So you're a scientist, and ...
somewhere along the way, hammered into your head
is the inevitable “nature versus nurture”
and that's at least up there with Coke versus Pepsi
or Greeks versus Trojans.
So, nature versus nurture: This, by now
utterly over-simplifying view of
where influences are-
influences on how a cell deals with
an energy crisis up to
what makes us who we are on the most individualistic
levels of personality.
And what you've got is this complete false dichotomy
built around nature as deterministic
at the very bottom of all the causality.
Of 'life is DNA' and the 'code of codes'
and the Holy Grail, and everything is driven by it.
At the other end is a much more social science perspective
which is: We are 'social organisms'
and biology is for slime molds;
humans are free of biology.
And obviously both views are nonsense.
What you see instead is that
it is virtually impossible to understand how biology works
outside of the context of environment.
[ It's Genetic ]
One of the most crazy making yet widespread
and potentially dangerous notions is:
“Oh, that behavior is genetic.”
Now what does that mean? It means all sorts of subtle stuff if you
know modern biology, but for most people out there
what it winds up meaning is:
a deterministic view of life,
one rooted in biology and genetics.
Genes equal things that can't be changed.
Genes equal things that are
inevitable and that you might as well
not waste resources trying to fix,
might as well not put societal energies into trying to improve
because it's inevitable and it's unchangeable.
And that is sheer nonsense.
[ Disease ]
It is widely thought that
conditions like ADHD are genetically programmed,
conditions like schizophrenia are genetically programmed.
The truth is the opposite. Nothing is genetically programmed.
There are very rare diseases, a small handful,
extremely sparsely represented in the population,
that are truly genetically determined.
Most complex conditions
might have a predisposition that has a genetic component,
but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.
The whole search for the source of diseases in the genome
was doomed to failure before anybody even thought of it,
because most diseases are not genetically predetermined.
Heart disease, cancer, strokes,
rheumatoid conditions, autoimmune conditions in general,
mental health conditions, addictions-
none of them are genetically determined.
Breast cancer, for example. Out of 100 women with breast cancer
only seven will carry the breast cancer genes.
93 do not.
And out of 100 women who do have the genes
not all of them will get cancer.
[ Behavior ]
Genes are not just things that make us behave in
a particular way regardless of our environment.
Genes give us different ways of responding to our environment.
And in fact it looks as if some of the early
childhood influences and the kind of child rearing,
affect gene expression:
actually turning on or off different genes
to put you on a different developmental track
which may suit the kind of world you've got to deal with.
So for example,
a study done in Montreal with suicide victims
looked at autopsies of the brains of these people.
And it turned out that if a suicide victim
(these are usually young adults)
had been abused as children, the abuse actually
caused a genetic change in the brain
that was absent in the brains of people who had not been abused.
That's an epigenetic effect.
“Epi” means on top of, so that
the epigenetic influence is what happens
environmentally to either activate or deactivate certain genes.
In New Zealand, there was a study
that was done in a town called Dunedin,
in which a few thousand individuals
were studied from birth into their 20s.
What they found was that they could identify
a genetic mutation- an abnormal gene-
which did have some relation to
the predisposition to commit violence,
but only if the individual had also
been subjected to severe child abuse.
In other words, children with this abnormal gene
would be no more likely to be violent than anybody else,
and in fact, they actually had a lower rate of violence
than people with normal genes
as long as they weren't abused as children.
Great additional example of the ways
in which genes are not “be all - end all.”
A fancy technique where you can
take a specific gene out of a mouse,
that mouse and its descendants will not have that gene.
You have ”knocked out” that gene.
So there's this one gene that encodes for a protein
that has something to do with learning and memory.
And with this fabulous demonstration you “knock out” that gene
and you have a mouse that doesn't learn as well.
“Ooh! A genetic basis for intelligence!”
What was much less appreciated in that landmark study
that got picked up by the media left and right,
is take those genetically impaired mice
and raise them in a much more enriched
stimulating environment than your normal mice in a lab cage,
and they completely overcame that deficit.
So, when one says in a contemporary sense that
“Oh, this behavior is genetic”
to the extent that that's even a valid sort of phrase to use,
what you're saying is: there is a
genetic contribution to how this organism responds to environment;
genes may influence the readiness with which
an organism will deal with a certain environmental challenge.
You know, that's not the version most people have in their minds.
And not to be too 'soap-boxing'
but run with the old version of “It's genetic!” and
it's not that far from the history of Eugenics and things of that sort.
It's a widespread misconception
and it's a potentially fairly dangerous one.
One reason that the
biological explanation for violence,
one reason that hypothesis is potentially dangerous-
it's not just misleading it can really do harm-
is because if you believe that, you could very easily say:
“Well, there's nothing we can do
to change the predisposition people have to becoming violent.
All we can do, if somebody becomes violent is
punish them- lock them up or execute them-
but we don't need to worry about changing the
social environment or the social preconditions
that may lead people to become violent
because that's irrelevant.”
The genetic argument allows us the luxury of ignoring
past and present historical and social factors.
And in the words of Louis Menand
who wrote in the New Yorker, very astutely he said:
“It's all in the genes, an explanation for the way things are
that does not threaten the way things are.
Why should someone feel unhappy or
engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living
in the freest and most prosperous nation on Earth?
It can't be the system.
There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.”
Which is a good way of putting it.
So, the genetic argument is simply a cop-out
which allows us to ignore
the social and economic and political factors
that, in fact, underlie many troublesome behaviors.