Bruce Kent Quotes

With my background and genetic makeup,buddy, you're lucky I'm as normal as I am. (Katra Agrotera)

Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call "temperament".

Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

I'm a very melancholic kind of person. I don't know why; I think certain people are born a certain way.

But with each passing year and each new study, the evidence for the genetic contribution to individual and group differences becomes more firmly established than ever.

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.

It's not that you make a psychopath. They are - more likely, they come out that way, and they show their stripes over time.

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.

The most recent studies both behavioral and biological, indicate one's sexual orientation is genetic — something determined at conception.

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain.

It's interesting: I think, genetically, there are people who need different things, like exercise. I need the exercise, others not so much, and I think more and more, we'll start to understand why people's bodies function in certain ways.

Some people are cool, some are cold. Many are down to earth, while a select few are divas.

Both of my grandmothers are aging well, and my mom is, too. I've got some good genes.

Genes are thought to contribute a certain amount to the cause of autism but it's not 100 per cent. It might be about 60 per cent genetic. So there are going to be environmental factors that mediate the impact of autism.

There haven't been genetic studies on grit, but we often think that challenge is inherited but grit is learned. That's not what science says. Science says grit comes from both nature and nurture.

You can't expect a poodle to guard your house the way a Doberman pinscher does, and you can't expect a Doberman pinscher to jump in your lap the way a poodle does. Some people are just animals of a certain nature, and they are always going to have certain impulses that motivate them.

I have two kids and they were by no means blank slates. One is exactly like me, one is exactly like my wife.

Everyone recognises that genes are part of the story but autism isn't 100% genetic. Even if you have identical twins who share all their genes, you can find that one has autism and one doesn't. That means that there must be some non-genetic factors.

I have five kids, and people can say 'nature versus nurture,' but it is nature! Nurture has so little to do with it. I have five kids, and there are five totally different people in my house.

Some people are born fast.