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This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phas

• brianchu 14y ago
  I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea that one day people will try to optimize their genes, even if it's only self-selecting. Yet: 1) Hereditary factors can only explain a small part of the picture. Eliminating hereditary factors that predispose people to developing mental illnesses would only eliminate a fraction of the problem. Environmental factors play a huge role. 2) The point at which what you describe happens is a long way off (if it ever happens), at least a couple of decades away. In that time, we need a viable solution. Part of that solution should be better access to mental health care. I don't think there will be any constitutional issues with institutionalized treatment of a child who has threatened to kill someone. AFAIK, a child's parent has considerable legal control over that child and the decision to institutionalize/otherwise treat. EDIT (reply to below): > wasn't known to have any violent tendencies >What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance. I'm afraid it's simply to early to say these kinds of things. We still do not have a complete picture of Adam Lanza's life. I don't think any of us can say anything about his personality until more facts emerge. A middle class existence is not the end-all be-all of mental stability. There are tons of other factors - family situations, bullying, school environment, the list goes on. And obviously, hereditary factors may very well have played a role in his case. >Meanwhile, someone without a mental illness has a moment of rage and threatens to kill a guy at a bar. Do we lock him up and drug him too? This is a straw man. Firstly, I was only talking about the case of children/adolescents whose parents have legal powers over them. In the case of an adult (whose parents obviously have no legal control), the problem is that those adults (incl. the guy who threatens another in your case) will get sent to jail and there won't even be an attempt to diagnose/treat a mental illness even once they are in jail. The guy in your example would not get diagnosed with something he doesn't have. He'll just be in jail. Expansion of access to mental health care should include expanded access to inmates.
  • joonix 14y ago
    But the CT shooter was never in trouble with the law and wasn't known to have any violent tendencies. And most people are not like the OP blogger: they aren't going to turn in their child to the authorities. A schizophrenic may not ever have violent tendencies. Then, one day a voice tells them to kill everyone. Meanwhile, someone without a mental illness has a moment of rage and threatens to kill a guy at a bar. Do we lock him up and drug him too? What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.
    • javajosh 14y ago
      >What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance. This is, of course, the crux of the matter. Clearly there is something in America's environment that makes us far more prone to this sort of thing than other places, with or without gun control. Identifying what that is will be critical to preventing this from happening again. Gun control can reduce the body count, but even a body count of one (suicide) is not acceptable. The silver lining to this is that these events raise a dramatic warning to us that there is something deeply, seriously wrong with our culture.
      • pjscott 14y ago
        Do we actually have statistics showing America to be worse about this than other places? It sounds like the kind of thing that people just assume after hearing about a sensational, attention-grabbing tragedy. Remember when there were huge epidemics of suicide and Satanic ritual abuse in the 80s? Or rather, people said there were. In reality, suicide rates remained mostly flat, even declining slightly overall, and the evil Satanic cults were a myth. So, be careful about postulating something deeply wrong with our culture, when there may well be another explanation.
        • slyn 14y ago
• fernly 14y ago
  You haven't thought it through. Try to visualize how such a program would be implemented. You run into intractable problems. One: who defines what traits are undesirable? (Do you imagine this would ever be uncontroversial? Aggression, for example, is needed -- sometimes.) Two: who determines how future behavior is linked to genes; and how is it ever proved that future behavior is only and certainly genetically-based and in no part linked to upbringing? Three: what if a genetic pattern associated with unwanted behavior turns out to be linked with another trait that is desirable (e.g. the subject of this story is both violent and highly intelligent; what if both traits come from the same genes?). Four: by what means do you coerce parents into not breeding? Is deliberate breeding a crime? Punishable by what? Five: what do you do about accidental children? Execute them? And so on. No democracy would ever install such a scheme.
  • joonix 14y ago
    You're not understanding me correctly. I'm not saying it will be a government mandate or coercion of any kind. I'm saying cultural attitudes will change on their own as "genetic awareness" becomes more mainstream. I'm making predictions about the future here and you are looking through modern day eyes. Twenty years ago people would be appalled to see the kind of things we openly share on Facebook with our friends today. In the future people may have no qualms about sharing their genetic profiles. There very well may be an eHarmony type service that matches based on potential offspring rather than answers to a questionnaire.
    • dinkumthinkum 14y ago
      The problem with what you're saying here is that many people TODAY, myself included, are appalled and what people naively share on Facebook today, and most probably this too will change in time. I think this is more of a boyish fantasy or the landscape of a sci-fi novel, which by the end people will inevitably reject. It's not like this is some thing that will be instituted in a vacuum.
  • javajosh 14y ago
    This is a very confused comment. Parents make these kinds of choices all the time, albeit on much coarser grounds (bring the down syndrome baby to term, or not?). If we started doing finer-grained genetic screening, clearly the choice would be the parents, and the question of "accidental children" doesn't even make sense: by default, the kids we make will be 'accidental' just more thoroughly, optionally, screened.
