Moral Lessons of the Genome
Ridley, Matt
Listen to the Genome It's not nature versus nurture anymore. BY MATT RIDLEY Why wrestle with Kant's God, Freedom, and immortally when it is only a matter of time before neuroscience, probably...
...without it, you cannot learn to speak...
...Appealing to nurture is no way out of this dilemma...
...Then, thirty-five years after leaving Harvard, as an unemployed grandmother, having happily escaped academic indoctrination, she sat down and wrote an article, which she submitted to the prestigious Psychological Review...
...In 2002 that innocence was lost with the publication of an extraordinary study of 400 young men...
...John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have refused to believe this...
...If reared in famine conditions, then develop a different body type...
...Beauty is nature...
...But Moffitt and Caspi were interested in a different approach: nature via nurture...
...Imagine that you are a youngster rescued too late by social services from an abusive family...
...But it is also nurture...
...They were destiny and determination, the enemies of choice...
...Knocking the gene out in a mouse causes aggressive behavior, and restoring the gene reduces aggression...
...Until that point, if a group of children asked, "Who is the toughest boy here...
...The involvement of the MAOA gene comes as no great surprise...
...BY MATT RIDLEY Why wrestle with Kant's God, Freedom, and immortally when it is only a matter of time before neuroscience, probably through brain imaging, reveals the actual physical mechanism that fabricates these mental constructs, these illusions...
...it also requires a "bad" genotype if it is to produce ill effects...
...The German philosopher Henrik Walter believes that the full ideal of free will is genuinely an illusion, but that people do possess a lesser form of it, which he calls natural autonomy and which derives from the feedback loops within the brain...
...I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will...
...It is the sum and product of circular influences with varying networks of neurons, immanent in a circular relationship between genes...
...Truly terrible parenting can still warp somebody's personality...
...Now imagine this with many thousands of neurons communicating at once...
...It did produce evidence, reams of it, all showing that children end up like their parents...
...You do not need a scientific study to tell you that some people are born more beautiful than others...
...Remarkably, the men with high-active MAOA genes were virtually immune to the effect of maltreatment...
...Are we clear yet...
...I am not so concerned about the mistake of attributing cause where none exists, such as the belief that thunder is Thor hammering...
...Nor am I saying that it is right to discriminate on the grounds of race or genetic disability...
...Just one diagnostic test, of the promoter length in this one gene, will allow a physician to predict, with some confidence, whether you are likely to be antisocial and probably criminal...
...Having certain genes gives you certain appetites...
...Matt Ridley is chairman of the International Center for Life in Newcastle, England, and the author of Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience & What Makes Us Human, from which this article is excerpted...
...It is probable that this wrenching separation from his mother was one of the prime sources of his mental instability," says a recent author, referring to Isaac Newton...
...Do not misunderstand me...
...snobs should emphasize nurture...
...started...
...But the drug could be risky, or it might fail altogether...
...Or as Smith put it, "The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education...
...Beauty runs in families...
...there is only an ever-changing set of brain states, a distillation of history, emotion, instinct, experience, and the influence of other people—not to mention chance...
...Attributing all action to linear causality is a habit to which the human mind is peculiarly addicted...
...now they look back nostalgically to the time when they could treat everybody the same...
...Another pattern takes over (I must get up), then another (maybe a few minutes more...
...And what are their products...
...Likewise, in a world where everybody gets the same education, the best jobs will go to those with the most native talent...
...Diet, exercise, hygiene, and accidents can all affect physical attractiveness, as can a haircut, makeup, or cosmetic surgery...
...They were the fates of ancient myth, the entrails of oracular prediction, the coincidences of astrology...
...As a practical matter, philosophers have failed to solve this problem in a way they can explain to the ordinary mortal...
...reprinted with permission...
...They did not get into trouble much even if they had been maltreated as youngsters...
...I cannot pretend I have given a fine-grained description of free will, because I think none can yet exist...
...More than a century later, the same statement still applies...
