Genes and Personality

If it is true that you have a soul which is separate from body, and thus is universal in some aspect, then how exactly could your father have passed on his personality to you? What would be the mechanism of his soul influencing your soul's nature?Also, if the body does act as a conduit between soul and worldly function, how do you disentangle bodily constraints causing the appearance of a specific personality and your soul's actual personality?

---

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

The term mechanism to me implies something physical which is closer to what Dawkins suggested with his memes theory. As I mentioned earlier I think Dawkins was right in saying that there is something involving culture or personality that is being passed down from generation to generation. He suggests that it is physical but he doesn't believe in anything spiritual. As I believe in life beyond the physical I think it makes more sense to believe that his memes are not physical but spiritual.To draw a parallel to our genealogy I think it makes sense just to say that we have "spiritual genes". I'm not completely sure what you mean but does this answer your question. (This was talked about in another thread.) If for example someone suffers brain damage. The physical body has the brain which acts like a computer. A computer requires input from somewhere. I'm inclined to believe that the input comes from our consciousness or soul, which is essentially the part of us that is spiritual. Our personality is part of that. If the brain is damaged then the brain can wind up functioning in a way that skews the input from the consciousness.

No a mechanism can be anything as long as there is a chain of cause and effect. I am trying to figure out how an eternal soul with certain traits gives another eternal soul certain traits, when their only apparent connection is a temporary physical connection of passing physical genes from one body to another.There must be some mechanism, even if it involves spirits. Actually I already understood that explanation you gave for why a damaged brain would not properly reflect the soul it is representing (or receiving inputs from). My question is how do you determine the difference between a brain that is damaged and so altering inputs, and the fact that a brain itself (functioning perfectly) might influence inputs?It seems to me the latter is not only possible, but necessary given environmental factors known to effect the brain. Thus we can never really see or know the spirit nature behind it, and thus whether your spirit is really like your dad, or whether the brain you have has given you similar outputs given specific inputs as your dad.

---

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

That is a very good question and I really wish that I had a very good answer to go with it. When I contemplate my own experience it seems to me that when I was involved in any act of intimacy there was also something else going on besides the physical pleasure. I still remember what it was like to be 15 and have my arm around a girl. Why would just having my arm around a girl in a theatre cause such a pleasurable sensation that everything else just seemed to fade away. What I ‘m suggesting, is that during any act of intimacy there is not only a physical bonding, but a spiritual bonding as well.If I’m correct in this then it also could logically follow that when the physical sperm and egg unite that there is also a parallel spiritual bonding. I agree that this is speculation but to me it makes sense based on my own observations and experience.(It raises another issue that has puzzled me for some time. I am a Christian and I believe in an afterlife that is outside of time. How do I enter a world that is outside of time at a point in time? Or, how do you arrive in an existence outside of time part way through eternity when time has no meaning?)Spiritual issues are difficult. So many of our answers seem to come from speculation just as in this case. In many ways the whole spiritual issue from a Christian perspective boils down to the commandments to love God and to love your neighbour. To me loving God is a matter of loving that which is good and hating that which is bad. Loving your neighbour involves wanting what is best for everyone and doing all that you can to bring joy to the lives of others.Beyond that it is largely theology and obviously some theology is truth and some isn’t and God has given us wisdom to try and sort it all out, but I am really digressing. I just wanted to give a bit of an idea of what I see as spiritual. I have no idea how to determine the difference. I’m in a physical world and all I can deal with is what is in a physical sense. As far as having similar inputs to my brain as what my dad has it boils down largely to opinion I suppose. It appears to me that I do, but you’re right, I can’t be sure.I’ll go back to the idea that the brain is a computer. The brain controls the operation of the body. Some of the functions require thought and some such as the heart don’t. The brain also has memory banks. I’m suggesting that the mind, soul, consciousness or whatever you want to call it gets input from the brain by drawing on its memory banks but then uses that information to formulate a decision.Thanks for your responses, I very much enjoy thinking these things through, and it’s a healthy thing for both my brain and soul.

Well this is interesting. You are correct that it is speculation, but then outside of direct rebuttal as well. More important in this specific case is why and how would two spirits who are only interacting at a point in time, end up affecting (creating?) a spirit outside of time. You not only have the problem of the infinite affecting the temporal, but the temporal effecting the infinite. Sure, they are interesting ideas and keep the mind active. Maybe they could be true as well, we'll just have to wait and see.

