Hormones and Heredity Human Behavior:

Hormones and Heredity

HUMAN BEHAVIOR: HORMONES AND HEREDITY

Human behavior has been an interesting subject of discussion and research. It is commonly believed that genes and environment determine human behavior. We need to not forget that genes are precisely what we call hereditary in ordinary language. When we are that someone is hereditarily prone to doing a certain thing, what we mean is that his genetic makeup makes his susceptible to such an action. There are certain characteristics or personality traits that human beings inherit and thus we blame these on genes. There are other actions that we learn from environment. According to various researches, genetics or hereditary is a very weak source or cause of behavior. While some person may have an aggression gene or a gene for certain behavior trait, it is highly unlikely that this gene alone would make him vulnerable to aggression or would predispose him to that particular behavior. Normally there are other factors that influence a person's behavior too. Environment is a strong contender in this connection. However in this paper, we shall also study the effect on hormones on human behavior.

While environment and hereditary are important sources of determining human behavior, hormones also have a marked influence on our physical and mental state thus altering our behavior at least for some time. When we see wrestlers in the ring, thrashing their opponent or Formula One competitors driving at alarming speed, we wonder how do they do it. It doesn't even look humanly possible. But they do it with absolute ease and this is where hormones come into the equation. The production of adrenalin is what takes a person from a restive state to an excited state and causes him to behave in an agitated, excited manner as if he is in a state of acute awareness. Hormones are commonly seen as chemicals that are secreted by certain cells and they move to another to affect bodily and mental state thus affecting behavior. The main function of hormones is to keep the body in a perfect chemical state. This means that hormones are secreted, as the body requires them. How would it be if a person were unavailable to feel any excitement on seeing his partner? This would not be a normal reaction and it shows a marked disinterest in the mate. But that not so normal behavior has other psychological reasons and thus the lack of hormone production.

However chemically speaking, it was the lack of adrenalin that caused a person to behave in an unexcited manner. For this reason, hormones are considered responsible for normal human reaction. "Hormones are the accelerators and brakes of cellular activity, and the fact they regulate gene activity makes them very useful. Unfortunately, hormone effects and interactions can be so complex that even the best known hormones are not completely understood." (MacDougall) Hormones are most often discussed in connection with sexual behavior. But they are responsible for almost every reaction and action. When a person takes on too much stress, stress hormones are to blame and these hormones cause the behavior from that. Similarly during a phase of depression when a person is undergoing acute pessimism, the production of endorphins stopped or is lowered which is the really cause of depression. For this reasons, medication is given which balances chemical reactions in the body to normalize behavior. Human behavior is thus a sum total of different influences including heredity, hormones, environment and psychology. Dr. Leary has explained this in an apt manner when he said:

The science of human behavior in the largest sense of the word behavior, the sense which includes all that human beings do, all that human beings have. In this sense of behavior it is the behavior of the whole, integrated personality which is under investigation....Psychology deals with the organism as a whole, as an integrated and orientated individual in contact with other individuals in a complex external environment, partly physical and partly social, in short, as a personality....The behavior of human beings, psychologically speaking... reduces to physiological facts and findings, in turn to those of the field of biology, then to those of bio-chemistry, then to chemistry in general and then, inevitably, to physics as the science of matter in motion." (p. 10-18)