Triggering the 'Warrior Gene' in a Villain or Hero



Directions: Read your article with your group and discuss the important points. Next, answer the following questions in your own personal opinion on a separate sheet of paper.

What trait is your article written about?

Do you believe this trait is more affected by “nature” or “nurture” based on what you read in the article? Explain why.

Describe this trait in YOURSELF…to what extent has your nature (genetics) influenced this trait? To what extent has nurture (environment) affected this trait in you?

When thinking of “nature”, cite examples of any relatives you know that may have similar traits.

When thinking of “nurture”, cite examples where you may have been influenced by parents, friends, media, etc.

Triggering the "Warrior Gene" in a Villain or Hero

Is coldblooded aggression due to nature, nurture, or both?

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Is aggression in our DNA?

Ever want to explain your villain's—or your hero's—coldblooded aggression with something other than "he had a bad childhood"?  More and more research is suggesting that you can do just that, because some people are just biologically primed to be more aggressive. And specific kinds of training and pressure can encourage people to indulge that tendency.  

Biologically, one factor that's getting a lot of attention is a mutation that causes low activity in the MAO-A gene. Some people refer to this form of the gene (somewhat romantically) as the "warrior gene," because, research suggests that people with that gene may be more aggressive. MAO, or monoamine oxidase, exists in each neuron (nerve cell) in the brain, and it acts like a recycling factor for neurotransmitters (brain chemicals). In people who have the "warrior gene," less MAO is produced, which means that less of the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine are broken down. As noted above, higher levels of these brain chemicals seem to equal higher levels of aggression. These people feel less empathy for others (if they feel any), and are more willing to harm others on a whim.

Environment or "nurture" is still important, however. A 2010 Scientific American article cites anecdotal evidence from several sources suggesting that killing others isn't as easy as pulling the trigger.  Soldiers, for example, must typically be encouraged to kill by "intensified training, direct commands from officers...and propaganda that glorifies the soldier's cause and dehumanizes the enemy." In other words, mind games must be played to break through an innate revulsion—at least with most people. 

Here are a few of the psychological principles behind those mind games:

• Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's own group is superior.  There's a natural tendency to believe that—ask any sports fan whose team is the best!—and a related tendency to view others in the same group with you more positively.

❖ Outgroup homogeneity is the tendency to see the members of an outgroup—a group other than one's own—as all alike. Slurs and epithets—calling a woman by the "b" or "c" word, an African American by the "n" word, or a gay or lesbian individual by the "f" word, for example—strip people in another group of individual names.

• Most people have a strong tendency to obey when the person giving the orders is in an authoritative position. A famous study by Stanley Milgram demonstrated that ordinary people would shock another person to death if they were pressured by the experimenter. (For the record, the participants weren't really shocking anyone, but they believed they were. Some of the people actually begged to be allowed to stop the shocks, but continued when asked to do so.)

• The expectations of a setting can also be extremely powerful.  Another study, this one by Phil Zimbardo, demonstrated that when given the opportunity to act as "prison guards" in a mock prison, some participants quickly became sadistic, reveling in their power, and in humiliating the "prisoners."

• Finally, Dave Grossman, author of the 1995 book On Killing, cites the use of video game-like shooting environments that allow service people to practice their marksmanship and decision-making in high-stress situations.  Anyone who hasn't checked out modern video games would probably be astonished by the gory realism of first-person shooter games. (Based on Grossman's assertion that these games both reduce inhibitions and improve shooting accuracy, if there is ever a real zombie apocalypse, my only real hope is that my brother, who's a master at these games, is armed to the teeth...and on my side.) 

Smart parents, smart kids?

LOS ANGELES - Scientists who hunt for "intelligence genes" used to think there were fewer than half a dozen of them. In recent years, they determined there may be at least 1,000 - each with just a tiny effect on the differences in people's IQ. A study released Tuesday found new evidence that many genes play a role in intelligence, but scientists still couldn't pinpoint the specific genes involved.

"It's been kind of a shock to the system that it hasn't worked," said psychologist Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia, who had no role in the study. "We can't find the effects of any individual genes that are large enough to seem worth worrying about." Previous work involving twins and adopted children has found that genes have a significant influence on differences in IQ scores, producing about half the difference between adults in general. The influence of genes on IQ appears to grow from childhood to adulthood.

