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Bryan Kohberger’s two sisters were fired from their jobs over their familial relationship with their alleged killer brother, according to a report. Melissa and Amanda Kohberger were canned in the months after their brother’s arrest for the quadruple slayings of four University of Idaho students last year, NewsNation reported. “Both of Kohberger’s parents are retired and I’m told the family is in very, very bad shape financially right now especially because the sisters are now unemployed,” anchor Dan Abrams said Monday. Kohberger was given a television inside his private cell and has the freedom to choose what he watches.

There's no such thing as a single "gay gene" that drives a person's sexual behavior, concludes the largest genetic study ever conducted on the issue. Instead, a person's attraction to those of the same sex is shaped by a complex mix of genetic and environmental influences, similar to what's seen in most other human traits, researchers report. "This is a natural and normal part of variation in our species," said researcher Ben Neale, director of genetics with the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "That should also support the position that we shouldn't...

Epigenetics: How Our Experiences Affect Our Offspring New research suggests that people's experiences, not just their genes, can affect the biological legacy of their offspring By The Week Staff January 20, 2013 Isn't our genetic legacy hardwired? From Mendel and Darwin in the 19th century to Watson and Crick in the 20th, scientists have shown that chromosomes passed from parent to child form a genetic blueprint for development. But in a quiet scientific revolution, researchers have in recent years come to realize that genes aren't a fixed, predetermined program simply passed from one generation to the next. Instead, genes can...

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth? IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger. But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in...

Religions thrived to protect our ancestors against the ravages of disease, according to a radical new evolutionary theory of the genesis of faith. Prof Richard Dawkins the atheist and sceptic, has condemned religion as a "virus of the mind" but it seems that people became religious for good reason - actually to avoid infection by viruses and other diseases - according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences. Dr Corey Fincher and Prof Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more...

Are you really lazy? Would you rather just sit around the house and watch TV all day instead of actually producing and trying to contribute to society? In the political world many conservatives would call those people Democrats but they may have now finally have found an excuse for their lifestyle of living off other people's hard work and money. It is the laziness gene. New Excuses for Workers: Laziness Gene is Discovered Is there really a laziness gene? Dr. Sanjay Gupta explained it this way on CNN, "Well, there is some preliminary research now actually looking at this very...

"My dear, let us hope that it isn't true!" the wife of the bishop of Worcester is reputed to have exclaimed 150 years ago, on hearing that human beings might be descended from apes. "But if it is true, let us hope that it doesn't become widely known!" When it comes to sociobiology - better known these days as "evolutionary psychology" - the bishop's wife has modern counterparts: The religious right and the secular and supposedly scientific left are remarkably on the same page, both sides inclined to dispute or misrepresent the relevance of evolution to human beings. The former,...

New research into inheritance shows we can alter family traits for better or for worse. Jonathan Leake reports For Beatrix Zwart being young means having fun. She works hard, and out of hours she plays hard — including plenty of nights on the town with her friends. “I lead a similar lifestyle to a lot of young professionals in Britain and I don’t intend to have any children until I’m well into my thirties,” said Zwart, a 25-year-old Belgian who lives in London. “I’ve never really thought my lifestyle now could have any effect on my future children or grandchildren.”...

Why home doesn't matterMay 2007Judith Rich Harris The BBC series "Child of Our Time" assumes that studying children with their parents will help us understand how their personalities develop. But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home During much of the 20th century, it was considered impolite and unscientific to say that genes play any role in determining people's personalities, talents or intelligence. But we're in the 21st century now, the era of the genome. So when Robert Winston informs...

Is it just coincidence that Bobby Bonds and his son Barry both made baseball history with their all-star power and speed? Or that Francis Ford Coppola and daughter Sofia rose to fame as award-winning film directors? Questions like these have long plagued psychologists, geneticists and philosophers. Coined nature versus nurture, it is one of the great mysteries of the mind, and much research has focused on the relative role of genes and the environment in determining everything from athleticism to personality to a person's predisposition to obesity. Smart research More than a century ago, Sir Francis Galton began studying the...

In 1998, a kindly grandmother living in New Jersey wrote a book about child-rearing that created quite a stir. In "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," Judith Rich Harris had the temerity to suggest that the most important influences on children were not their parents but genes and peers. This was heresy, and critics immediately attacked the book in reviews with titles such as "Parents Don't Count!" Nonetheless, Mrs. Harris had made a very convincing argument, and she stuck to her guns. Now, with "No Two Alike" (W.W. Norton & Company, 352 pages, $26.95), she...

NEW YORK: Scientists have raised new questions about free will, with some of the first evidence that the way people behave towards each other can be controlled by their genes rather than their environment and upbringing. They have found that people with a rare genetic mutation known as Williams syndrome have brains that work abnormally in social situations, producing erratic and inappropriate behaviour. The finding implies that humans' social interactions are pre-programmed to some extent and that external influences - "nurture" in contrast to "nature" - may be less important. The researchers, at the National Institute of Mental Health in...

This month is the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve, the book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray about — to quote their own subtitle — "intelligence and class structure in American life." The book generated a huge controversy when it was published — so much so that, if you trawl around the Internet or bookstores, you can find first, second, and third derivatives (so to speak) of the book: books and articles about it, books and articles about those books and articles, and so on. Most of TBC consists of summaries of research in...

In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature By NICHOLAS WADE Who should define human nature? When the biologist Edward O. Wilson set out to do so in his 1975 book "Sociobiology," he was assailed by left-wing colleagues who portrayed his description of genetically shaped human behaviors as a threat to the political principles of equal rights and a just society. Since then, a storm has threatened anyone who prominently asserts that politically sensitive aspects of human nature might be molded by the genes. So biologists, despite their increasing knowledge from the decoding of the human genome and other advances,...

In a new twist on the age-old question of nature vs. nurture, Johns Hopkins scientists following 14 boys who were surgically altered as infants and raised as girls found that the majority grew up identifying strongly as males. Some of the patients spontaneously took on boys' names and began wearing male clothing before anyone told them the circumstances of their births - while others decided to live as boys once they found out. Warning against sweeping conclusions about the foundations of gender identity, the researchers noted that the study was limited to boys who were "assigned" to the female gender...

Startling Study Says People May Be Born Gay By Amanda Gardner HealthDay Reporter October 6, 2003 3:21 PM (HealthDayNews) -- The origins of sexual orientation may be evident in the blink of an eye. In what is the first study to show an apparent link between a non-learned trait and sexual orientation, British researchers have discovered the way peoples' eyes respond to sudden loud noises may signal differences between heterosexual and homosexual men and women that were developed before birth. The authors, whose study appears in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, say about 4 percent of men and...

MONDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDayNews) -- The origins of sexual orientation may be evident in the blink of an eye. In what is the first study to show an apparent link between a non-learned trait and sexual orientation, British researchers have discovered the way peoples' eyes respond to sudden loud noises may signal differences between heterosexual and homosexual men and women that were developed before birth. The authors, whose study appears in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, say about 4 percent of men and 3 percent of women are gay. Scientists have long sought to determine whether sexuality is learned...

MONDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDayNews) -- The origins of sexual orientation may be evident in the blink of an eye. In what is the first study to show an apparent link between a non-learned trait and sexual orientation, British researchers have discovered the way peoples' eyes respond to sudden loud noises may signal differences between heterosexual and homosexual men and women that were developed before birth. The authors, whose study appears in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, say about 4 percent of men and 3 percent of women are gay. Scientists have long sought to determine whether sexuality is learned...