---

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

So, do identical twins have the same soul? Or does another soul appear a bit later on? What about Chimera¹, do they have two souls or does one them disappear? Do most² souls never get to be born? If only humans have souls, did Homo Erectus have a soul? What about Neanderthals? What about Australiopithicus (sp?)? At what point did souls start appearing?¹ Chimera occur when there are two fertilised eggs but they combine to form a single individual who's cells do not all have the same genetic code. This is often the case in individuals who have different coloured eyes but can occur in others.
² IIRC, less than 40% of fertilised human eggs go on to actually produce a viable baby.

I have asked that same question (most souls being born) with regard to the abortion debate. It actually leads to some other questions as well, regarding destruction of souls.Antiabortion people often act as if it is such a tragedy, but if the souls are universal and simply moved to occupy a body at some time and are denied at that time, what then is the tragedy? Are they capable of being harmed by this, or unable to manifest themselves later?Great line of questioning, and thank you for mentioning Chimera, I had not heard of that phenomena before and so am vastly intrigued... off to the library!

---

holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Here's a transcript of the New Scientist article I learned of it from: http://www.katewerk.com/chimera.html

This is why I raised the issue of time because the two are connected. The mating of the temporal with the infinite is tricky to say the least.There is a possible partial answer though. Many of the more esoteric thinkers in physics are suggesting that time is not what we think it is but a series of nows and that each now is a separate universe which is eternal. (Like I've really got a handle on that. ) Julian Barbour is one of these. Here is a little bit about him and his ideas. Here is the link to the entire article. There are a number of other articles on the net on his theories.Discover Financial Services This whole idea does raise questions about the abortion issue however but I'm not suggesting that souls are universal. If the soul is formed by the spiritual genes of the parents then each soul is unique and wouldn't have occurred without the physical bonding. You could make the point that if the unborn have a soul then they are eternal anyway but then you could apply the same logic to someone who had been born.Apparently they have found that people have memories of their time in the womb but that as we get older we are unable to retrieve those memories. This suggests to me that we do have consciousness or a soul prior to physical birth.

Please don't think that I am trying to promote this as gospel. I have just thought a lot about these things and I'm using this as a sounding board for some of the things that have occurred to me.Identical twins although very similar are still unique physically and I assume the same would be true spiritually. My best guess would be that souls develop in parallel with the physical body which would answer the case of Chimera, (which I've never heard of before).When you ask if most souls never get born I don't know. I would like to believe that infants that don't survive through to life outside the womb are eternal but we are dealing with the metaphysical and this answer is beyond knowing.As far as the animals etc are concerned I'll speculate on that as well. (As the Brits say, "in for a penny in for a pound". ) In my reading on physics one of the theories that seems to make a lot of sense to me is that this world is a reflection of the real world.If this world is all made up of particles, which are really only bits of energy, then there isn't really that much that is real here in the sense of what think of as real. (Some scientists seem to go even further by suggesting that all these particles are really bits of thought or information.)In light of all this I would tend to think that assuming our next world is the real one, (the one that we are a reflection of), then I would assume that animals etc would exist there as well which would indicate that they have some eternal nature about them. The Bible certainly indicates that God cares about all of his creation.As I said, this stuff does make interesting speculation.

