Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. and John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School make their cases for an immigrant-specific genotype in their respective books, American Mania and The Hypomanic Edge. Even when times are hard, Whybrow points out, most people don’t leave their homelands. The 2 percent or so who do are a self-selecting group. What distinguishes them, he suggests, might be the genetic makeup of their dopamine-receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.” (New York Times Magazine)
This is one of the Times’ ideas of the year in review, to which I blinked earlier this week. Even as a psychiatrist with a high tolerance for materialist explanations of behavior, however, I am leery of this, since the circumstances of American life since people’s arrival here may have done as much to select against risk-taking as those which originally selected for immigration. And I am not sure the pioneer spirit that has been so glorified as the impetus to colonize the New World played as much a part in determining who came here as the Creation Myth would have it. (But maybe my contrarianism in raising these questions comes from the genetic stock of my immigrant forebears?)
