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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >But the whole point of the study is that it's still the genes that
> result in expression of one characteristic or another.

This is the current dogmatism, but new evidence is alredy greatly weakening 
that line of thinking.


 >That is, unless

> you think that people have conscious control over what happens to
> their genes and they are able to direct changes to them. If that's
> your theory, then we've left science and entered New Age mysticism.

A very short time ago the notion that one's genetic makeup could alter at 
all, the epigentics or the sequencing, was considered itself to be fanciful 
mysticism.  Now it is not.  Every estabilshed scientific principle we 
consider to 
be truth incarnate now of days was at one time leaving science and entering 
mysticism.

In the 1770's when Joseph Preistly (and others, he was not the first) began 
to theorize that there were mysterious properties in the air that functioned 
as 
"acid-formers" and "water-formers", and "nitre-formers" they were ridicululed 
as dealing in notions of fairy spirits in the air.   Moderns who like to see 
an unbroken succession of reason and logic as opposed to "mysticism" like to 
say it was the church people and mystics that ridiculed Priestly and his lot. 
 
But it was not, it was the contemporary scientists.

Now days we use Latin terms for Priestly's theory, oxygen (acid former), 
hydrogen (water former) and nitrogen (nitre former) and think it is the most 
solid 
of God-given fact.  But at one time it was a step beyond science into 
something very akin to mysticism as all "advances" have been.

What is already beyond speculation and mysticism is that when people acts a 
certain way, adopts certain habits, their genetic makeup does indeed changes. 
 
It is  only by taking a strict and uncalled for mechanisitic view of the 
human 
that we exclude attitude and mental state from that list.


James