Genetic Determinism

There's a nice essay this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Daniel Dennett, entitled "The Mythical Threat of Genetic Determinism". Picking up from Stephen Jay Gould's campaign against genetic determinism, whereby we and the paths of our lives are programmed and dictated exclusively by our genes, Dennett expands the critique to encompass environmental determinism as well. He thus turns the Nature vs. Nurture debate on its head:

Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment. This is particularly evident in the way the trillions of connections between cells in our brains are formed. It has been recognized for years that the human genome, large as it is, is much too small to specify (in its gene recipes) all the connections that are formed between neurons. What happens is that the genes specify processes that set in motion huge population growth of neurons -- many times more neurons than our brains will eventually use -- and these neurons send out exploratory branches, at random (at pseudo-random, of course), and many of these happen to connect to other neurons in ways that are detectably useful (detectable by the mindless processes of brain-pruning).

These winning connections tend to survive, while the losing connections die, to be dismantled so that their parts can be recycled in the next generation of hopeful neuron growth a few days later. This selective environment within the brain (especially within the brain of the fetus, long before it encounters the outside environment) no more specifies the final connections than the genes do; saliencies in both genes and developmental environment influence and prune the growth, but there is plenty that is left to chance.

When it comes to humans, and thus self-consciousness, in light of the behavioral and genetic constraints that seem evident and all-encompassing, as though a prison, the important thing is "what we can change whether or not our world is deterministic." There is, after all, for instance, prison security for a reason. The key to self-consciousness, then, is not only the recognition of life's vagaries -- this is but simple consciousness -- but rather the taking advantage of these same vagaries as potentialities of power and/or prevention. Consider, Dennett suggests, the apparent economic and colonial dichotomy between the histories of (and between) Eurasians and Third World:

Accidents of biogeography, and hence of environment, were the major causes, the constraints that "fixed'' the opportunities of people wherever they lived. Thanks to living for millennia in close proximity to their many varieties of domesticated animals, Eurasians developed immunity to the various disease pathogens that jumped from their animal hosts to human hosts -- here is a profound role played by human genes, and one confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt -- and when thanks to their technology, they were able to travel long distances and encounter other peoples, their germs did many times the damage that their guns and steel did.

I think Dennett is representing a very valid perspective here. I have a friend who, whenever he commits a crime, and he often does, he blames a demon. This demon has ranged anywhere from a fallen angel to genetic mischief to a poor childhood. No matter the "cure," though, his demon still exists today because, for one reason or another, he never took ownership of it. Now, I'm not for a second suggesting that every person everywhere is free to solve their problems with a blithe acceptance that it is their problem. No, it's far more subtle than that. Nevertheless, the human will is striving and conniving, and it sinks its teeth into opportunities when and if they arise, empowering chance, or preventing it from, changing the contours of life. The human will, when presented the opportunity, in a sense "revolts" against the determined pattern of their lives, to create new emergent patterns for successive generations to revolt against. This seems as true for biology as it is for history and sociology. We do not create chance, and neither can we anticipate it; but we can, and do, seize it, for better and worse.