a David Brooks article

David Brooks is one of my favorite columnists because in most situations he seems to get the "big picture". Last Wednesday, July 16 he wrote an article that appeared on the editorial page of the Telegram & Gazette labeled "Human nature under the microscope". Mr. Brooks discusses human genetics and what scientists know and don't know about how certain genes relate to various behavioral traits. His focus was on what we don't know and he celebrated the fact that we know so little about such a complex system as heredity. He also brought out the fact that much of what we do is based not only on genes but also on environmental factors. He went on to emphasize how difficult, if not impossible it is to trace cause and effect. Mr. Brooks writes: "Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associates. It's now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait." He said that it is clear that there are some situations that we know of that cause anti-social behavior, poverty, for instance, but that drawing a relationship between a gene or a situation to a behavior does not work and that even understanding how larger circumstances produce a particular aberrant behavior is very hard to understand.

Mr. Brooks ends his article with these two paragraphs..

"We can strive to eliminate that multivariate thing we call poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we're not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be.
This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth --that there are severe limits to what we know and can know; that the best political actions are incremental, respectful toward accumulated practice and more attuned to particular circumstances than universal laws."