...Each idea comes unbidden because of its associations with the preceding idea, as a new pattern of neuronal activity comes to dominate consciousness...
...There are no sharp geographical boundaries where one race begins and another ends, and the genetic variation between races is small compared with the genetic variation among individuals of the same race, reflecting the recent common ancestor of all human beings alive today—little more than three thousand generations have passed since that common ancestor lived...
...The cause of behavior lies in a circular, not a linear, system...
...Society stratified by wealth is unfair, because the rich can buy comforts and privileges...
...I am intrigued by a coincidence: human adults are specialists, and human adolescents seem to have a natural tendency to differentiate themselves...
...To a chimpanzee or a Martian, the different human ethnic groups would barely deserve classification as separate races at all...
...Furthermore, in trying to disprove his guilt, a criminal who admits to a nat64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 ural inclination to crime is hardly likely to win over the jury...
...Moral: Social policy must adapt to a world in which everybody is different...
...Their promoters are designed to be switched on and off by events...
...Moral: Being a good parent still matters...
...To Tooby and Cosmides, it was a puzzle that race should therefore keep appearing as a natural classifier...
...The CREB genes that run learning and memory are cogs responding to experience...
...Human beings are so obsessed by linear causes that they find it almost impossible to escape the idea...
...TOM WOLFE When genes were discovered, late in the second millennium of the Christian era, they found a place already prepared for them at the table of philosophy...
...Yet we feel we are free to choose our next act, in which case our behavior is unpredictable...
...Neurons in the brain are hearing back from the recipient even before they have finished sending messages...
...That's what the word "meritocracy" means...
...Politicians are going to have to decide who should have the power to authorize such a test and such a treatment, in the interests not only of the individual but of his or her potential victims...
...Pretty women are not necessarily stupid, but nor are they necessarily brilliant...
...Which bits of Britney Spears are genetically attractive and which are cosmetically attractive...
...The discovery of how genes actually influence human behavior and how human behavior influences genes, is about to recast the debate entirely...
...They allow it to open more files, find more Web sites, and accept more e-mail...
...The response alters the message they send, which in turn alters the response, and so on...
...Likewise, the children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce—yes, but only if they are biological children...
...Lawyers often argue for diminished responsibility on the grounds of insanity, or on the grounds that the defendant was driven to crime by a spouse, or on the grounds that the defendant was abused as a child and therefore could not help himself or herself...
...Genes themselves are steeped in circular causality...
...Fortunately, the meritocracy is continually undermined by another, even more human force: lust...
...Moral #7: Free will when William James brought his considerable brainpower to bear on the problem of free will in the 1880s, it was already a venerable conundrum...
...the rest is circumstance...
...They are exquisitely good at simple "if-then" logic: if in a certain environment, then develop in a certain way...
...They are mostly reassuring...
...Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers are made, not born...
...Moral #1: Genes are enablers...
...Astonishingly, this largely replaced the tendency to make mistakes by race, though it had virtually no effect on the tendency to make mistakes by sex...
...He argues: The denial of free will, then, comes from viewing a brain as being embedded in a linear causal chain...
...Locke said that it was as nonsensical to ask "whether a man's will be free as to ask whether his sleep be swift or his virtue square...
...Most people think of peer pressure as pushing the young toward conformity...
...Moral #2: Parents / n 1960 a graduate student at Harvard received a letter from the head of the university's department of psychology, dismissing her from the Ph.D...
...But it seems likely that parenting is like vitamin C; as long as it is adequate, a little bit more or less has no discernible long-term effect...
...without it, you could not so easily see the world as three-dimensional...
...This was supported later by Emile Durkheim, who considered the division of labor not just the source of social harmony but the foundation of the moral order as well...
...Nurture reinforces nature...
...Because the MAOA gene is on the X chromosome, women have two copies, and are correspondingly less vulnerable to the effect of the low-active gene...
...No longer is it nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture...
...This study has immense implications for social policy...
