Is it me, is it my parents, or is Society to blame?
A longstanding debate: how much does genetic inheritance shape us and how much does environment?
A longstanding debate: how much does genetic inheritance shape us and how much does environment?
In his book, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding philosopher John Locke promoted the concept of a human mind at birth as being a tabula rasa – a blank sheet to be filled in by experience as we grow. The 20th century psychologist B F Skinner took a similar position, that command of language was a result of operant conditioning. Dogs can be taught to salivate when they hear a bell ring. Humans can be taught to articulate, “when's lunch?”
On the other hand Noam Chomsky, a contemporary linguist who savagely attacked Skinner's position, claims that the human brain is genetically endowed with an, as it were, “language organ”. Small childred learn to talk around the same age, no matter how simple or complex the language in their society; all known human societies have language (even as an outlying example, sign language in societies of the profoundly deaf). Chomsky further claims to have isolated structures in grammar and language that are common or similar in all languages that he has studied.
But an “either-or” debate misses the real complexity of what is at stake here.
An instructive example is the effect on propensity to violent human behaviour of one variant of the gene coding for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A – a less rivetting topic you might think would be hard to find.
But a New Zealand study which followed a thousand children from age three to age 26 found that a low activity variant of the gene was strongly associated with children's propensity to develop violent or other antisocial behaviour. But here's the striking point: 85 percent of people who had that gene variant and were severely mistreated as children developed antisocial behaviour. The people with that gene variant who were not mistreated were no more likely to develop antisocial tendencies than people with the high activity variant.
In other words, genetic propensity had no effect unless triggered by mistreatment.
Now a very different example: most people accept that one's height is genetically influenced, although not deterministically. Tall parents tend to have tall children. What are we to make of the fact that Dutch people are taller than Americans? In the 1850s Americans on average were three inches taller than the Dutch. Now the Dutch are on average two inches taller than the Americans:
The idea that many Europeans are looking down on Americans has led to a flurry of interest in trying to explain the trend, with debate focusing on whether to blame the lack of universal health care and other holes in the nation's social safety net, particularly for children.
"We conjecture that perhaps the western and northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy," [Jonh Komlos of University of Munich] wrote in one of his latest papers, published in June [2007] in the journal Social Science Quarterly.
While some researchers agree, others are more cautious, arguing that height is determined by a complicated amalgam of genetic, environmental, social and biological influences.
"It's a puzzle to which we really don't have a good answer at this point," said Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. "Nobody has identified anything that can really explain it."
But there are three factors in this conundrum, not just two. For some of our characteristics and behaviours we can blame heredity. For some more of it we blame society. But there still remains the segment that we can influence by our will.
These factors all exist – but we don't understand at all well how fluidly they interact. Until we do we must be cautious about making assumptions about what people can change about themselves and what they cannot.
Mike Martin is one of Open Forum's regular bloggers and commentators. He is a retired a computer systems programmer. Mike is interested in a wide range of Australian social and policy issues.
sally.rose
February 3, 2009 at 3:56 am
We need to blame ourselves
"What other people can change about themselves and what they cannot"
Well Mike, that's one of my favourite questions!
Unravelling the interplay of biology and environmental influence and experience on the expression of our genes is a fascinating area.
Not just for individuals, but also for us as a species.
In The Origin of the Species Darwin slipped in a short paragraph musing on the possibility that perhaps non-physical attributes might have evolved using a similar mechanism to natural selection.
Much work has been done in the last 30yrs on evolutionary theories of morality, advanced consciousness and language (an the connectedness of these things) that has continued where this idea left off.
Ah..I digress. Getting back to the meat of your blog.
An individual may have a genetic predisposition to a certain body mass, there are many ways they can influence the actual expression of this (excercise, diet) and also other factors beyond their control which may contibute to a different outcome (infectious or hereditary disease).
In the same way individuals have a genetic predisposition to personality. But we all have the power to influence the expression our own character (our attitude, efforts made), again other factor beyond our control will affect the expression of our personality (good fortune, great loss).
In both the physical and the non-physical aspects of who we are it is impossible to isolate all causes and effects of our expression. The connections are too interconnected and causally linked in too many directions and bizare configurations for them to make sense in isolation.
Just because we can't control everything is no reason not to try. You can't control a family history of stroke – but you can be a non-smoker. You can't control a natural propensity to anger – but you can chose non-violent actions. This is where it often becomes foggy as people often claim they can't control themselves because they had a bad childhood. No doubt positive environmental influences help, but except in the very rarest of cases, it's a poor excuse for not taking personal responsibility.
Most of the time it would be far fairer, not to mention more more helpful, to blame ourselves rather than our parents or society.
MikeM
February 4, 2009 at 12:42 am
Untangling personal responsibility is not always easy
In general I agree with you Sally, but we do not always know what it is that we can or should change. Even if we do we may not know how to go about it. According to a recent report:
I agree that people need to take personal responsibility for what they do but many aspects of this – work ethic, attitude to education, respect for the law, to name a few, are influenced by the environment in which they grow up and live.
The relationships are complicated though. That is why we find it easy to accept that Barack Obama, who was raised in a single parent family, has been more successful in life than his erstwhile critic, Joe the Plumber, who was raised by both his parents.
sally.rose
February 4, 2009 at 2:06 am
Those toddlers can blame their parents
Those toddlers can defiinitely blame their parents. But if they're still blaming their parents when they're 25yrs old then that is a different story. Although it will remain true that their parents have a had a past causal influence, and may have left their now adult child with a legacy they can't control (eg prediposition to diabetes) the 25yr old has now become the agent with the greated potential for affecting change.
(By the way well done giving up the smokes!)