Adoption studies are all about this. The best example I have heard of was how singer/songwriter Joni Mitchel was young, poor, pregnant, and gave her daughter up for adoption. The daughter was raised in a family which valued convention and favored practical over artistic concerns. They discouraged the child from expressing herself through art, and would deny her feelings of “difference” from earliest childhood by telling her she was their biological child.
Upon adulthood, her adoptive brother felt “she needed to be told,” and told her. She managed to track down her biological mother. But it was a rocky life and rocky relationship, because her adoptive family believed in the Blank Slate, and this simply is not true.
They have been tracking down and isolating such genetics, and now this can be (mostly) detected via brain scan. A doctor/scientist wrote a book about it: he was in charge of the study and was surprised that his own scan had been put in the “psychopath” category.
However, like your son, he had been raised with love, taught to channel his desires into paths that would give back for himself and others, and had chosen a scientific career where he cared for people, as he was best able. He was a credit to society despite those genetics which would make it so easy to be destructive and miserable.
I think we have far more of these psychopath genetics that we acknowledge. Incidence is considered 1-3% currently, but I think that only counts the people who did not have the benefit of patient, devoted, upbringings like the sons in this comment.
We get our genes. Then our formative years are spent learning to use them for good; or battle the anger that comes from frustrating our true nature.
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