...You are lying awake in bed, and the brain is freewheeling from one idea to another in a rather pleasant way...
...The way to do it is to give them another, stronger clue to coalition membership...
...Transcription factors—devices for switching on other genes...
...She believes that the environment, as well as the genome, has an enormous influence on the personality of a child, but mainly through the child's peer group...
...I am not saying that it is wrong to interview people to try to ascertain their personality and their innate ability...
...But neither is nature, in the shape of genes which influence behavior, a special or peculiar threat to free will...
...It is the nurturists who are calling for moderation now...
...But 12 percent of the girls in the New Zealand cohort did have two low-active genes, and these girls were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder as adolescents—if they had been maltreated as youngsters...
...Within four minutes, the evolutionary psychologists had done what social science had failed to do in decades: make people ignore race...
...they do not reduce its options...
...They are themselves exquisite mechanisms for translating experience into action...
...Criminal parents produce criminal children—yes, but not if they adopt the children...
...There is no "me" inside my brain...
...Yet racism has if anything moved up the political agenda, even as racial prejudice and scientific justifications for it have faded...
...Besides, the parental reaction itself is just as likely to be innate: parents could be genetically predisposed to perpetuate rather than fight gender stereotypes...
...For Freeman, the alternative to linear causality is circular causality, in which an effect influences its own cause...
...Published by HarperCollins, 2003...
...Now that science knows the connection between gene and environment, ignorance is no longer morally neutral...
...By the end of the twentieth century, sociologists were gingerly hinting at a new and disturbing idea—that however unjustified the science of race might be, racism itself might be in the genes...
...From about 1950 onward, psychologists had studied what they called the socialization of children...
...In practice, this defense has been tried in very few cases so far, and though it is bound to increase in frequency, I see no earth-shattering revolution in criminal justice if it does...
...Those with the low-active genes were much more antisocial if maltreated, and if anything slightly less antisocial than the average if not maltreated...
...dislike doing what you are bad at...
...On the other hand, it suggests that sexism is a harder nut to crack because people will continue to stereotype men as men and women as women, even when they also see them as colleagues or friends...
...Meritocracy means that universities and employers should select the best candidate despite—not because of—his or her background...
...Each child soon realizes what he or she is good at and bad at—compared with the others in the group...
...Genes, unlike gods, are conditional...
...If personality is created by parents, peers, or society at large, then it is still determined: it is not free...
...Those prejudices are not in one sense innate—there is no "doll gene"—but dolls and many other toys are designed to appeal to predisposing prejudices...
...I wish to be a subject, not an object...
...But her critics have already taken her lessons to heart: they are looking for how parents react to a child's innate personality and how parents respond to genes...
...To the extent that science posits a cause of someone's behavior, it seems inevitably to take away freedom of self-expression...
...The opening words of Harris's article are: Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child's personality...
...for ill effects to occur, a bad environment is JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 "I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men's acts of will...
...Free will and universal determinism are irreconcilable boxes to which linear causality leads...
...For example, age, sex, and race were, as expected, strong clues: the subjects would attribute a statement made by one old person to another old person, or a statement made by one black person to another black person...
...These children—all white and with little variation in class or wealth—included 8 percent who were severely maltreated between the ages of three and eleven and 28 percent who were probably maltreated in some way...
...This is true within families as well as in school classes and street gangs...
...Moffitt and Caspi divided the young men into those with high-activity MAOA genes and those with low-activity MAOA genes...
...Ignorance was once bliss...
...Yet even James was lamely reduced to the following disclaimer: I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true...
...About half your probability of divorce is in the genes...
...But it is an illusion all the same...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 Moral #4: Meritocracy E very job interview is about genetic discrimination...
...Moral: Free will is entirely compatible with a brain exquisitely pre-specified by, and run by, genes...
...Once the studies of twins raised apart started coming out, proving dramatically high heritability for personality, you could no longer ignore the possibility that parents had put their children's character in place at the moment of conception, not during the long years of childhood...
