Stotz and Griffiths, Biohumanities
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Another part of the survey instrument set out to investigate whether, as Lenny Moss has
argued, investigators either start with the conception of a gene defined by its predictive
relationship to a particular phenotype (Gene P), or with the conception of a concrete gene
with a specific molecular sequence and the template capacity to code for many different
products, depending on how it is transcribed and how its initial product is later processed
(Gene D) (Moss, 2003). We argued that these different starting points would affect how
investigators set out to unravel the complex relationship between genes and other
molecular factors with the phenotype. Hence the second task asked subjects to assess the
value of different research strategies for investigating complex diseases. For each disease
we offered four strategies, designed to run along a continuum from focusing on the
statistical relationship between gene and phenotype to entirely giving up on such a
relationship in favor of analyzing content-dependent causal pathways between gene and
phenotype. We looked for differences in which strategies were favored by biologists from
different backgrounds, and also at whether the choice of strategies changed for human
versus animal disease, and for physiological versus psychological disease.
2.2 The Innateness Study
It is a truism that the term 'innate' is vague and ambiguous. Matteo Mameli and Patrick
Bateson have recently reviewed the scientific use of the term 'innate' and identified no
less than twenty-six proposed definitions of the term, of which they judge eight to be both
genuinely independent definitions and potentially valuable scientific constructs (Mameli
and Bateson, 2006). However, the term 'innate' remains immensely popular in psychology