Dysfunction A gene or environment ?

uncle Alan

uncle Alan

Joined
Jul 11, 2004
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A family on my wife's side never ceases to amaze me the way they lead their lives. We are talking drunkenness,dishonesty & shiftlessness in general.The parents were decent people but both sons, & 3 of 4 grandsons have serious problems.
One son's death was rushed on by alcohol. The other's alcohol problems cost him 2 wives, loss of driving license,confiscation of all his hunting weapons. He fathered two sons that are infected. One is a pathoigical liar & con man. The other is almost 50 , an alcoholic that has ruined his liver & will die if he continues drinking. He lives in an apartment & his only possessions are an old T/v & a 10 year old van. He had 2 daughters & one is not a lady but the other is working & going to school.I'll skip the grandsons because of their youth but it doesn't look good for them.

I believe that enviroment is the factor. However,others feel that it is an inherited gene.
This is a problem that some of you have dealt with. What is your opinion on the cause ?

Uncle Alan
 
All we can do is guess. We see people who have dorks for parents and they're dorks too -- is it because of their parents' genes or because of the way their parents raised them? We see people who have dorks for parents who are not dorks -- how come? Finding out would take generations of highly unethical experimenting. Ain't gonna happen, not for the foreseeable future anyway. All we can do is guess -- although of course we can argue about our guesses, endlessly....
 
There are people with what seems to be a physical propensity towards alcoholism, that is, alcohol affects them differently than people who can take it or leave it.

But unless they live in a society and an enviroment that enables their alcoholism, they may never find out, and lead undistorted lives. In this sense, it is the environment that triggers the propensity.

But humans aren't robots at the mercy of their programming and eventually, however bad the situation they were born into, these people will have to take responsibility for their own lives.

I've seen the fighters win and the whiners lose.
 
Eugenics - a nasty topic.

This is the old "Nature or Nurture" discussion.

Probably a bit of both, but I favor "Nature," not a popular nor politically correct choice. Behavior can be modified, but what is the natural proclivity, what will people choose when given the freedom to do so? Reads like some of your relatives have strongly indicated their choices.

Cougar Allen has the gist, though. No real studies have been conducted along these lines. Just alot of talk and no action due to ethical considerations.
 
orthogonal1 said:
This is the old "Nature or Nurture" discussion.

Probably a bit of both, ...
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The problem with "Nature or Nurture" is that it really isn't an either/or situation. Even within the gene, it takes another part of the DNA sequence to activate an inherent characteristic.

Humans cannot leap tall buildings at a single bound.
Humans can leap a short fence.

Some humans never learned to jump.
Some humans just don't want to jump.

The fallacy in eugenics lies in our inability even now to specify which characteristics are really favorable and which are destructive, and how to shift the frequency of each without resorting to culling, which distorts all the other characteristics we hadn't considered yet.

Even God got tired of playing God, and eventually stopped talking to people in the Bible.
 
As a adoptive and foster parent I have long been interested in this subject.I heard a lady interviewed who had spent years studying twins separated at birth and it was her conclusion that half of who we are is environment and half is blood.
For the last 18 months we have had foster daughters who are sisters living with us.When they came to us the baby was 7 weeks old and her sister was almost three.The came to us from a party house and were filthy and in very bad shape.The 20 month old is a very intelligent above average child.It will take many years to over come the damage done to the older one in her early years.
When my wife was 27 and I was 35 we took in a 16 year old pregnant girl from a remote Indian village.Her mother was a drug dealer and she was abandoned and abused through out her life. She also has fetal alcohol syndrome.They lived with us until her son (my grandson) was ten.It was the hardest thing we have ever done but my wife turned her into a lady.She has never married and is now working as a pharmacy assistant.Her son who is now 16 has a higher IQ than I do. He wants to be a mechanical engineer. He collects guns and knives and can tell you any thing you want to know about John Wayne.
What more would a grand pa want?
From our four daughters, seven grandchildren and numerous foster children I have learned the first year is the most important.You can increase IQ and establish brain connections by constant interaction.
 
Now there's a third factor. Genetic predisposition, environment and opportunity, -- and an active outside effort, deliberately changing the effect of random circumstance.
 
I am not a doctor, have no kids and have done no research, but I believe the situation was summed up by a BFC member a while ago: "ADD = Adults Don't Discipline."

In 1991, 2,000 prescriptions for Ritalin were issued to children in the UK

In 2005, there were 359,100

Are we to believe that a "disease" unheard of a few years ago has increased in prevalence by a factor of 180 in 14 years?

There isn't even a clinical test for ADD or ADHD.

"There are no medical tests for ADHD and adults are evaluated on a range of factors, including their childhood behavioural history and questionnaires asking if they suffer from restlessness, lack of organisation and poor time management. Or, as critics of the growing ADHD "industry" put it, reasonably normal behaviour."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/16/nadhd116.xml

"Ritalin: So much easier than parenting."

maximus otter
 
Of course, there is no substitute for good parenting. However, in some cases, good parenting is not enough.