• enoch_r 14y ago
  I think this relies on an overestimation of the planning and foresight that goes into most pregnancies. About half of US pregnancies are unplanned, and it certainly seems like there are large segments of the population for whom even relatively short-term risks, like the propensity of the father to cheat--or never be involved at all--are basically ignored when choosing a mate.
• draq 14y ago
  The truth is that humans, like all other animals, have been selective breeding all the time, it's called evolution. We select our mates based on their phenotypes (like aggression, intelligence etc). It was more so in the past than now. People used to abandon infants that are born "defective" (we now have abortions). Parents selected the mates for their children because they are believed to be better judges of "good" phenotypes. It was customary to ensure that the family of the respective mate has no members with mental illness. Yet, after millennia of selective breeding, we still have all the crazies among us. The fact that those "bad" genes still exist must mean that they confer some benefits to the carrier. The interplay between genes, RNA, proteins and other macromolecules is so complex that I doubt we can pin down a mental illness to a single gene or safely remove a mutation that causes mental illness from the gene pool without reducing other collateral beneficial traits.
  • kc0bfv 14y ago
    The benefits that natural selection causes to propagate are those which improve the organism's reproductive opportunities. Those "benefits" aren't necessarily all that great when you've got a civilization. To take it to a ridiculous extreme, if a gene exists which makes you kill all the other men in your village, then impregnate all the women, that gene will be pretty popular in the next generation.
    • draq 14y ago
      That ridiculous extreme must be quite a popular gene, because it still exists: It's called war and mass war rape. Yet, we are not all warmongers and rapists (I hope). So civilisation is already putting its slow but steady evolutionary pressure onto our genes. Let's hope that it's putting our gene pool onto the right track. I simply don't share joonix' optimism that genetic screening can eradicate "unbeneficial" traits within next centuries without wrongly removing "beneficial" ones, before we have a better and complete understanding of our biological makeup. More dangerous than ignorance is half-knowledge.
  • dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    This is also a bit simplistic I think. I don't think most abortions are because of a physical defect or deformity, or at least, many abortions are not. As well, in many cultures that selected mates for their children, it usually did not exactly involve phenotype checking, but usually other kinds of economic and cultural reasons. Also, the fact that "bad" genes still exist does not mean they confer some benefit, that's a very panglossian view.
• philwelch 14y ago
  I think gene therapy and possibly selective abortion would be common as well. People won't leave someone they love because of some simple genetic tests when there are other alternatives.
• zekenie 14y ago
  Talk this over with a molecular biologist. Its never gonna happen. Some pathologies are (or have components that are) hereditary. Of those things, a handful are specific gene mutations or groups of mutations. These mental illnesses are so poorly understood... None (to my knowledge) have been shown to be genetic. And its not just that we haven't found the underlying genetic reason. There probably isn't an underlying genetic cause! These systems are so complex, and DNA is only one piece of the puzzle. Epigenetics is a field that isn't getting enough public attention. Its probably responsible for much of the more nuanced hereditary pathologies and patterns that people observe.
  • bermanoid 14y ago
    Mental illnesses are not understood at all, I'll agree with that. I would be hesitant to assume that they're not genetic, though - I've personally decided not to have children entirely due to the fact that mental illness is so prevalent in my partner's family (about 50% of the current < 30 year olds in the family have either been hospitalized or tried to kill themselves, and I'm not willing to subject a child of mine to those odds). I frankly don't believe that this family has just been randomly unlucky, it seems far more likely that there's something genetic behind it, especially since even the "sane" people in the family tend to be so unhappy that they probably should have been treated for the same things that the "crazy" people have been hospitalized for. DNA may only be one piece of the puzzle, but I think it's a big enough piece of that puzzle that we need to look into it a bit more. I can't recall the last truly "crazy" person I've interacted with that didn't have something messed up in their family history... That said, epigenetics definitely could be the issue here, my partner is of Irish stock and that's one of the classic cases of epigenetic poisoning (the famines caused all sorts of epigenetic nastiness, a lot of which has been shown to persist for generations). I totally believe that some lineages have seriously detrimental baggage associated with them, and I believe that hers could be one of them. In the end though, I don't know that there's much difference - a person's heritage, one way or another, ends up determining their children's susceptibility to mental illness, and if that susceptibility is high, a responsible "parent" should perhaps choose not to have the child. Just my opinion. And to be fair, if everyone followed it and was a "responsible parent" (i.e. not having kids if your family history is fucking nutters), the woman I love would not have been born, so I don't hold it that dear...
• omGac0W 14y ago
  Is "wanting to kill people" really so far from the norm as to have a gene associated with it? What would the gene be responsible for, "Propensity to give a fuck about other living beings"? Because in my mind, the line between being "sane" and killing everyone in sight is pretty fine. One's logic could go like this, "Man, everything sucks, and those kids down at the preschool are always so damn happy. Fuck Them. If I'm not happy no ones gets to be happy. Lock and load assholes." Suddenly you've got another tragedy. I would imagine people that are suicidal sometimes feel like this. Maybe it depends on how introverted or extroverted they are. The introverts disappear quietly in the dead of night, and the extroverts start mowing down pedestrians in the town square and then blow their brains out standing on the Mayor's statue. If a gene could be isolated for "suicidal tendencies" and also for intro/extro we might be able to reduce future events like this. But just because someone is a suicidal extrovert that hates everyone it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to start killing people. Maybe the ones that don't are just pussies and the gene for "guts" or "courage" would also have to be isolated? I don't know I'm just rambling. I ask myself why I don't kill my neighbors. Is it because I'm "sane"? Well I guess so, if "liking others" and not wanting them to be sad is a characteristic of sane people. But I firmly believe that there's a tiny slice of murderer in all sane people, and I like to think of people like Adam Lanza as having just a bigger slice, because putting them in a different category of "mentally ill" sort of feels like I'm denying a part of my own nature.
