tiny. Genetics hardly explains more than 30-40% of phenotypic variance in those two. Most traits are largely determined by our nutrient supply, infections, eubiosis / dysbiosis, etc. The first year of life is particularly important.
- nyssos 3y ago
  > but a bitter lesson from the last decade for those who believed it was the major driver of disease is that the environment has a stronger effect. It doesn't make sense to talk about whether genes or environmental factors have stronger effects in general: they're very very very strongly interacting. It's not phenotype = genes + environment, it's phenotype = stupidly_complicated_function_we've_only_just_begun_to_understand(genes, environment). You can talk about the effects of genetic variation in a particular environment, or of environmental variation given fixed genetics, but "the contribution from [genetics/the environment]" without any further qualification is not a thing that exists.
  - nextos 3y ago
    I know, but the dominant trend was to (try to) predict diseases by calculating genetic risk scores, ignoring any environmental contributions. This trend is even known as genetic determinism. There is a whole generation of senior academics who are fiercely attached to this line of thought.
    - klipt 3y ago
      How much better could you predict if you sequence both DNA and samples of expressed RNA from various parts of the body?
    - dekhn 3y ago
      Personally I think nyssos's explanation (that disease is a complex function of the joint distribution of genotype and environment) is still more convincing, and that the reason environment temporarily got more attention is simply that our ability to understand causality of disease in non-mendelian contexts is still very limited (it being an extremely complex function). I've worked in this field for a while and continuously get into arguments with geneticists, part of that is because I simply don't understand the explanations genetics gives (I'm a molecular biologist and computer scientist; the difference is that genenticists treat genotype to phenotype as a black box, while molecular biologists see it as an event system), but another part of it is that most scientists are highly susceptible to the streelight effect, and genetics is something tangible you can easily measure in the lab, while environment is... much more complicated.
      - sizzle 3y ago
        Do you work as a computational biologist? I think the problems these scientists are trying to solve with computing power is fascinating. I’m working on human biomolecular data viz tools in a consortium of academic labs (Harvard, CMU, etc.) funded by the NIH. I really enjoy working with computational biologist. More info here if anyone is interested to collab or learn more, please reach out: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-023-00019-y/index.html https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-023-00019-y/index.ht... https://portal.hubmapconsortium.org/ https://portal.hubmapconsortium.org/ (not mobile friendly)
molsongolden 3y ago
I haven't read Behave and childhood trauma can definitely have lasting impacts but I am also inspired by some of the older folks I have known with what seem like bottomless wells of joy. There's a cynical broken person out there for every one of them, they aren't the norm, but some of these people went through terrible shit as children or throughout their lives but they're still happy and grateful for what they did end up having. Also, some of the happiest people I know come from some of the worst starting environments. This is definitely survivorship bias because these people made it out to become happy but there's some thread between the two around grit and expectations then finding joy in the most basic things.
- brightball 3y ago
  It’s one of the reason I appreciate Dabo Swinney’s life story so much. He had an awful childhood, broken home, poor as dirt, his mom shared his bed in college because they were so poor. And yet, he’s one of the most optimistic and successful leaders out there determined to show people that their conditions do not define them.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    Survivorship bias is strong. We only hear about the ones who 'make it'. Little more than footnotes for the countless who don't. Normies believe some people don't deserve a good life.
noitamroftuo 3y ago
sapolsky has a new book, check it out on this pod https://www.econtalk.org/robert-sapolsky-on-determinism-free-will-and-responsibility/ https://www.econtalk.org/robert-sapolsky-on-determinism-free...
zeteo 3y ago
Yes this seems backwards for at least some of the variables in the study. If you're in great health you're more likely to be joyful and to have good relationships with those around you. Saying that you should choose joy is like saying that you can avoid the worst health problems if you never go to hospital.
temp0826 3y ago
I think Harvard students would likely have more opportunities to choose joy so I'd take this all with some boulders of salt anyways.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I would very much doubt that. Joy is in how you engage with the life you have. You can have a Harvard education and (for example) be envious of the guy next door, or let topics-of-the-day drive you crazy (eg: "I don't have kids because it's bad for the environment" or "I never got married, too busy with my career") And vice a versa, plenty of poor people find a way to be at peace with what they have (and even strive to do better w/o being resentful) , have families, etc.
  - digging 3y ago
    > let topics-of-the-day drive you crazy Oh yeah, chasing fads and news cycles is miserable - > "I don't have kids because it's bad for the environment" or "I never got married, too busy with my career" There are, uh, extremely not "being driven crazy by topics-of-the-day." Let alone even being joyless choices.
  - jtr1 3y ago
    > plenty of poor people find a way to be at peace with what they have (and even strive to do better w/o being resentful) , have families, etc. There is a definite floor to this definition of “poor” and a ton of people live below it.
    - kridsdale3 3y ago
      That is true. It's also true that truly happy people live in places in Africa with actually the bare minimum calories, barely functioning shelter, and not the best prospects for medicine.
      - rqtwteye 3y ago
        How do you know they are truly happy? I am sure they wouldn't mind proper food, housing and medical care.
notShabu 3y ago
sometimes it's not even clearly good or bad. E.g. "sensitivity" as a trait can be useful in nurturing environments to develop it into talent, but also a way-in for trauma that would have otherwise bounced off of someone with less sensitivity.
- Eunoia12 3y ago
  True. I think people need more exposure to society. Maybe school implementation- social clubs, more sports incoporated, who knows. People in general should try, even at their jobs, to join in on events. Exposure helps people with being able to balance, as well as find themselves, on what works, and what doesn't work within their bubble. Bodies, as well as stress can be alleviated when you're surrounded by people. Even when you're in solitude, working in a public coffee shop can help too.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    My social experiences all trend negative, even when I gave my all and tried my best to fit in. At the end of the day, society demands we fit in a mold and be replaceable, and not everyone fits into that mold. People who are like that, do not have a community and would have to be completely different people to be accepted in a community in a healthy way.
bowsamic 3y ago
I totally agree. My mum left when I was 2, and my dad struggled to care for me well. I have been totally depressed from age 9 to today (age 29). My scientific career has failed due to it. I am totally unable to control it, no matter how much I try to change my circumstances or push through it
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Either way, the conditions/makeup of your conception, prenatal environment and first 3 years of your life are simultaneously the most consequential part of your life and the part of your life over which you have the least control. At least 80% of life outcomes, in terms of objective quality and mental health is determined by those factors.
throwaway5Am1k 3y ago
This sounds like such a cop out. I've lived in low socioeconomic areas my whole life, went to school in them, played sports in them, been in communities in them. How many of these people have I met? 5? 10? The majority of people can, and should try and embrace good habits. Some structure, sleep, sunshine, exercise, community, etc.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  To some extent, yeah, we have 'free will'. I can chose my diet. I can chose to exercise. I can't chose my immune system or whether or not my temperament is predisposed to depression or asociality. Even if you try to fight against it, sometimes you're simply going to be swimming upstream your entire life. That's admirable, but tiring.