...Eccentrics are mocked...
...Examine any group of young people, and you will find each playing a consistently different role: a tough, a wit, a brain, a leader, a schemer, a beauty...
...The evolutionary psychologist Frank Sulloway sees each child within the family as selecting a vacant niche...
...Yet it would be absurd even to ask which aspects of beauty were nature and which nurture...
...Remember this...
...Moral #5: Race S een from outside the species, human races look remarkably similar...
...It is a useful instinct: natural selection has given the human mind a capacity for detecting intentionality in others, the better to predict their actions...
...this in turn alters the neural circuitry, which in turn alters the expression of the CREB genes by absorbing outside experience, and so on around the circle...
...Genes no more constrain human nature than PowerPoint, Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and the like constrain a computer...
...You will not get chaos, just as you do not get chaos in the flock of birds, but you will get sudden transitions from one dominant pattern to another...
...To try to find the first cause of the actual moment of rising would be impossible because it is buried in a circular process in which thoughts and experiences feed off each other...
...The problem could not have been cracked by thought alone...
...And so on...
...Ironically, the more egalitarian a society is, the more innate factors will matter...
...When a child specializes in a chosen role, that role becomes what he is good at...
...Some help...
...Evidence for nurture is not evidence against nature, nor is the converse true...
...But human minds were designed for the Pleistocene savanna, not the urban jungle...
...T he first and most general moral is that genes are enablers, not constrainers...
...The behavior is not random, though, soit must have a cause...
...Welcome to the first of many Promethean dilemmas for the new century...
...Some forms of genetic discrimination are clearly more acceptable than others: personality is fine...
...Parents treat their children very differently according to the personalities of the children...
...The subjects sat down at a computer and were shown a series of pictures each associated with a sentence putatively spoken by the person in the picture...
...Then before you know it a decision is taken somewhere in the brain, and you become aware that you are getting up...
...These new possibilities are not scripted in advance...
...These genes are not just units of heredity—that description misses the point altogether...
...Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one of them at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 The more we lift the lid on the genome, the more vulnerable to experience genes appear to be...
...Seen from the balcony of middle age, teenagers seem obsessed with uniformity...
...JUNE/JULY 2003 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...all will jump up crying "Me...
...studies reveal no role at all for the family environment in divorce...
...it depends on face shape, figure, nose size, and so on: all features that are mostly genetic...
...It is a fair bet, too, that her hair will be less attractive when she is eighty than when she is twenty, owing to—well, owing to what...
...As the founders of evolutionary psychology, they are apt to think in terms of how instincts got 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 The discovery and dissection of genetic individuality will not make the life of politicians easier...
...It is the source of many mistakes...
...They were constraints on human freedom...
...There might be an inevitable human tendency to be prejudiced against people of a different ethnic origin...
...The child then trains for that role and not for others, acting in character,developing still further the talent he has and neglecting the talent that is lacking...
...It was published to sensational acclaim...
...The tough gets tougher, the wit gets funnier, and so on...
...Gravity influences a falling cannonball but not vice versa...
...In that much more egalitarian world, talent may have determined your job...
...The first person to draw attention to this human tendency to specialize was probably Plato, but it was the economist Adam Smith who put the idea into circulation, and it was upon this observation that Smith built his theory of the division of labor...
...What I am suggesting is that the appetite for nurturing a talent might itself be an instinct...
...Causes can still only go forward in time, but they can then influence themselves...
...Senses, memory, and action all influence each other through genetic mechanisms...
...In Smith's world, your adult specialty is a matter of chance and opportunity...
...In a world where everybody gets the same food, the heritability of height and weight will be high...
...Moral #3: Peers H arris's demolition of parental determinism is accompanied by the construction of an alternative theory...
...We invent absurd myths, like the flap of a butterfly's wing starting a hurricane, in a vain attempt to preserve linear causality in such systems...