Scientists have come to realize that, as with height, differences in intelligence come not from a few genes, but rather the overall effect of many genes, each with only tiny influence. That makes them hard to tease out. The new DNA study, reported online Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, came to similar conclusions. Many genes work together to shape intelligence much like the different instruments of an orchestra that play in sync. Unless there's a soloist playing, it's often difficult to decipher the contributions of individual instruments.

As important as genes are in determining intelligence, they don't act alone and the role of one's upbringing and experiences cannot be ignored. So why do researchers care so much about the relationship between genes and intelligence? Our memory, reasoning skills and thinking abilities tend to decline as we age, some faster than others. Understanding the genetics of intelligence may someday help researchers gain a better handle on mind-robbing diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The new work was done by I.J. Deary of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and colleagues in several countries. The team wanted to find out "whether genetic differences that we could test on people's DNA could explain some of the reasons that people have different intelligence test scores," Deary said in an email.

Researchers didn't ID any genes affecting IQ. But they estimated that they found a genetic influence that accounts for at least 40 percent to 50 percent of the differences on intelligence test scores in the 3,511 unrelated adults in their study who were tested on knowledge and problem-solving skills. They focused on more than 500,000 places in the participants' DNA, looking for evidence that IQ-influencing genes lay close to those places. They concluded that the overall effect was coming from many scattered genetic differences, each of only small influence.

The latest work adds to evidence that even the most powerful of these has only weak influence. Deary said that future studies will probably need to involve millions of people to detect the genetic effects. Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, who's looked for intelligence-related genes for 15 years but didn't participate in the new study, isn't surprised by the latest findings. "We've got a century of twin and adoption studies," such as those comparing twins reared in different families, that support the notion that about half of IQ differences come from DNA, he said.

Plomin said this doesn't mean half of a person's intelligence is due to genes nor does such a genetic influence imply that a person's intelligence is fixed. Turkheimer, the Virginia psychologist, thinks other types of research such as brain scans might have better luck in understanding what intelligence is.

Those methods are better than "pinning your hopes on adding together a bunch" of small effects from individual genes, he said. John Olsen, of Orange, California, who was adopted at birth, attributes his brainpower to his genes. As a kid, he always wondered where his inquisitiveness came from. School bored him and there were no lively debates at the dinner table growing up.

"I was a bit of a challenge," he recalled. "I was very curious and like a lot of intelligent people always asked, 'Why?"' In his late 20s, Olsen took a genius test and scored high enough to get accepted into Mensa, the high IQ group. A telephone call from a long-lost aunt several years ago led to a reunion with his biological mother.

Olsen soon discovered his mother had the same curiosity and liked to ask probing questions. He also learned his maternal grandmother was fond of one-line comebacks and "was wickedly smart till the day she died."

Friendship: It May Be Genetic

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Your choice of friends may stem, in part, from your genes, a new study suggests.

The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, doesn't mean that you're fated to be friends with some people and destined to dismiss others. But the findings do suggest that as kids mature into young adults, they may have a genetic inclination to pick certain types of people as their friends.

"As we grow and move out of our own home environment, our genetically influenced temperament becomes more and more important in influencing the kinds of friends we like to hang out with," states Kenneth Kendler, M.D., in a news release from Virginia Commonwealth University, where Kendler is a professor of psychiatry and human genetics.

Kendler and colleagues interviewed about 1,800 male twins aged 24-62 born in Virginia and listed in the Virginia Twin Registry. The researchers asked the twins about the friends they'd had from age 8 to 25, splitting that time frame into several two- to three-year periods.

The twins reported how many friends they had had in each time period who smoked, drank, cut classes often, used or sold drugs, stole things, or got in trouble with the law.

Identical twins share all the same genes. Fraternal twins don't.

In Kendler's study, identical twins were more likely than fraternal twins to make similar choices in their friends. So the researchers reason that genetics may play a role in choosing friends.

That doesn't mean that identical twins always chose the same type of friends. The findings aren't quite that iron-clad.

But Kendler's team estimates that when kids are 8-11 years old, genes explain 30% of their choice in friends, with that percentage rising to about 50% from age 15-25, as people mature into independent adults.

In short, the study suggests that genes may influence friendship, but genes aren't the final word on how people choose their friends. Since all of the twins were white men, it's not clear if the findings apply to other groups of people.

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