Prof. Dr. Sohan Raj Tater
Genes and environment don't compete but are complimentary. Genes are like the tools of painter's trade, the lighting in the garret, palette brushes and paints. They cannot operate in a vaccum. They require external catalysts before they function. The environment provides the needed boost. It continues the artistic effort itself. It takes the preffored genetic tools and works with them to provide a finished portrait. Like the artist, it operates within a range defined by these tools. No matter how powerful it is, the environment cannot force genes to manufacture products they are not designed to manufacture.
The difference between seeing heredity and environment as competitors and recognizing their supportive relationship is a critical one not only to understand the concepts behind genetic prophecy but in realizing how we are living organism, adopt in order to survive in a changing world.
Genes often act in concert with other genes. They can be influenced, altered, modified, triggered or shut down by these actions—and production by their neighbours. Such as, they not only help to control the impact of environment but actually constitute a part of that environment for the genes they influence.
Genes can effect the genes in various ways, for instance, each of us inherits one of the two genes. The first makes us particularly susceptible to arsenic poisoning and the second confers resistance. The dose needed to poison someone who has the genes for susceptibility, might be so small that it has no effect on someone who is resistant.
A person's height, for instance, is closely linked both to his genetic heritage and to the environment in which he grows. Genetically tall people tend to be born into tall families an shorter into short families. The same holds true for entire population like seven feet giants of the Ibo tribe of Nigeria or the short stocky people of the South East Asia. Average stature in population tends to remain more or less constant. When it increases, it is mainly environment like improvement in nutrition and health during the first year of life which has significant effect on height in the later years.
The change in the average stature is the production of improvement in environment but individuals grow only with in the ranges permitted by their genetic heritage. Height is influenced by a broad range of genetic and environment potential. The same kind of balance exists through the biology we can track them down to the molecular level to the regulation of a single gene product.
Doctoral Thesis, JVBU