Every week the media seem to grossly oversimplify the results of some study making claims that are just over the top. It seems high time to chronicle these. I’ll post the better ones as I find them. Here, my friends, is the cause of marital discord, covered in the esteemed Washington Post: Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord.
Men are more likely to be devoted and loyal husbands when they lack a
particular variant of a gene that influences brain activity,
researchers announced yesterday — the first time that science has
shown a direct link between a man’s genes and his aptitude for monogamy.
There’s no time to let these results sit idly by when we can test for the so-called divorce gene:
The finding set off a debate about whether people should conduct
genetic tests to find out whether potential mates are bad marriage
prospects. Several independent scientists called the discovery
remarkable and elegant but disagreed over whether such information
ought to be used in making personal decisions about love and marriage.
Leading our race for over-interpretation is HealthDay News, which claimed “Whether a man has one type of gene versus another could help decide whether he’s good ‘husband material.’”
Heck, why stop at testing when you can move on treatment? This research, the Telegraph notes, “raises the highly speculative possibility that scientists could one day develop drugs to target the gene in an attempt to prevent marriages from falling apart.” Speculative indeed, but that doesn’t stop them from mentioning it.
As the Brandon Keim notes over at Wired:
…the coverage isn’t just superficially faulty: it’s a fundamental misinterpretation of the findings. There’s a strong link between a gene and a social outcome, but the gene is only marginally interesting; what matters, according to the researchers themselves, are the neural networks implicated by the gene. That’s much less glamorous than blaming marital discord on a single genetic flaw, but it’s accurate.