...I suspect that science has so far greatly underestimated the number of gene sets, which act in this way—conditioning their output to external conditions...
...without those genes, it would be impossible to learn and recall...
...This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no...
...Moral: Individuality is a product of aptitude reinforced by appetite...
...In the light of this, there are morals to be drawn...
...Indeed, there is increasing evidence that what socialization theorists have assumed were parent-to-child effects are often actually child-to-parent effects...
...My concern here is with another kind of mistake: the belief that intentional behavior must have a linear cause...
...These men were all born in 1972-1973 in the city of Dunedin, on the South Island of New Zealand, and were studied at regular intervals as they grew to adulthood...
...Having assumed you would now be the chief coach and sculptor of a human personality, you find yourself reduced to the role of little more than a helpless spectator cum chauffeur...
...CREB genes allow memory...
...These roles are created, of course, by nature via nurture...
...BDNF genes allow the calibration of binocular vision through experience...
...Imagine a flock of birds twisting and turning as it flies along the seashore...
...If the eldest child is responsible and cautious, the second child will often become rebellious and carefree...
...Parenting is a revelation to most people...
...The way to look at this in terms of nature versus nurture would be to see whether the outcome was because of the abusive treatment the subjects received from their parents or because of the genes they received...
...The key word is "linear;' by which Freeman essentially means one-way...
...Those genes alter the synaptic connections between neurons...
...But for a few it seems to slam the prison door of fate...
...The philosopher Henrik Walter points out that an animal determined 99 percent by genes and 1 percent by its own agency has more free will than one determined 1 percent by genes and 99 percent by nurture...
...Isaiah Berlin put it almost in the form of a catechism: I wish my life and my decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind...
...Gone is the triumphalism of Freud, Skinner, and Watson...
...Much later, stuck at home with chronic health problems, Judith Rich Harris took up writing psychology textbooks, books in which she faithfully relayed the dominant paradigm of psychology—that personality and much else was acquired from the environment...
...Hume said that either our actions are determined, in which case there is nothing we can do about them, or our actions are random, in which case there is nothing we can do about them...
...They create new possibilities for the organism...
...Twin 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003 Parenting is like vitamin C; as long as it is adequate, a little bit more or less has no discernible long-term effect...
...Of the 1,037 people in the cohort, Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi selected 442 boys who had four white grandparents...
...The chances are that talk therapy would be useless, but that a drug to alter your mental neurochemistry would be useful: many drugs for mental conditions alter monoamine oxidase activity...
...Harris got brickbats as well as bouquets...
...If the subjects matched everything correctly, Kurzban got no data: he was interested only in their mistakes...
...With plenty of money, luxury, and help, even quite ugly people can make themselves attractive, as Hollywood proves regularly, and even beautiful people can ruin their looks through poverty, carelessness, and stress...
...None of this will come as a surprise to people who have more than one child...
...FOXP2 allows human beings to acquire the language of their people...
...The original genetic differences in talent may be very slight indeed...
...finding yourself better at something than your peers sharpens your appetite for that thing...
...in a world where some live in luxury and others starve, the heritability of weight will be low...
...They are not gods...
...How will you, your doctor, your social worker, and your elected representative handle this knowledge...
...Although they were initially disappointed to find few clear-cut correlations between parenting style and a child's personality, they clung to the behaviorist assumption that parents were training their children's characters by reward and punishment and to the Freudian assumption that many people's psychological problems had been created by their parents...
...They reason that during the African Stone Age race would have been useless as an identifier, because most people would never have met anyone of a different race...
...For a start, the courts are already used to deterministic excuses...
...It is much bruited about that the discovery of genes influencing behavior will lead to an epidemic of lawyers to try to excuse their clients on the grounds that it was their genetic fate to commit crimes, not their choice...
...Moral #6: Individuality T he discovery and dissection of genetic individuality will not make the life of politicians easier...
...Genes will be just another excuse to join the list...
...According to Harris this tendency to differentiate first emerges at about the age of eight...
