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Evolution of Personality
Well here we go...

Evolution of Personality

Cadrache
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Posted 09/17/08 - 09:35 PM: Subject: Evolution of Personality	#1
Sigh... I have absolutely no idea how this suddenly appeared in my head. Ice cream; Steven Erickson's newest book; and the annoyance from the offspring of fruit flies bear crazy ideas... (Stupid pregnant fly decided to hatch a few dozen offspring in the apartment a couple days ago.) Well anyways; the ice cream has syrup on it as well. And behold! What if personality could be equivocated as a form of genetic makeup? After briefly thinking about first impressions; personality viewpoints from Jung, Freud, a couple of analyze yourself books and how people design character traits for story telling; I came to the simple conclusion that I definitely have no idea how to claim that specific personality traits could be specifically applied as a 1:1 ratio to the connecting pairs that make up a double helix. This is maybe 5 or 6 seconds after the idea entered consciousness. In other words anger, or sadness, or "being thoughtful" cannot be claimed as being the same as adenine or one of the other 3 what-ya-calls-it.(Gooes to Wiki) An emotion would be more aptly described as a chromosome; a sequence of base pairs that form an attribute. Like blue eyes that are sometimes green. The question then continues; If emotion is a chromosome sequence; then what would be the building blocks to these said chromosomes? Then I remembered the google news headline "Scientists are about to study if you can actually beat genetics - a study on dieting"; as well as this youtube info-video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF5yTLzWyBU And with the article in the Seed magazine regarding how teeth structures are formed, I somehow ad the additions that each chromosome personality setting is not an exact A = B ratio but rather that this sequence allows for a certain range of possible movements to a specific outcome. In this case there would be two sets of max and min values: Internal; external stimuli. Well anyways about half-way through the last paragraph was when I decided to start typing this all up, so the last sentence formed during the typing phase of the whole thing. Finito approximately 14 minutes after the random thought came to mind.

ManiacJack
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Posted 09/18/08 - 09:05 AM:	#2
I tried to experiment with mating fruit flies in high school- I knocked 'em all out with ethanol... and they never woke up. Maybe you can alcoholize your apartment? Maple syrup? I think putting it on ice cream is frikin' awesome. So... you are suggesting that when a hereditary constraint that is combined with something like diet, the effect is an emotional variable? Similar to a table, hereditary is columns, environment is rows, and possible emotional states are found in the cross-sections?
Future Tense Passed Relief the Escapist wrote: Bullshit, self-deception, self-aggrandizement. Explains everything, really...

Cadrache
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Posted 09/19/08 - 07:18 PM:	#3
Meh. Soaked my hand with water and swung at em. Seems they can't fly if they get even a little bit wet. =D Yes I am suggesting that hereditary constraint affects personality. Though what I am thinking about isn't Hereditary, environment, emotional states as that function exactly. Hmm... How to put it? With physical genetics; a number of processes for traits are more static then what you would get with personality traits. Like baldness and the like. Dominant in males; usually recessive in females; if the offspring inherits the gene sequence, then the outcome will happen. With personality traits; you may not have a direct relationship of parents to offspring. If the father and mother both have a tendency to a specific set of emotions under a general environmental pressure; the son may experience an entirely different set of emotions that are independent from the hereditary indicators from both parents. At least it seems that would be the case if we set up the column/rows/states scenerio.

Jokelamaniac
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Posted 09/27/08 - 12:04 PM:	#4
Let's recall famous Harry Harlow and his monkeys. These monkeys, if deprived from their mothers, didn't really to handle with their kind. When breed, they grew up unsuitable mothers. It is clear that the passion to spend time with others of own kind, and to take care of one's babies, is a personality trait that has been programmed in chromosomes. But still, their emergence depends on enviromental factors. So I think this fits to man also. DNA is real, it gives potentials or something, but doesn't in the end dominate the whole system.
Mr. Jokelamaniac

wuliheron
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Posted 09/29/08 - 08:24 AM:	#5
Shyness was the first personality trait proven to be genetic, however, your appreciation of genetics could perhaps do with some updating. All mammals from mice to humans share roughly the same number of genes, in fact, some sixty percent of our genes we share with plants. The differences between mice and men, plants and animals, is in how modular blocks of genes ranging from a few hundred base pairs to a few thousand are organized, read, and put to use. This is a new science known as Epigentics and will probably require a century to mature. One of the more interesting results of epigentics has been the discovery that the environmental conditions of our ancestors can dramatically effect how our genes are expressed. For example, the grandchildren of people subjected to starvation have a much greater chance of developing diabetes. In the case of personality, without intervention psychologists estimate a serious trauma in a family can require up to seven generations to work itself out. Primitive people often believed that if a mother experienced a trauma while pregnent it would affect the baby, and they may not have been too far from the truth. It is not nature vrs nurture so much as it is nature AND nurture. Exactly where one stops and the other begins can be impossible to determine because the two really are inseperable.

vykk_draygo
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Posted 09/29/08 - 02:37 PM:	#6
I don't think your title really fits with your post. Instead of Evolution of Personality, it sounds more like it should be "Genetics of Personality." What you've come up with is just another argument in the nature vs. nurture debate.
"But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?" H.P. Lovecraft

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