Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The Warrior Gene?
I've been talking a lot recently with some of my colleagues about the
challenges posed in communicating the findings of genetic research to
the public. A story from Time Magazine is headlined "Which Kids Join Gangs? A Genetic Explanation" and though the story some highlights some interesting research, it probably does more to show just how difficult it will be to communicate genetic information to the public. For example, the story notes that:
Beaver and his colleagues found that those males carrying
the low-active MAO-A gene were nearly twice as likely to join an
organized gang than males with the high-active gene, and when in a
fight, they were nearly twice as likely to brandish a weapon. Of the
gang members studied, those who had a low-activity MAO-A allele were
more than four times more likely to use a weapon when compared with
male gang members who carried a high-activity version of the allele.
The story is accompanied by photos of young men in gangs with links to pictures of gang members in New Zealand and El Salvador and provocative quotes about how this finding might lead to better efforts to prevent violence, all of which makes the point of the story--there's some sort of genetic predictor of violence--sound very scary. But from the Time article, it's possible to see, though not made very clear by the author, that the study is pretty preliminary, and that even its worst findings aren't actually that meaningful or frightening.
For example, carriers of the gene mutation had a doubled chance of
joining a gang--meaning that instead of having a 1.5 out of 100 rate of joining a gang, the carriers joined at a rate of 3 of every 100. In other words, 97 in 100 carriers of the "Warrior Gene" don't seem to be linked to violence in any sort of meaningful way. The vast majority of carriers are just fine.
The study itself (Abstract here) relies on finding associations between genome scans and self-reported data from surveys of about 1,000 males and 1,100 females. Which, given
the challenges of this sort of research, makes sense. But self-reported surveys from adolescents on questions about gang membership aren't exactly the most reliable data in the world--and are particularly unreliable when using small data sets. Based crudely on the abstract (since I don't have access to the full study), it looks like 30 or so surveyed actually claimed to have joined a gang.
So here's what we have: A major magazine has published an article about a "genetic explanation" for violence called the "warrior gene" which, in actuality, is poorly understood and, at worst, appears to not cause violence in most people. It's a clear, if unfortunate signal of the confusion to come surrounding genetics.