...also required...
...If clever men get to the top, it is a reasonable bet that they will use their privileges to seek out pretty women (and probably vice versa), just as the rich did before them...
...The study makes clear that a "bad" genotype is not a sentence...
...Moral: The more we understand both our genes and our instincts, the less inevitable they seem...
...Moral: Egalitarians should emphasize nature...
...Nowhere is this more obvious than in the troubled matter of gender...
...The mistakes told him something about how the subjects had mentally classified people...
...Of course, children resemble their parents: they share many of the same genes...
...But seen from inside one race, other human races look extremely different...
...And that means they must believe in inherited factors of mind...
...Freeman is not the only one to champion nonlinear causality as the source of free will...
...Abusive parents produce abusive children, neurotic parents produce neurotic children, phlegmatic parents produce phlegmatic children, bookish parents produce bookish children, and so on...
...At the end, they saw all eight pictures and all eight sentences, and they had to match each statement to the right picture...
...As expected, many of the maltreated children have themselves turned out violent or criminal, getting into trouble at school or with the law and showing antisocial and violent dispositions...
...To this day, no biography is complete without a passing reference to the parental causes of the subject's quirks...
...Free will was, I believe, a genuinely insoluble problem until recent empirical discoveries, just as the nature of life was a genuinely insoluble problem until the discovery of the structure of DNA...
...Consider the question of beauty...
...They tested the male children for differences in one particular gene called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, and then compared it with upbringing...
...race is not fine...
...Kant thought it inevitable that pure reason entangles itself in insoluble contradictions when trying to understand causality, and that escape lies in positing two different worlds, one run by the laws of nature and the other by intelligible agents...
...Even if the interviewers correctly ignore race, sex, disability, and physical appearance and discriminate on the grounds of ability alone, they are still discriminating, and unless they are prepared to decide on the basis of qualifications and background alone—in which case, why hold an interview?—then they are looking for some intrinsic, rather than acquired, talent...
...The low-active maltreated men committed four times their share of rapes, robberies, and assaults...
...Likewise, a "bad" environment is not a sentence...
...Is that fair to the stupid ones who are left behind...
...For all the efforts of Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Darwin, he insisted that some juice still remained to be pressed from the free-will controversy...
...Could it be that these two facts are connected...
...Genes got stuck with the label "first cause:' Now that the genomeis available for inspection, and genes can be seen at work, a much less terrifying picture is emerging...
...No wonder so many people were against them...
...Tooby and Cosmides asked their colleague Robert Kurzban to test this evolutionary theory by a simple experiment...
...You will search in vain for a linear sequence of cause and effect, because the first cause (a bird appearing to turn) is then dramatically influenced by the effect (its neighbor's turning...
...Sports fans are well aware of the phenomenon: white fans cheer a black player on "their" team as he beats a white player on the opposing team...
...They fill the boy's cupboard with dinosaurs and swords and the girl's with dolls and dresses, because they know this is the way to please each child...
...They were the gods...
...Nobody even suggested that both could be true...
...they are cogs...
...But society stratified by intelligence is also unfair, because the clever can buy comforts and privileges...
...Parents who have children of different gender do not have to be told about the experiments in which adults rough-and-tumbled baby girls disguised in blue and cuddled baby boys disguised in pink...
...It whispers in the ear of the juvenile: Enjoy doing what you are good at...
...Watch this space...
...Beauty will put a brake on stratification by brains...
...My starting point is the work of a visionary Californian neuroscientist with the appropriate name of Walter Freeman...
...And if behavior has a cause, then it is not free...
...And when being sentenced, if he claims it is in his nature to murder, he is unlikely to persuade the judge to set him free to kill again...
...In 1972 Richard Lewontin disposed of most serious scientific racism by showing that genetic differences between individuals swamp differences between races...
...That is a meaningless question, precisely because her nurture has enhanced rather than opposed her nature: her hairdresser has enhanced her hair, but it probably started out as quite nice hair...
