This investigation used the statistical technique of meta-analysis to probe the putative association between heredity and crime. The data for this study were 54 effect sizes obtained from 38 family, twin, and adoption studies on crime. In addition to the overall gene-crime relationship, the potential moderating effects of gender, sample nationality, date of publication, and quality of the resea...

To the Editor: We found the study of clinical responses to opioids by Angst et al.1 to be an excellent first-of-its-kind study for distinguishing the contribution of heredity versus environment. Much work has been done using twins to separate heredity from environment and this addition to our literature is timely. Although the use of twins to separate nature from nurture is a long-established m...

To measure the relative subjective importance attached to heredity and environment, undergraduates. graduate students, and faculty were asked to predict the IQ scores of hypothetical adopted children based on the IQs of the biological mother and father, the IQs of the adoptive parents, and the socioeconomic status of the adoptive parents. Intuitive predictions of IQ were inconsistent with addit...

It is widely recognized that human evolution has been driven by two systems of heredity: one DNA-based and the other based on the transmission of behaviorally acquired information via nervous system functions. The genetic system is ancient, going back to the appearance of life on Earth. It is responsible for the evolutionary processes described by Darwin. By comparison, the nervous system is re...