You see sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of a baser kind
By bud of nobler race; this is an art
Which does mend Nature - change it rather; but
The art itself is Nature.
William Shakespeare, A Winter's Tale. 

Do our genes make us, or are we moulded by our environment and our interaction with it? The answer given to this question by those who have a gene centred view is that essentially we are the product of our genes.  This is what I call the ‘deep down’ view. Somehow, ‘deep down’, we are hard-wired to be who we are.  When I point out differences created by our interaction with our environment they say ‘ah yes but deep down’ it is in the genes.

In t...

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