The Behavior of Genes Nature and Nurture

The International Herald Tribune reports:
'The right genes make all the difference.' Or so declares an advertisement, as a boy portraying the son of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf holds his own in a match against Taylor Dent. While neither science, nor this television commercial, can explain much about how the genes of the tennis stars' son might affect his tennis game, people are comfortable linking genes to athletic prowess.
Many people, however, are leery of attributing other components of behavior to genes personality or intelligence, or social traits like fidelity, for example. They're troubled by the ethical implication, as if a nod toward the genes diminishes the role of the environment and free will. It is nature versus nurture: a debate that has spawned extremist views on both sides, from Nazism (nature) to Marxism (nurture). The truth is that DNA is both inherited and environmentally responsive, and recent animal studies go far toward resolving nature versus nurture by upsetting the assumption that the two work differently. The discoveries emphasize what genes do (producing proteins that are the building blocks of life), rather than simply who they are (their fixed DNA sequence).