Hi GDR, First off, we want to decide whether personalities are inherited at all. The evidence for the inheritance of personality (by which I mean interests, patterns of behaviour, inclinations, etc) is very strong. Child abuse, for example, appears to be strongly heritable. I've lost count of the number of times I've read in a newspaper that some child abuser was abused himself when young. This is why social workers talk about the "cycle of abuse". The cycle of abuse is a cycle of inheritance, and the cycle of behaviour is broken by preventing inheritance. On a more trivial level, we find (in the UK) that many people living in a small town will support the same local football team, so support for that team is clearly inherited in some way. One doesn't wake up one morning and pick a team at random.But this kind of inheritance doesn't follow the same path as genetic inheritance. Genetic inheritance spreads from parents to children (i.e. vertically), whereas cultural "inheritance" can also spread horizontally (i.e. between unrelated members of a population). Here is a (perhaps exaggerated) example. I'm pretty sure those children didn't inherit the behaviour from their parents, but they inherited it culturally by horizontal transmission. Furthermore, unlike inheritance of a genetically determined trait, their inheritance contained at least some volition. To be a happy slapper or not to be a happy slapper, that is the question. It's worth making a digression here to discuss the notion of a physical pathway in cultural inheritance. The personality traits I've mentioned so far are inherited culturally, but are necessarily inherited by a physical pathway. One becomes an abusive parent by being physically abused as a child; one becomes a keen football fan by physically watching and playing games with one's father; etc. These personality traits are also manifested physically: A person who has a love of literature can be identified by examining the books they have purchased, or by measuring the amount of time they spend reading. One can identify more ethereal traits, such as a suicidal tendency, by counting scars on a forearm.For me, there is no dichotomy between cultural inheritance (or "memes" - that ugly, silly and damaging word) and genetic inheritance. They are just different physical routes by which a personality trait moves from person to person. There is nothing metaphysical or spiritual involved, unless one's notion of spirit includes physical conditioning and learned experience. It seems clear that personality traits are physically inherited in some manner, either vertically or horizontally. Some traits (such as a foot fetish, or whatever) may appear to be invented de novo in an individual, without direct inheritance (a mutation event ). The big question is whether personality traits can follow the same physical pathway as the genome.One problem is that, as a previous poster pointed out, the classical method for carrying out genetic inheritance research is to look at mutants carrying a single rare allele with strong effect. Consequently we know much more about genetic disorders than about the normal functioning of the genome. Looking at personality traits exacerbates this problem - because personality traits are exactly the kind of traits that we would expect to be influenced by a large number of genes of small effect, and the experimental protocol is further complicated by the fact that human beings can learn and modify their personalities.Evidence for the inheritance of personality comes largely from twin adoption studies. The idea is that twins are genetically identical, but have been adopted into different families with different patterns of cultural inheritance. If we look at enough twins, and enough diverse family backgrounds, we might be able to identify personality traits that appear to be "immune" to the cultural background. In principle, these studies can be carried out on adopted non-twins, as long as we take their reduced genetic relatedness into account.These kinds of studies have identified some personality traits (agression, propensity to suffer from stress, lethargy, propensity to watch TV, etc) that appear to be inherited. But for reasons outlined above, the level of inheritance is low. Personality traits, because they are likely dependent on an unknown but large number of genes, and because they are susceptible to cultural modification, and because they are very difficult to define and measure consistently, show low penetrance. In the older literature you will often see silly, unscientific and essentially meaningless statements like "27% of aggressive behaviour is genetically inherited". One should be very wary of such statements. What is called a "gene for aggression" when it is expressed on a housing estate in the east end of london, might be called a "gene for being a formidable stock trader" when it is discovered in a sample from Harvard graduate students, or a "gene for nobility" when it is discovered amongst the Yanomamo people. One also has to ponder what 27% of one's aggression means. I'll end with two examples of research from different empirical aproaches that suggests you are wrong.1. Suicide.As expected, the first result is from a "disorder", in this case propensity to commit suicide. Note that the authors have identified a single nucleotide polymorphism (!)Here's the reference. Here's the abstract:

quote:

---

Genetic factors contribute to the risk of psychopathology in many psychiatric conditions, but the specific genes are yet to be identified. Neurotransmitter alterations are implicated in the etiology of psychopathology based, in part, on studies of neurotransmitter receptors and their biosynthetic or degradative enzymes in postmortem tissue. Identification of the altered receptors and enzymes serves to identify candidate genes of potential etiological significance. Polymorphisms in these genes can contribute to alterations in protein function in vivo that are part of the neurochemical underpinnings of psychopathologies such as major depressive disorder, psychoses, alcoholism, personality disorders, aggressive-impulsive traits, or suicidal behavior. Altered serotonergic function is implicated in the etiology and pathogenesis of several major psychiatric conditions. In particular, there is much evidence for an association of lower serotonergic function and suicidal behavior. Thus genes related to the serotonergic system are candidate genes worthy of study as part of the genetic diathesis for suicidal behavior. This review examines the following polymorphisms in the serotonin biosynthetic enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase (TPH; A779C substitution), the serotonin transporter (5-HTT, 5-HTTLPR allele), the 5-HT1B receptor (G861C, C129T substitution) and the 5-HT2A receptor (T102C) for their relationship to suicidal behavior. For the TPH gene, we found the less common U or A allele variant of the A779C polymorphism was associated with suicide attempt. Other studies have found the U allele to be associated with aggression and lower serotonergic function in vivo. A 44 base pair insertion/deletion in the 5' flanking promoter region of the 5-HTT gene may result in less 5-HTT expression and 5-HTT binding. We examined 220 cases postmortem and found no association between the promoter genotype and 5-HTT binding. We also found no association with major depressive disorder (MDD), suicide or pathological aggression, despite finding significantly fewer 5-HTT sites in the prefrontal cortex of depressed and/or suicide cases. In genomic DNA samples from 178 unrelated subjects, we detected two polymorphisms for the 5-HT1B receptor at nucleotides 861 and 129. However, no association between either polymorphism and depression, suicide, aggression, or alcoholism was observed. There are two common polymorphisms for the 5-HT2A receptor gene in humans. The results of studies of 5-HT2A receptor gene polymorphisms do not indicate significant major associations with suicidal behavior. In contrast, the 5-HT2A receptor itself is reported to be increased in suicide. Functional polymorphisms involving the promoter region that affect gene expression may explain this finding. Studies of candidate genes related to serotonergic function in brain are increasingly used to establish genetic alterations contributing to psychiatric illness. The most meaningful studies combine the study of candidate genes with direct measures of related proteins as well as psychopathology. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

