The genetic cocktail – a heady brew

The family visit prompted me to think about the genetic inheritance passed on to my granddaughters and Cathy’s blog (http://cwnotebook.blogspot.com/) which also deals with the nature/nurture debate has pushed me to think about it further. I’ve been watching the three little girls and am fascinated to see which bits of me they’ve inherited. The interesting thing about grandchildren as opposed to children is that you can see aspects of yourself which are not in your children. I think there’s some sort of formula which says something like a child inherits 25% of the genes from each parent and 12.5% of each of its grandparent’s genes. (If anyone knows otherwise, perhaps they’d let me know.) This suggests that the children could by-pass parental behaviour in favour of the grandparent. Actually I’m not quite sure if this applies to personality only, or if the physical aspects count, as well. My son, who looks nothing like me, is similar to me in some aspects of his behaviour. GD3, who looks a lot like me, does not, as far as I can see, resemble me in terms of personality. So perhaps when the genetic cards are shuffled, you get physical factors and personality genes all thrown in together. GD2, my daughter’s child, is very slow and takes her time in most things. I recognise myself very clearly here. But she doesn’t look like me, and she doesn’t behave like her mother, who is fast and energetic, like the whole of my other half’s family.

But in some things, the line between nature and nurture is not clear-cut. GD1 and GD3 swim and cycle and climb, and are physically very active. Do they take after their parents, who are both sporty and well co-ordinated, or is the fact that they have been exposed to such activities and encouraged to do them the important factor? Did I inherit a lack of co-ordination from my parents, or had no inclination to be sporty because they were not? A bit of both, I suppose.

The nature/nurture debate comes into my novel, Tainted Tree, as my heroine, Addie, is adopted. As I’m always a middle of the road sort of person, I think the line between the two is fuzzy. If it were dogmatically one way or another, we would not be individuals with choice on how to behave. We would be pre-determined by our genes and incapable of changing our behaviour to respond to a given situation. Alternatively, we would be putty, shaped by circumstances without the ability to fight back when those circumstances proved difficult. My view is that our genes might give us the inclination to behave in a certain way, whereas our upbringing will perhaps relate to our attitudes and such aspects of our character as honesty, trustworthiness and so on.