“A gene that promotes nurturing behavior postcopulation could… spread throughout the population, to the extent that the offspring of people with the nurturing gene fare better, as a group, in the competition for resources and mates.”

— Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

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Daniel Levitin 76

American psychologist 1957

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“Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes “for” particular items of anatomy or behavior.”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"The Without and Within of Smart Mice", p. 234 (originally appeared in Time, 1999-09-13)
I Have Landed (2002)

“The fact that a gene must be switched on to form a long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

“The use of "nurture" as a synonym for "environment" is based on the assumption that what influences children's development, apart from their genes, is the way their parents bring them up. I call this the nurture assumption. Only after rearing two children of my own and coauthoring three editions of a college textbook on child development did I begin to question this assumption. Only recently did I come to the conclusion that it is wrong.”

Judith Rich Harris book The Nurture Assumption

The Nurture Assumption, chapter 1, p. 2. http://books.google.com/books?id=-uKBJRMJBjcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=%22nurture%22%20as%20a%20synonym%20for%20%22environment%22&f=false http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/harris-nurture.html

“Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: Even though I had long been taught that the genes of the brain are the governors of behavior, the absolute masters of our fate, our work showed that, in the brain as in bacteria, genes are also servants of the environment.... An environmental stimulus... activates modulatory interneurons that release serotonin. The serotonin acts on the sensory neuron to increase cyclic AMP and to cause protein kinase A and MAP kinase to move to the nucleus and activate CREB. The activation of CREB, in turn, leads to the expression of genes that changes the function and the structure of the cell.

“Jacob and Monod found that in bacteria, genes are switched on and off by other genes. This led them to distinguish between effector genes and regulatory genes. Effector genes encode effector proteins… which mediate specific cellular functions. Regulatory genes encode proteins called regulatory proteins, which switch the effector genes on or off.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

“Jacob and Monod not only outlined a theory of gene regulation, they also discovered the first regulators of gene transcription. These regulators come in two forms—repressors, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that shut genes off, and as later work showed, activators, genes that encode the regulatory proteins that turn genes on.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

“Many people today see genes as a reason for aberrant behavior, but the major influences have been shown to be environmental... What is considered appropriate behavior today may be considered un-sane in the future...Better values, ideals, and behavior cannot be fully realized while there is still hunger, unemployment, deprivation, war, and poverty.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Source: Designing the Future (2007), p. 19

“The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable. In fact, Dobzhanksy, for instance, worked quite a bit on so-called lethal chromosomes which are highly successful in one combination, and lethal in another. Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong. In the 30s and 40s, it was widely accepted that genes were the target of selection, because that was the only way they could be made accessible to mathematics, but now we know that it is really the whole genotype of the individual, not the gene. Except for that slight revision, the basic Darwinian theory hasn't changed in the last 50 years”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

Part of the answer to the question "Where do you think Darwinism is going to go in the next 50 years?"
What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001)

“When you nurture Nature, Nature nurtures you.”

Donald L. Hicks

Look into the stillness

“But here I stop—short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors—from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call “free will,” determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum—extreme altruism to extreme selfishness—that our genes permit.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"So Cleverly Kind an Animal", p. 266
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

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