DNA Quote of the Day: Dr. Philip Zimbardo

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted June 9, 2007 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

You write in your book, “There are no special inner attributes of either pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome.” Isn’t this an empirical question—something for behavioral geneticists to answer?

Behavioral genetics cannot deal with highly complex behaviors, and certainly not generic ones like good and evil. There is no data of genes that predispose toward good or evil, and any such data would be so weak as to apply [only] to a minority of cases. If your mother and father were both schizophrenic, the probability you will be is only 50 percent.

~Stanford Magazine, May/June 2007

Tags: philip zimbardo, psychology, human genome, genome, genomics, genetics, dna, genes, behavioral genetics

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