testable hypotheses regarding the social-environmental factors that enable or restrict the influence of genes. This is precisely the type of work that sociologists have engaged in over the past two centuries. If, indeed, the social environment is a fundamental cause of health (Link and Phelan 1995), then it is likely a fundamental cause of genotype–phenotype associations. The proximate associations (e.g., the influence of specific genotypes or haplotypes on a particular phenotype) may change over time, but the normative and institutional context in which behaviors reside remains fundamental to these more proximate causes.
