A disposition in advance to react in a particular way

Usage examples of predisposition.

Whatever friendship he might entertain for Berthollet, it was easy to perceive that he preferred Monge, and that he was led to that preference because Monge, endowed with an ardent imagination, without exactly possessing religious principles, had a kind of predisposition for religious ideas which harmonised with the notions of Bonaparte.

He found that a presymptomatic person with a genetic predisposition to a serious condition faces little or no difficulty in obtaining health insurance.

My dialogue with you simply cannot overcome your predispositions and preconceptions that, by observation, hold you.

When you have realised to the marrow, that all the physical organs of man and all his physical structure are what they are through a series of adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up to a level of practical efficiency only by the elimination of death, and that this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many of his mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously different and better.

We generally now accept that genetics plays a role in the predispositions to these, and other, problems, but we do not have the measurement technology to determine if DNA actually carries, pre-programs, cells to develop the virus itself.

Their candidates are identified partially through their DNA predispositions and subsequently through the independent actions that individuals take.

Do you think there may be predispositions, inherited or ingrafted, but at any rate constitutional, which shall take out certain apparently voluntary determinations from the control of the will, and leave them as free from moral responsibility as the instincts of the lower animals?

Your question about inherited predispositions, as limiting the sphere of the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a very wide range of speculation.

But their claim that their solution is no more than hereditary predisposition defies both science and common sense.

Further, our offspring are born nearly unformed, or altricial, replacing reflex instinct with lessons drawn from experience and the accumulated wisdom of the tribe, channeled by only the most general of innate predispositions.

There were a lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that Ann might have a genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long QT syndrome, named for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the electrocardiogram.

There have been claims that there can be a genetic predisposition to the condition, and that it might be linked to Down's syndrome in infants.

Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data `highways', abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, foetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

This metaphor resonates down the ages, becoming the basis for philosophical debate in the eighteenth and scientific / ideological debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as to whether humans are born with innate predispositions or as tabula rasa - clean slates on which experience inscribes individual memory.

For although greater difficulty may be felt in believing that witches are able to cause leprosy or epilepsy, since these diseases arise from some long-standing physical predisposition or defect, none the less it has sometimes been found that even these have been caused by witchcraft.