This type of thinking is symptomatic of a popular fallacy about genetics—we might technically call it monogenic determinism—where complex traits, diseases or behaviors are reduced to a single genetic cause, which imposes a fate on the bearer, whether it’s being gay, daring, permanently petrified, autistic or epileptic. It’s a fallacy in three dimensions: complex traits rarely have single genetic causes, they always involve the nongenetic environment and genetics is probabilistic, not deterministic.
