Belief that genetics explains all aspects of human behavior
Genetic reductionism is the belief that understanding
genes is sufficient to understand all aspects of
human behavior.[1] It is a specific form of
reductionism and of
biological determinism, based on a perspective which defines genes as distinct units of information with consistent properties.[2] It also covers attempts to define specific phenomena in exclusively genetic terms, as in the case of the "
warrior gene".[3]
The concept has been criticized by many biologists.[4] According to Affifi (2017), "With the discoveries of
pleiotropy and
epistasis, cracks in the reductionist paradigm emerged even before the rise of
molecular biology, but the full extent of the interdependency and flexible adaptivity of the
genome has really come to light in the past 10 years..."[5] The genetic reductionist perspective can be appropriate when used to identify changes in specific
genetic loci that cause differences in a given
phenotype.[6]