nextos 3y ago

Genetics is great, but a bitter lesson from the last decade for those who believed it was the major driver of disease is that the environment has a stronger effect. If we ignore Mendelian traits, i.e. rare diseases, ankylosing spondylitis and type 1 diabetes appear to have the largest contribution from genetics. Yet, penetrance is tiny. Genetics hardly explains more than 30-40% of phenotypic variance in those two. Most traits are largely determined by our nutrient supply, infections, eubiosis / dysbiosis, etc. The first year of life is particularly important.

nyssos 3y ago
> but a bitter lesson from the last decade for those who believed it was the major driver of disease is that the environment has a stronger effect. It doesn't make sense to talk about whether genes or environmental factors have stronger effects in general: they're very very very strongly interacting. It's not phenotype = genes + environment, it's phenotype = stupidly_complicated_function_we've_only_just_begun_to_understand(genes, environment). You can talk about the effects of genetic variation in a particular environment, or of environmental variation given fixed genetics, but "the contribution from [genetics/the environment]" without any further qualification is not a thing that exists.
- nextos 3y ago
  I know, but the dominant trend was to (try to) predict diseases by calculating genetic risk scores, ignoring any environmental contributions. This trend is even known as genetic determinism. There is a whole generation of senior academics who are fiercely attached to this line of thought.
  - klipt 3y ago
    How much better could you predict if you sequence both DNA and samples of expressed RNA from various parts of the body?
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Personally I think nyssos's explanation (that disease is a complex function of the joint distribution of genotype and environment) is still more convincing, and that the reason environment temporarily got more attention is simply that our ability to understand causality of disease in non-mendelian contexts is still very limited (it being an extremely complex function). I've worked in this field for a while and continuously get into arguments with geneticists, part of that is because I simply don't understand the explanations genetics gives (I'm a molecular biologist and computer scientist; the difference is that genenticists treat genotype to phenotype as a black box, while molecular biologists see it as an event system), but another part of it is that most scientists are highly susceptible to the streelight effect, and genetics is something tangible you can easily measure in the lab, while environment is... much more complicated.
    - sizzle 3y ago
      Do you work as a computational biologist? I think the problems these scientists are trying to solve with computing power is fascinating. I’m working on human biomolecular data viz tools in a consortium of academic labs (Harvard, CMU, etc.) funded by the NIH. I really enjoy working with computational biologist. More info here if anyone is interested to collab or learn more, please reach out: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-023-00019-y/index.html https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-023-00019-y/index.ht... https://portal.hubmapconsortium.org/ https://portal.hubmapconsortium.org/ (not mobile friendly)

molsongolden 3y ago

I haven't read Behave and childhood trauma can definitely have lasting impacts but I am also inspired by some of the older folks I have known with what seem like bottomless wells of joy. There's a cynical broken person out there for every one of them, they aren't the norm, but some of these people went through terrible shit as children or throughout their lives but they're still happy and grateful for what they did end up having. Also, some of the happiest people I know come from some of the worst starting environments. This is definitely survivorship bias because these people made it out to become happy but there's some thread between the two around grit and expectations then finding joy in the most basic things.

