Unfortunately, the nature-versus-nurture debate continues in criminology. Over the past 5 years, the number of heritability studies in criminology has surged. These studies invariably report sizeable heritability estimates (∼50 percent) and minimal effects of the so-called shared environment for crime and related outcomes. Reports of such high heritabilities for such complex social behaviors are surprising, and findings indicating negligible shared environmental influences (usually interpreted to include parenting and community factors) seem implausible given extensive criminological research demonstrating their significance. Importantly, however, the models on which these estimates are based have fatal flaws for complex social behaviors such as crime. Moreover, the goal of heritability studies—partitioning the effects of nature and nurture—is misguided given the bidirectional, interactional relationship among genes, cells, organisms, and environments. This study provides a critique of heritability study methods and assumptions to illuminate the dubious foundations of heritability estimates and questions the rationale and utility of partitioning genetic and environmental effects.

After critiquing the major models, we call for an end to heritability studies. We then present what we perceive to be a more useful biosocial research agenda that is consonant with and informed by recent advances in our understanding of gene function and developmental plasticity. Continue reading full articlePlease kill me if anything should happen to Lord Tyrion.  We were first introduced to Lancel Lannister in “Lord Snow,” the third episode of Season 1. Toilet Shower Combo For SaleAs King Robert regaled Barristan Selmy and Jaime Lannister with war stories, Lancel, twitchy and chagrinned, fetched the wine. Drapes Window Treatments IdeasEugene Simon, who was cast in the part at age 19 following a career as a child actor, played Lancel as a hapless fool for all of Season 1 and well into Season 2. Window Cleaning Kuwait

The youngest and least important member of the Lannister clan, Lancel had almost no hope to flourish when surrounded by larger-than-life figures like his uncle Jaime the Kingslayer, his Aunt Cersei and Queen, and the rest of the royal family. Insecurity came naturally to him, and Simon sold it well. And yet Lancel plays a crucial part in Season 1, supplying King Robert with an endless supply of strong wine on his hunt. Robert became so drunk that he foolishly tried to kill a wild boar, and died. Lancel was more dangerous than he knew. Lancel enjoyed an expanded role in Season 2, and Simon got to stretch his acting muscles. Newly elevated to knighthood, Lancel acted as a go-between for Tyrion and Cersei as the siblings vied for power. Lancel was still a hapless fool at heart, but Simon layered some unearned confidence over the stammers and pratfalls. Simon earned his spurs during the Battle of the Blackwater. Lancel was one of the few Lannisters of any use during the battle, and though it ended with him crumpled on the ground in pain, the moment where he stands up to Cersei in the Maidenvault was a high-water mark for the character.

Still, after his many humiliations, Lancel could be forgiven for wanting to rehabilitate his image. When Simon showed up again in Season 5, he was a bumbling idiot no more. Gone was the lean, wispy-haired teen with an overinflated opinion of his own importance. In his place was a calm man with a shorn head and a faraway look in his eye. When he confronted his Aunt Cersei about their plan to kill Robert, attentive viewers quickly realized that he could be trouble. However, the Queen Regent missed that lesson. Or was it Dowager Queen? I tempted you into our…unnatural relations. And of course…there was the king…his boar hunt…his wine… Although we didn’t see it on screen, Lancel had been radicalized, and he quickly took as place beside the High Sparrow as a member of the new Faith Militant. Throughout Season 5, Simon marched around King’s Landing with a steely eyed determination we hadn’t seen before. It was Simon’s best year with the character.

Lancel didn’t have a ton to do in Season 6, although he was crucial during the finale, “The Winds of Winter.” Lancel followed a child under the Sept of Baelor and found a candle, burned almost completely away, standing in a pool of wildfire. The child stabbed him in the back, and Lancel crawled on his hands and elbows toward the candle in an attempt to put it out, a final chance to to do something heroic. He was our eyes and ears during this scene, and Simon sold his terror and resolve well. Of course, he failed, and Lancel went up in flames along with the rest of the Sept. In the end, Lancel was a hapless fool after all, but Eugene Simon proved his mettle. We wish him good fortune in the roles to come.To salute Eugene Simon’s performance as Brother Lancel, formerly Lannister, we have a guest post by WotW friend and surveymaster James Rivers. On most television shows, an actor must portray how his character changes over time. Sometimes that change is transformative and quick, but usually it happens more slowly.

Eugene Simon did not have that luxury in his portrayal of Lancel Lannister on Game of Thrones. The first two seasons, he played an intimidated pushover devoted to his older cousin (and queen), Cersei. After two seasons off, he returned to the role and had to immediately sell his character’s unseen metamorphosis into a pious religious fanatic. He pulled off both “versions” of Lancel with seeming ease. We first see him in episode 3 of the first season being mocked by King Robert as he serves wine: “Gods, what a stupid name. Some halfwit with a stutter?” With Lancel’s reply, “It’s empty, your grace,” referring to his wine pitcher, Simon was off and running. In Season 1, he helped Robert into his ill-fitting armor, as well as his grave, and hooked up with the king’s widow. In Season 2 he tried, and failed, to go toe-to-toe with Tyrion and eventually was forced to be his reluctant informant — at one point having a now-forboding conversation about Cersei hoarding wildfire.

In an interview with TV Guide during Season 2, Simon described Lancel as “fundamentally not made of much,” someone “dutiful” to his house who has ambitions, but “doesn’t have the tools available to him psychologically to actually be anything more than a boy.” After Lancel’s injury at the Battle of the Blackwater, Simon vanished from the Thrones screen, but those who’d read A Feast for Crows figured he might show up again. Turns out Simon thought so too, and had been preparing for a possible return. “I was quite raring to go,” he told TV Guide in another interview, for Season 5, “for people to see just how this boy figure in the first two seasons could become someone of such influence and intimidation through really being at first an underdog.” And so at the start of Season 5, Lancel re-appeared as a “sparrow” devoted to the faith of the Seven, clad in a simple robe and with shorn hair. If Simon returned to play a character transformed in looks and spirit, so too, did he return to a show transformed — to use his own words — from an underdog to something of influence.

That had to make playing Lancel 2.0 that much more intimidating. But he pulled it off, giving a performance in his first big scene back (in which he seeks forgiveness from Cersei for what he did with and for her) that effectively demonstrated Lancel’s new nature, called back to previous events, and made fans of Cersei worry. Simon continued to recur through Seasons 5 and 6 as the Cersei vs. the Sparrow plot advanced through its varied power shifts. And the Lancel we ultimately were left with, staring at death in the form of green fire, is a far cry from the one who once poured Robert wine. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss almost certainly didn’t randomly assign Lancel to be the one featured in an excruciatingly tense scene as, knife wound and all, he dragged himself in vain to nearly melted candles set in a pool of wildfire. With him, we witnessed the horror of the initial explosion. They needed someone familiar to the audience to witness the horror of the initial explosion, and likely wanted wanted to give Simon’s long-time character closure.