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Genes and Behavior: Nature–Nurture Interplay Explained By Rutter Michael. Oxford: Blackwell. 2006. 272 pp. £14.99 (pb). ISBN 1405110619
In this book Mike Rutter sets out to explain how genes might influence behaviour and how this might be important in understanding the causal pathways leading to various behavioural traits and psychiatric disorders. This is an ambitious and challenging project, not just because the issues themselves are so complex and our current understanding so rudimentary, but also because this area has suffered from a polarisation of views between the proponents of Nature and Nurture that has been most unhelpful. The great majority of researchers have realised for some time that the key to understanding individual differences in susceptibility to behavioural disorders will come from understanding how the effects of genetic variation and environmental exposure interact over the lifespan, but the grumbling guerrilla war between behaviour geneticists and psychosocial researchers has been sustained by the fact that the different schools have approached their subjects from different theoretical and methodological perspectives and spoken different languages in which apparently similar terms actually describe crucially different concepts. As with many intellectual disputes the differences have had a lot to do with reciprocal misunderstandings of methodology and language, but the flames have been fanned by evangelists on both sides.
What is needed, therefore, is someone with an understanding not just of genetics, but also of psychosocial and developmental research - to...