Thinking about genetics, esp. the family kind that is sold to the gullible or the bogus tribal memberships, I naturally turned to my own family. I have three sets of "grandparents", my mother's parents, my father's parents, and the parents of my uncles who are all Hatfields, brothers married to my mother's sisters. Remarkably, my cousins on that side have a blip in their genetic code that interferes with the proper development of their phalanges: fingers and toes. Among them are too many toes (easy to remove one), missing thumbs (docs moved her big toe up to be a thumb), and a club foot (the hardest one to fix). This glitch goes back to Anne Boleyn, an ill-fated wife of Henry VIII. In paintings her sixth finger was sometimes hidden in her skirt.
So I went to genetic websites and found a far different and more serious mutation that carries susceptibility to rage.
I know of no one like this related to me and don't carry those genes myself -- just know about the TV program deriving from the history of Hatfields. One of the uncles-in-law never married and was institutionalized for what was understood to be "paranoid schizophrenia." He is erased from family history. My mother's opinion was that it came from his mother's side, Ruth, who was a sweetly cherished homebody unlike the career Pinkerton women. But this may be an idea developed by the Hatfields, aggressive dominators in style apart from genes.
This rage gene is a more immediate version of the idea of "bad seed" that curses some people. Bob Scriver was accused of that, through the MacFie side. His obsessions, hot temper, narcissism were the markers. Late in life he met a cousin who was almost exactly like him, even played the cornet just like him. The idea haunted him and got confused with racism, but he had it backwards. It would have been more protective to marry an indigenous person with an entirely different genetic code. On the other hand, maybe Blackfeet were formidable warriors because they carried this gene.
We think of genes in terms of one-gene/one-trait but the truth is that it takes a whole sequence of interacting of genes coded for certain proteins, cultures rewarding certain traits, and individual histories that accumulate trauma, deprivation, frustration, and failure. When these small things interact to create a syndrome in a lot of people, there are riots in the streets. But vulnerability (as many as fifty may be involved in schizophrenia) is not inevitability: some cultures (including some indigenous communities) find ways to adapt and channel schizophrenia, for instance, into shamanism.
The amount of research is impossible to keep up with, far more complex than we thought. I'm going to post the list I keep for myself separately. Feel free to download and use it as an introduction. It's not the same as Google.
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