Environmental Influences on Genetic Expression: Biological And Behavioral Aspects of Sexual Differentation

The major purpose of this conference was to bring together a number of people from various scientific fields to consider a topic so broad that a cross-disciplinary approach to it could be effective. To this end, the planning group invited molecular biologists, embryologists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and clinicians to examine within a short period the topic of sexual differentiation, which involves the consideration of molecules, man, and society, with overtones of mysticism, religion, and social organization. The topic represents an area in which there is evidence of environmental influences on genetic expression and one in which an interaction of behavioral and biological disciplines can be readily demonstrated. The ability to pass from concern with molecules, cells, and anatomical configurations to the holistic concept of the organism is indeed difficult. Molecular biology and other biological disciplines have approached their particular problems with a view to decreasing the variables and arriving at some concept of universal biological law. In contrast, the social science disciplines, instead of reducing variables, examine the many variables that emerge where the organism deals with his brothers and his entire environment. Both systems of thought have utilized the scientific method, but each has approached an examination of developmental phenomena in a different way, accumulating different kinds of data. There was no question in the minds of the conference planners that an examination of such an important topic as sexual differentiation would have to include both these approaches, for it is from both of them that new concepts in this complex area will come. We brought both together in the belief that the message of a concern with the organism must include both.