Watching the most recent episode of “Elementary” there was an issue presented as if it were a fact that it is possible to identify a gene that predicts sociopathic behaviour. Does anyone know if this is, in fact, the case?
Possible now? No. Possible, theoretically, in the future? Yes.
We’re not entirely sure that “sociopathic behavior” is genetic in origin, but it could be. More likely, like with many illnesses and behaviors, there’s both a genetic tendency and environmental factors which trigger that tendency. So it’s possible that one day, we’ll be able to identify those genes which tend to be found in people who engage in sociopathic behavior and not found in people who don’t. But not yet.
“Sociopathic behavior” is a term that isn’t widely used in mental health these days, but is still widely used in fiction. Mental health people are more likely to speak about the actual disorder a person has or their specific maladaptive behaviors. They will often find that someone who behaves in a way laypeople would call “sociopathic” has a personality disorder called Antisocial Personality Disorder. How is Sociopathy Treated? (with pictures) “Sociopath” is a broad, not very well defined term used by laypeople, like “stomachache”, while Antisocial Personality Disorder is more specific and used by professionals, like “small bowel obstruction”. Neither one is wrong, but they mean slightly different things if you’re being precise.
Low serotonin is associated with aggression.
Neuroimaging could assess damage to or inborn dysfunction in the frontal lobe.
Also, dysfunction caused by very rare gene mutations that cause MAO-A deficiency and then psychopathic behavior. See: Brunner syndrome.
But these are only 3 possible causes, and couldn’t possibly diagnose every sociopath. Note the rarity of Brunner’s. So, no, it’s certainly not an effective diagnostic tool.
No such genetic marker exists.
There is, though, a ‘warrior’ gene which is correlated to aggressiveness and aggressiveness is correlated to rage. But no hard causal relations are definitively shown. The fact that the researchers say that such genes need to be ‘activated’ by childhood trauma raises all sorts of skeptical questions.
As for a sociopath gene, there is no marker-candidates yet. There is some evidence through twin and familial studies that sociopathy has a genetic/hereditary correlation, but, nothing definitive.
And to answer your next Elementary-related question: No, you can’t give someone a hereditary disease… yet. Rewriting genetic code is possible and happening in animals, but not yet done on humans – at least, not that anyone is letting on since such human trials aren’t approved.
Thanks for the answers. I would just say that it is going to be awfully hard to play along and solve the crime with Sherlock and Watson if they are making things up. It was a good show though and gives me a clearer idea of “suspension of disbelief.”
There you go!
Consider it “science fiction”, if you like. And really, every prime time procedural (CSI:Whatever, etc.) is also science fiction. They may not have rocketships and aliens, but they’re using scientific tools and procedures that move the story forward, but don’t really work that way (or exist, sometimes) in real life.
Well, the things that happened in that episode of Elementary are just a few years away, so, not so far fetched.
BTW, the secret to Elementary is that you’re only given about four ancillary characters with speaking parts each episode. The real perp, once you omit the most obvious, is one of those.
And OMT: The biggest reality breaker of procedurals is the “enhance!” of grainy photos. That ain’t never gonna happen… blobs are blobs and can be ‘resolved’ in a billion different configurations. The best you can do, since license plate characters are finite, is create a database of blobs that different characters create. Or, if you have several photos, to combine them for better resolution.
Heh… reading WhyNot’s post, and all I could think about before reading further was “Enhance!”
The original Sherlock made crap up all the time. The number of cases solved by “deductions” which consisted of just knowing some obscure (incorrect) fact is startling. That’s what you get when you hire a socially maladjusted cokehead detective. Bastard probably sent dozens of innocent men to the gallows.
As stated by others, no, no such marker exists, nor will a single marker ever be found which “causes” ant-social personality disorder on a population significant level. Scare quotes because “cause” is a very broad term. We may at some time find a marker which causes a very small increase in the chances of an individual displaying ASPD. That marker, along with thousands of others, may collectively be able to tell us if an individual has a higher risk for ASPD than an individual with fewer of those risk alleles. It’s also possible that we will find a single mutation which is highly related to ASPD in a particular family. On the population level it would be an extremely rare mutation (possibly only existing in one family), but in that family it is highly predictive of ASPD.
I think of this as the Screen Actor’s Guild effect. (It’s my understanding that) speaking roles pay more than non-speaking roles, so it is more cost effective to have a character speak in the first act and the third act, than just in the third act after the reveal. Law & Order and CSI also operate in this premise. Certainly not every episode of every show fits this pattern, but any innocent by stander who says something is instantly a suspect.
Though the paper which initially said those things made a big splash, I do not think it is true. I’ve been coauther on a couple of papers which fail to find the MAOA childhood maltreatment interaction. Those were on larger samples than the original finding, and with vastly more power than the original paper. What that means is, if the effect existed, and was as large as the original paper suggested, then we would almost certainly have found it (under those circumstances, we found it in 10,000 out of 10,000 simulations). What we did find (and the original paper found, too) was a relationship between childhood maltreatment and later anti-social behavior. Most children from abusive homes did not go on to exhibit anti-social behavior, but most subjects who showed anti-social behavior had come from abusive homes.
Oddly, in the original Holmes stories, none of the folks Holmes nabs end up getting capital punishment. Holmes himself doesn’t seem to object to it, but all of the capital cases he takes on always seem to end with the perpetrator dying some other way.
Yes, this is getting to be a problem for prosecutors in real court cases – jurors who have watched much TV expect this kind of unreal accuracy in evidence. Many prosecutors now have pat speech: “This is court, not TV-land”, which they give to the jury early in the trial.
MRI and fMRI scans show similar structural and functional abnormalities in people believed to be sociopaths…
genetic tests do not exist yet, but the geneticist would do well to look for these genes in those showing MRI and fMRI sociopath abnormalities.
Cite?