  • michaelt 14y ago
    Having occasional thought about killing isn't unusual - but the article describes having these thoughts far more often than is normal, and acting on them with much less provocation. An analogy: Any computer will crash when running buggy software - but a computer with a bad stick of RAM will crash much more often. The symptoms of both those problems will be fairly similar. Likewise, most humans think about killing from time to time - but some mentally ill people think about it much more often. Unfortunately with humans one can't run memtest86+ or swap the ram out and see if the problem goes away.
  • dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    I don't think it's so simple as to written off as some genetic issue certainly and, to be honest with no malice intended, the idea there will be no mental illness at some point in this center is the dumbest thing I've heard in awhile, but I also don't think the "line" between being "sane" and "killing everyone in sight" is fine; why would that be the case? It seems if it really were as precarious as you say, we would have a lot more violence. Only a very small percentage of people become these sorts of rampage shooters.
• deleted 14y ago
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• aw11603 14y ago
  There is almost no mental illness with data that links it to genes. Schizophrenia, for instance, has no data showing a genetic cause and plenty data linking it to environment. Oliver James is lovely to read on this, if you fancy.
  • polyfractal 14y ago
    That's not true. There are dozens of candidate genes for Schizophrenia. None have been linked conclusively, probably because none of them are entirely responsible. I think the general agreement in the field is that genetic abnormalities are necessary but not sufficient to cause Schizophrenia. If you are going to crack, it's usually because you are genetically predisposed to it and in the right environment to trigger the disorder. Using Schizophrenia as an example, there are plenty of mid-20's males that are in stressful environments...but don't become schizophrenic. A minority of those males will have a genetic abnormality that predisposes them, and they start hearing voices.
• Mz 14y ago
  A few randomish thoughts: The U.S. (and Australia, which was a penal colony) likely has a higher than average (at least for Europe) incidence of what I will call "maverick" traits -- gene based traits that make people less able to go along to get along, for some reason. They aren't necessarily bad traits, they just aren't very conducive to "domestication". The tend to be some of the same traits necessary for activities like exploration and other risky behaviors -- including founding a start up. One of the things YC asks about on its application is rule breaking behaviors. Folks who are too compliant are not well suited for doing groundbreaking work. So I don't personally think that breeding these traits out is necesarily a good thing. The reason America has higher rates is because a lot of our ancestors left Europe (or other countries) when they just could not fit in. Many left to seek the right to worship as they saw fit -- in other words to think and believe as they wished. So it looks to me like Europe already tried to get rid of these genes and, instead of extinguishing them, mostly exported them, thereby concentrating them in a couple of countries. People with these genes tend to not "go quietly into the night". They tend to go kicking and screaming. So I do not think criminalizing people for having such traits is a good policy. It is better to find ways to help them live constructively with certain traits and to carefully distinguish between traits, which are value neutral, and outcomes or behaviors, which are not value neutral. I usually do not say this publically, but if Joan of Arc were alive today, she would likely be in a psych ward having her meds adjusted, trying to make the voices stop, instead of playing midwife to the bloody birth of modern Fance. I have also read that Alexander the Great was likely bipolar. Again: I am not so sure that our desire to rid ourselves of people who aren't "normal"/adequately compliant or "cure" them of their differences is such a good thing. I think there are better ways to deal with peope like that than simply trying to break them. I think the goal of breaking them is likely a loss for both the individual being broken and for society. Take that too far and we lose important human traits, like adaptability. I have a genetic disorder. It is more common in populations which historically were subjected to high death rates from a particular infectious disease (though I don't recall which disease). In other words, carrying at least one gene was likely protective against dying from this infection. Thus this deadly genetic disorder became more common in cases where it helped you survive in the face of worse things. The same is true of Sickle Cell disease, which is protective against malaria. Viewing genetic variations of that sort solely as defects and not as adaptations misses the big picture. If they weren't adaptive in some situations, they wouldn't be selected for by evolutionary pressure.
• e12e 14y ago
  You realize the US will likely be waging wars for the foreseeable future, and that being a soldier will likely pay more than minimum wage, certainly up to past the age of procreation (I like to think of this as the event horizon for evolution; evolution only "sees" up your youngest child; if you then die, you gave still made the right evolutinary choices). The military will have need of sociopaths and killers.
  • dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    I don't think the military is exactly enamored by the thought of sociopathic killers, they tend to not follow orders very well. Come on, that's a bit much!