...After that age, they will start to say "Him...
...I was about to write some cliche like the ravages of the environment, and then I recalled that aging is a largely genetic process, a process mediated by genes in the same way that learning is...
...This was revealed purely through the statements made by the people depicted, who were taking two sides of an argument...
...Noticing people's sex and age, on the other hand, would make good sense: these were reliable if approximate predictors of behavior...
...This is not to denigrate the great philosophers...
...Though a few cranks still believe they will find a justification for racial prejudice in the genes, the truth is that science has done far more to explode than to foster the myth of racial stereotypes...
...Practice has done the rest...
...It is probably still premature to tackle free will until we understand the brain better, but I believe we can now glimpse the beginning of a solution because of our understanding of what genes do in a working brain...
...The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my example in assuming it is true...
...This is simply an illusion, a mental mirage, a misfiring instinct...
...In Freeman's words, "Each of us is a source of meaning, a wellspring for the flow of fresh constructions within our brains and bodies...
...White Victorians were ready to elevate (or relegate) Africans to a different species, and even in the twentieth century hereditarians frequently sought to prove that the differences between blacks and whites were deeper than skin and were manifest in the mind as well as the body...
...Moral: Don't be frightened of genes...
...Quickly the subjects began to confuse two members of the same side more often than two members of different sides...
...The genome has indeed changed everything, not by closing the argument over nature versus nurture or by winning the battle for one side or the other, but by enriching the argument from both ends till they meet in the middle...
...The proponents of each view seemed to agree implicitly that their explanations were mutually exclusive...
...Girls reared in fatherless households experience earlier puberty—an effect that is made possible by some still mysterious set of genes...
...The age-related decay of beauty that occurs in everybody after reaching adulthood is a process of nature via nurture...
...The message of Charles Murray's notorious book The Bell Curve was exactly this: that a meritocracy is not fair...
...This is plainly a volitional act, yet it is in some sense determined by the alarm clock...
...Children whose adoptive parents divorce show no such tendency to follow suit...
...It was not his fault, your honor, it is in his genes...
...It suggests that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, that racism can be easily defeated if coalition clues cut across races, and that there is nothing intractable about racist attitudes...
...So evolutionary pressures may well have built into the human mind an instinct—suitably transacted through nurture, of course—to notice sex and age, but not race...
...To be fair, socialization theory was more than an assumption...
...nonconformists are ostracized...
...I am saying that if you want to live in a meritocracy, then you had better not believe in nurture alone, or you will give all the top jobs to those who went to the top schools...
...practice makes perfect, and soon you have carved yourself a niche within the tribe as a specialist...
...Racism might be an instinct...
...For most people, the finding is therefore liberating...
...All this proves precisely nothing, said Harris...
...Spinoza said that the only difference between a human being and a stone rolling down a hill is that the human being thinks he is in charge of his own destiny...
...Is the world more fair when all bright kids, even thosefrom the slums, get places at the best universities, and so get the best jobs...
...But that still leaves a much more ambitious problem: to convince you, as James perhaps could not, that freedom of the will is true—despite nature and despite nurture...
...Now Kurzban introduced another possible classifier: coalition membership...
...But that practice may itself depend upon a sort of instinct, deposited in the adolescent human brain by natural selection over tens of thousands of years...
...then suddenly a sensory pattern intervenes—the alarm clock...
...program because she was not up to the mark...
...Whether it be baggy, many-pocketed trousers, giant sneakers, bare midriffs, or baseball caps worn backward, teenagers prostrate themselves before the tyrant of fashion in the most craven way...
...In some ways the news that our genes are important contributors to our personality should be reassuring: At least we are determined by our own intrinsic forces rather than somebody else's...
...Is it more moral to insist that all vulnerable people take such a test, to save them from future imprisonment, or that nobody be offered such a test...
...The code must be obeyed...
...I just listened to a radio program about whether boys were better at soccer than girls or whether their parents just pushed them that way...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
