The notion that our behaviour is largely due to our genes is immensely popular with the media, and intensely unpopular with many scientists. The Biopolitical Times blog has taken to nominating a “gene of the week” – from debt to DIY to propensity to answering telephone surveys.

The latest gene to surface accounts for liberal political views. Researchers at the University of San Diego and Harvard have found that that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene are more likely to be liberal as adults (if they had an active social life in adolescence).

This drew the scorn of John Horgan in Scientific American. He scoffed at “gene-whiz science”.

“Researchers, or gene-whizzers, typically make a surprising announcement: There's a gene that makes you gay! That makes you supersmart! That makes you believe in God! That makes you vote for Barney Frank! The media and the public collectively exclaim, ‘Gee whiz!’ Follow-up studies that fail to corroborate the initial claim receive much less or no attention, leaving the public with the mistaken impression that the initial report was accurate—and, more broadly, that genes determine who we are.”

On a similar note, Charles Foster, writing in Practical Ethics, criticises “genetic fundamentalism”.

“Who will rid us of these turbulent reductionists? They are very difficult to cull. The one gene = one protein idea is dead. But some of its offspring, which include the notion that there is a gene for immensely complex, plainly multifactorial traits, limp on. The war’s over. They’ve lost. But they keep on fighting. Haven’t their champions heard of epigenetics? Don’t they know how plastic even adult brains are?”

All this may be true, but if so, it would be bad news for the personal genomics industry which sells genetic profiles by associating traits with genes. Genetic fundamentalism has life in it yet.