brightball 3y ago
It’s one of the reason I appreciate Dabo Swinney’s life story so much. He had an awful childhood, broken home, poor as dirt, his mom shared his bed in college because they were so poor. And yet, he’s one of the most optimistic and successful leaders out there determined to show people that their conditions do not define them.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Survivorship bias is strong. We only hear about the ones who 'make it'. Little more than footnotes for the countless who don't. Normies believe some people don't deserve a good life.

noitamroftuo 3y ago

sapolsky has a new book, check it out on this pod https://www.econtalk.org/robert-sapolsky-on-determinism-free-will-and-responsibility/ https://www.econtalk.org/robert-sapolsky-on-determinism-free...

zeteo 3y ago

Yes this seems backwards for at least some of the variables in the study. If you're in great health you're more likely to be joyful and to have good relationships with those around you. Saying that you should choose joy is like saying that you can avoid the worst health problems if you never go to hospital.

temp0826 3y ago

I think Harvard students would likely have more opportunities to choose joy so I'd take this all with some boulders of salt anyways.

xyzelement 3y ago
I would very much doubt that. Joy is in how you engage with the life you have. You can have a Harvard education and (for example) be envious of the guy next door, or let topics-of-the-day drive you crazy (eg: "I don't have kids because it's bad for the environment" or "I never got married, too busy with my career") And vice a versa, plenty of poor people find a way to be at peace with what they have (and even strive to do better w/o being resentful) , have families, etc.
- digging 3y ago
  > let topics-of-the-day drive you crazy Oh yeah, chasing fads and news cycles is miserable - > "I don't have kids because it's bad for the environment" or "I never got married, too busy with my career" There are, uh, extremely not "being driven crazy by topics-of-the-day." Let alone even being joyless choices.
- jtr1 3y ago
  > plenty of poor people find a way to be at peace with what they have (and even strive to do better w/o being resentful) , have families, etc. There is a definite floor to this definition of “poor” and a ton of people live below it.
  - kridsdale3 3y ago
    That is true. It's also true that truly happy people live in places in Africa with actually the bare minimum calories, barely functioning shelter, and not the best prospects for medicine.
    - rqtwteye 3y ago
      How do you know they are truly happy? I am sure they wouldn't mind proper food, housing and medical care.

notShabu 3y ago

sometimes it's not even clearly good or bad. E.g. "sensitivity" as a trait can be useful in nurturing environments to develop it into talent, but also a way-in for trauma that would have otherwise bounced off of someone with less sensitivity.

Eunoia12 3y ago
True. I think people need more exposure to society. Maybe school implementation- social clubs, more sports incoporated, who knows. People in general should try, even at their jobs, to join in on events. Exposure helps people with being able to balance, as well as find themselves, on what works, and what doesn't work within their bubble. Bodies, as well as stress can be alleviated when you're surrounded by people. Even when you're in solitude, working in a public coffee shop can help too.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  My social experiences all trend negative, even when I gave my all and tried my best to fit in. At the end of the day, society demands we fit in a mold and be replaceable, and not everyone fits into that mold. People who are like that, do not have a community and would have to be completely different people to be accepted in a community in a healthy way.

bowsamic 3y ago

I totally agree. My mum left when I was 2, and my dad struggled to care for me well. I have been totally depressed from age 9 to today (age 29). My scientific career has failed due to it. I am totally unable to control it, no matter how much I try to change my circumstances or push through it

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Either way, the conditions/makeup of your conception, prenatal environment and first 3 years of your life are simultaneously the most consequential part of your life and the part of your life over which you have the least control. At least 80% of life outcomes, in terms of objective quality and mental health is determined by those factors.

throwaway5Am1k 3y ago

This sounds like such a cop out. I've lived in low socioeconomic areas my whole life, went to school in them, played sports in them, been in communities in them. How many of these people have I met? 5? 10? The majority of people can, and should try and embrace good habits. Some structure, sleep, sunshine, exercise, community, etc.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
To some extent, yeah, we have 'free will'. I can chose my diet. I can chose to exercise. I can't chose my immune system or whether or not my temperament is predisposed to depression or asociality. Even if you try to fight against it, sometimes you're simply going to be swimming upstream your entire life. That's admirable, but tiring.