Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, 641 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115-6019, USA.
World Psychiatry. 2005 Feb;4(1):3-8.
It is as futile to ask how much of the phenotype of an organism is due to nature and how much to its nurture as it is to determine how much of the area of a rectangle is due to its length and how much to its height. Phenotype and area are joint products. The spectacular success of genomics, unfortunately, threatens to re-awaken belief in genes as the principal determinants of human behavior. This paper develops the thesis that gene expression is modified by environmental inputs and that the impact of the environment on a given organism is modified by its genome. Genes set the boundaries of the possible; environments parse out the actual.
询问一个生物体的表型有多少是由其先天因素决定，有多少是由后天环境决定，就像确定一个矩形的面积有多少是由其长度决定，有多少是由其高度决定一样，都是徒劳无益的。表型和面积是共同的产物。不幸的是，基因组学的巨大成功有可能重新唤起人们对基因作为人类行为主要决定因素的信念。本文提出了一个论点，即基因表达受环境输入的影响，而环境对特定生物体的影响又受其基因组的影响。基因设定了可能性的边界；而环境则解析出了实际情况。