---

2. HomosexualityNot a disorder, of course. The results are suggestive but due to the type of analysis we're not able to identify a specific nucleotide change this time Here's the reference. Here's the abstract:

quote:

---

The Darwinian paradox of male homosexuality in humans is examined, i.e. if male homosexuality has a genetic component and homosexuals reproduce less than heterosexuals, then why is this trait maintained in the population? In a sample of 98 homosexual and 100 heterosexual men and their relatives (a total of over 4600 individuals), we found that female maternal relatives of homosexuals have higher fecundity than female maternal relatives of heterosexuals and that this difference is not found in female paternal relatives. The study confirms previous reports, in particular that homosexuals have more maternal than paternal male homosexual relatives, that homosexual males are more often later-born than first-born and that they have more older brothers than older sisters. We discuss the findings and their implications for current research on male homosexuality.

---

Hope this is of interest. Sorry for wandering.Mick[edited to correct subtitle]This message has been edited by mick, 07-06-2005 01:29 PM

Thanks mickThat is really interesting except for the reference on suicide that was way over my head. The part about twins was interesting and I was wondering how it applied to Philip in post 13 of this thread. He is an identical twin who with the same genes and nurture grew up to be very different than his twin. To me this indicates that there is something beyond both our genealogy and our environment that make us the people that we are. (Back to my spiritual genes. )I think you are saying that we are a balance between the personality that we are born with and our environment, and that we don't know by what percentage the two are divided up.In addition you are saying that the part of our personality that is inherited is included in our genealogy, but at this point that is all theoretical as biologists have not been able to pinpoint any specific gene or group of genes that perform this function.Have I summarized your position reasonably well?I suppose another factor in all of these things that has to be considered is mental illness or physical damage to the brain which I would have thought would be what would be the chief explanation for suicide.I obviously don't have the answer to this, but I am inclined to think that we do have spiritual genes, (how about we call them spenes ) but obviously if biologists are able to find genes that carry personality traits I'll have to revise my thinking.Thanks again for the post. I'll be reading that again before this discussion finishes.

> As I understood what he was saying that we had our personality passed
> down from generation to generation via memes in our brains.Nonesense. That isn't what he was saying at all. It wasn't even particularly Dawkins' concept - he was using it as an illustration.You are taking the concept of memes too literally - go and read the selfish gene (or wherever you came across memes) again and have a rethink.Cheersr

> but I also have many of his personality traits.Says who? How do you determine the similarity between 'traits'? How do you even *define* traits?Was your father (by accounts from other people) say...generous? Are you? WOW! What an amazing match! Was he intelligent? Are you? WOW!You see what I'm getting at? I mean no disrespect at all - I just want to understand what you base this feeling of similarity on and how you measure it.> Dawkins suggests that it is memesNo no no no no.No he doesn't. You haven't understood a thing about memes if you think this.r

I outlined what I meant by traits in post # 10 using the Myers Briggs method as well as the A/B personality. I explained where I felt that I was like him and different from the rest of my family. (My brothers had a different biological father but we were all raised by the same Dad and Mom.) The whole concept of memes is a littl vague. Here is how Wikipedia defines it.Meme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The term and concept of meme (pronounced [miːm] in IPA; from the Greek word μνήμη for 'memory') first appeared in the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Though Dawkins defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise definition of a meme remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.
Different definitions of the meme generally agree, very roughly, that a meme consists of some sort of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). Dawkins introduced the term after writing that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmissionin the case of evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.In casual use, the term meme often refers to any piece of information passed from one mind to another. This usage more closely resembles the analogy of "language as a virus" than Dawkins' analogy of memes as replicating units. This definition has come into popular use on the Internet to refer to phenomena such as Obey Giant, "All your base are belong to us", Blogebrity and Icy Hot Stuntaz.