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Can personality influence inheritance?
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"Is personality inherited?
Of course.”
So opens Alberto Halabe Bucay’s short paper (with a long title), “Endorphins, personality, and inheritance: Establishing the biochemical bases of inheritance”, found in Bioscience Hypotheses. Inheritance and genetics have long been the darlings of the scientific world, the focus of career-long hunts to find factors that cause disease or influence hair and eye color. But personality is not as straight forward as the genes for blue eyes. “Of course,” says the paper, “although it may be influenced by external factors.”
In fact, the paper seems to focus less on how personality is inherited, and much more on how personality shapes inheritance. Specifically, Bucay’s paper asks the question, “How do endorphins influence inheritance?”
Endorphins are the body’s morphine—almost literally. When you break your leg, a rush of endorphins is created by the pituitary gland and hypothalamus to help block some of the pain. The same thing happens when you undertake strenuous exercise. Endorphins even kick in as you die. They also play some sort of role in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
So what do endorphins have to do with inheritance? Bucay, of the Hospital Angeles Lomas in Huixquilucan, Mexico, offers an interesting theory: perhaps endorphins can have similar effects to drugs such as heroin and morphine. After all, they do nearly the same things in small doses. He writes, “Morphine, which we have known about since Greek times (and so it is named for Morpheus, god of dreams)…deadens pain, gives one a sense of well-being and causes sleep which is typical of what you get from opiates.” Not unlike how endorphins help ease the pain.
Back to inheritance. When opioids enter the body, they bind to endorphin receptors, such as in areas that produce sperm cells, known as spermatozoa. While a single, low dose of morphine is unlikely to generate extensive changes in the spermatozoa, there is a much different story with addicts who submit their body to long-term, high levels of the drug. Dr. Bucay explains that this may translate to endorphins: “What happens is that the endorphins affect the genes at the sites where spermatozoa is manufactured little by little over one's lifetime, much like morphine at used in low dosages. But in addicts, we see more damage due to the higher dosages of morphine that they take.”
The journal article states that “endorphins participate in various mental processes, both physiological and pathological, including stress, alcoholism, eating disorders, and schizophrenia.” So can these endorphin-influenced states of mind play some role in how endorphins impact heredity?
At the moment, no one knows. Journals like Bioscience Hypotheses are gems of the scientific world. They are places for scientists to publish musings, to pull from many fields to create a working idea to offer to the community at large for discussion. These journals do everything from sparking great new paths of research to stirring the scientific pot. This is just the beginning of the story.
"This is an intriguing idea" commented Dr. William Bains, Editor of Bioscience Hypotheses. "We wanted to publish it to see what other scientists thought, and whether others had data that could support or disprove it. That is what our journal is for, to stimulate debate about new ideas, the more groundbreaking, the better." [EurekAlert]
So is personality inherited? Of course. Can endorphin-influenced personality alter inheritance? Only time will tell.
Special thanks to Mark Hollis, Nonpartisan Examiner, for translating Dr. Bucay’s interview from Spanish.
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