Nature, nurture, and nature-by-nurture - Killing the dichotomy

This book provides a broad snapshot of recent findings showing how the environment and genes influence behaviour. It attempts to kill the nature versus nurture polarity that has plagued the study of behaviour. This dichotomy is largely, but not totally, dead in academic circles but still haunts many debates outside academia, from views on teaching and punishment to politics and the media more generally. A statistical approach is needed to describe the average effects of genes on a behaviour and, importantly, to show how genes affect the variation around the mean. The distinction between an average effect and the variation around it is crucial, because for the most part there is not a single gene for phenotype A or B; rather, there are many genes that alter the probability of expressing phenotype A or B.