These media events happen pretty regularly, in fact I’d say almost weekly now. You’ve seen the headline: Gene X causes Behavior Y.

Let me make this simple. If you read a headline that says anything remotely like that, immediately turn the page being confident in the knowledge that it’s bupkis (that’s a scientific term) at worst, or a miserable telling of the actual truth at best.

This is where I bring out one of my favorite cartoons. It starts out with a researcher’s conclusion from his or her research: “A is correlated with B (p=0.56) given C, assuming D and under E conditions”  and through several iterations through pr and media ends up “A will kill you”.

This basic truth is that scientific genetic research is misreported (that’s putting it mildly) in the media. Most times conclusions based on research don’t follow the “eureka, I found the holy truth” model, but rather are years of research by many different people, who argue, retest, replicate and eventually (hopefully) come to a close proximity of the truth. This is doubly true of complex diseases, traits and behaviors. Yes, sometimes there is a single variation of a gene that causes an obvious trait, disease or even behavior. That’s the exception, not the rule. Most times traits, complex diseases and behaviors have a ‘multifactorial” origin, in other words the ’cause’ of them is several to many variations in several to many genes interacting with a myriad different possible environmental factors to bring us to the trait/disease/behavior.

Want a perfect example of this? A newly reported “warrior gene”. It’s sad to see it reported this way on National Geographic, an organization which I respect.

John Horgan did an excellent piece pulling this story apart. The gist of his point about this particular ‘report:’

[This one] study provides little to no evidence for the warrior gene, because the difference between carriers and noncarriers was minuscule. McDermott et al. examined 70 subjects, half of whom carried the warrior gene. The researchers found that 75 percent of the warrior gene carriers “meted out aggression” when cheated—but so did 62 percent of the noncarriers. Moreover, when subjects were cheated out of smaller amounts of money, “there was no difference” between the two groups.

Obviously, the warrior gene cannot possibly live up to its name. If it did, the whole world—and China in particular, if the racial statistics cited above are remotely accurate—would be wracked by violence. The warrior gene resembles other pseudo-discoveries to emerge from behavioral genetics, like the gay gene, the God gene, the high-IQ gene, the alcoholism gene, the gambling gene and the liberal gene. (See my previous columns on the liberal gene and gay gene.)

In the end, given much more research and discussion, we might find that this variation might have some effect on aggressive behavior in context with a dozen other genes and those variations, given several environmental factors.

But Gene X does not cause Behavior Y.