Felitti’s childhood adversity findings lay further waste to the myth of genetic determinism that I began debunking in the chapter on epigenetics. No single addiction gene has ever been found—nor ever will be. There may exist some collection of genes that predisposes people to susceptibility, but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination. What’s true of physical illness is just as true of addiction: genes are turned on and off by the environment, and we now know that early adversity affects genetic activity in ways that create a template for future dysfunction. Human and animal
...more