There is genetic involvement in almost all tyepes of behavior. Ceertainly addicitive types of behaivor, in general, are now being linked to specific neurotransmitter receptors in certain parts of the brain. Does this mean that such addictive behaviors are predestined?--No, because the genes that "predispose" toward such behaviors interact with other genes, the environment, and a host of other factors still to be determined.

Alcohol is yet another example. In addition to the propensity for addictive bahavior described above, one factor determinining alcohol tolerance is the level of the liver enzyme alcohol dehygrogenase, which, to a great degree, determines the metabolism of alcohol. Some people have more, some less. Some people can increase their amounts (upregulate), some cannot. This is genetic. and plays some part in determining alcoholism. However, by simply staying away from alcohol altogether--this is not an issue.

In short, human behavior and its underlying causes--brain, genetics, and human interaction, is the most complicated thing in the universe (that we know of). Trying to reduce it to an either/or is such a vast oversimplification that it is counterproductive. We need to modify our mindsets toward a new way of thinking.
 
maximus otter said:
I am not a doctor, have no kids and have done no research, but I believe the situation was summed up by a BFC member a while ago: "ADD = Adults Don't Discipline."

In 1991, 2,000 prescriptions for Ritalin were issued to children in the UK

In 2005, there were 359,100

Are we to believe that a "disease" unheard of a few years ago has increased in prevalence by a factor of 180 in 14 years?

There isn't even a clinical test for ADD or ADHD.

"There are no medical tests for ADHD and adults are evaluated on a range of factors, including their childhood behavioural history and questionnaires asking if they suffer from restlessness, lack of organisation and poor time management. Or, as critics of the growing ADHD "industry" put it, reasonably normal behaviour."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/16/nadhd116.xml

"Ritalin: So much easier than parenting."

maximus otter
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They are now finding out that almost all the kids that commited murders at their schools, or other places were on, or recently been taken off these psychotropic drugs.
Many schoolkids that have commited suicide have been found to be on these drugs or recently had them discontinued.

They are extremely dangerous and can make people very unstable and psychotic, yet they allow idiotic teachers to rule when and who should get these drugs, without question, and if the parents don't go along with the "recommendation" by the teacher, they get child welfare involved and the parents are charged as unfit and the kid(s) taken away from them, to be raised in a loving foster home environment.:rolleyes:

Nice world we've allowed the teachers to create for the kids, the socialiast mind control pukes.:barf: :rolleyes:

Anybody want to raise kids today? I think a couple would have to be either very brave, or crazy to start a family in todays school environment.
 
"ADD = Adults Don't Discipline."

Maximus Otter... You hit that nail right on the head. I mean WHAMMO!

ADD is a real problem with some (and I mean SOME) kids. But overall, what we are seeing is a lack of dicipline in the homes being reflected in the classrooms. I taught for a few years and saw this crap first hand. It is disgusting.
 
I come from a family where alcohol problems were kept strictly within limits by the very strict social expectations placed upon my parents' generation. In my generation, I had a cousing drink himself into two divorces and an eventual suicide. (Yes, I am very much aware that there were other factors involved, but this was the base problem.) Both of my parents had drinking problems and this was enough to keep me, at least, from letting alcohol get the better of me. When I realized, by watching my cousin and my brother as well as my parents, that alcohol was a physical problem for my family, I all but quit drinking and I now take various medicines that do not interact well with alcohol, so I do not drink at all. I must say that I do miss my single malts and my dark beers, but I can live longer better without them.

As for ADD and ADHD, I suffer From it to this day and take Adderal for ADD. I wish to God that they had known about it when I was a kid in school! My life would have been so much easier. It was not a case of lack of discipline as my parents were both military, one West Point and the other the daughter of a West Point graduate, and I will assure you that you do not graduate from St. Albans by "goofing off." I worked my tail off, but I had such difficulty concentrating on things that did not engage my interest. I worked damned hard. But I would have had it so much easier had I been able to stay focussed as I can now.
 
FullerH said:
I worked my tail off, but I had such difficulty concentrating on things that did not engage my interest. I worked damned hard. But I would have had it so much easier had I been able to stay focussed as I can now.
Click to expand...

Hugh,

One of my strongest attributes, intellectually speaking, is my very long attention span. I can work on complex problems for hours without getting burned out. But those problems involved information that I needed to learn. Thus I was interested. On the other hand, if there is a problem/task in front of me that does not engage my interest, you can forget about it. I think this is pretty normal for most people, but we don't all have ADD. Could it be that these meds that you take could help pretty much everyone to focus better? I'm certainly not advocating anything, I'm just making a point. I prefer that we all remain our imperfect selves. ;) :)
 
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