"Infidelity Gene" Hyped in the News

Researchers have presented only flimsy, contradictory evidence that specific genes make some people more prone to infidelity, as depicted in the series “The Affair” ().

"Sunday Review" section has anointed Richard Friedman its go-to guy for touting behavioral genetics--or "gene-whiz science," as I prefer to call it. In March, Friedman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, proclaimed that researchers had discovered a "feel-good gene," which "makes some people inherently less anxious, and more able to forget fearful and unpleasant experiences."

, Friedman's claim—like virtually all reported linkages of complex human traits and disorders to specific genes (see )--is based on flimsy, contradictory evidence. I'm so naïve, or arrogant, that I actually thought my critique might dissuade the from further hype of gene-whiz science. editors must care more about traffic than accuracy, because they devoted almost the entire front page of yesterday’s "Sunday Review" to Friedman's latest travesty, "."

The core of Friedman's essay is his assertion that some women are "biologically inclined to wander." More specifically, women who carry variants of the gene AVPR1A—which encodes the receptor for the hormone arginine vasopressin--are "much more likely to engage in 'extra-pair bonding,' the scientific euphemism for sexual infidelity."

In support of this claim, Friedman cites . The team surveyed the Finnish subjects and found that 9.8 percent of the men and 6.4 percent of the women reported engaging in at least one "extra-pair mating." The researchers found an association between five AVPR1A markers and extra-pair mating in women but not in men.

First, self-reports are notoriously unreliable, but that's not the primary problem with the Zietsch study. The problem becomes apparent toward the end of the paper, when the authors acknowledge that their results "do not directly replicate previous results in humans."

That's an understatement. found no association between AVPR1A and extra-pair mating in either men or women. found an association between one AVPR1A polymorphism, called RS3, and poor pair-bonding in men; Zietsch found no association between RS3 and extra-pair mating in men or women. Many other groups have linked mating behavior to so-called OXTR genes, which encode receptors for the hormone oxytocin, but Zietsch found no evidence for OXTR linkages.

Consider the following passage, in which Zietsch et al. review other attempts to link human sexual behavior to specific genes:

That passage—with all its confusion and contradictions--is a microcosm of the history of behavioral genetics. Zietsch note, "Problems with the replicability of candidate-gene associations for behavioral traits are well documented." Indeed. I've been documenting the problems for more than two decades now, and yet the hype persists--even in supposedly responsible outlets like . What will it take to stop the gene-whiz hype?

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