Modern intellectual culture is haunted by a pervasive anxiety concerning genetic explanations of human behavior. A good example of this is a recent piece by Richard C. Lewontin in the New York Review of Books. The anxiety is betrayed in the title: "It's Even Less in Your Genes".
Less than what, I ask? Less than "all" is the answer. We are constantly being told that our behavior is not "all" in our genes, meaning, presumably, we are not the biological equivalent of player pianos. This is an argument with no opposition. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that human behavior is not heavily influenced both by exposure to information and materials present in the environment.
Lewontin points out that the expression of genes in organisms as diverse as corn plants and ethanol producers is largely a function of the interaction between genes and the environment. A given corn plant will function very well in one location, but not so well in another. A plant with different genes may do the very opposite. Feedback loops are generated within all organisms as the expression of one gene responds to the expression of another, and the first responds again and so on. Likewise, when an organism responds to its environment, the environment if frequently changed, forcing the organism to respond again. These feedback loops get very complicated, and that usually makes it difficult or impossible to determine the actual function of specific genes.
That only means that it is difficult to define what it means for a behavior to be in the genes; it doesn't mean that the genes are any less consequential. Our genes are essential elements in our existence as organisms and in our behavior, but they are scarcely the only essential elements. The second digit in a three digit combination is useless without the other two, but you still have to know the second digit to get into your locker.
We are still suffering from some basic philosophic mistakes made at the outset of modernity. Many philosophers and scientists profess to believe in materialism, but materialism is rarely defined. If it means that all things are composed of material, it is clearly false. Empty space is not composed of material, nor is gravity. Information may be embedded in material, but it is composed of material. Melt your front door key into a dollop of metal and then try to open the door with it. The material is the same, but the form is different and that makes all the difference.
Likewise, living organisms are frequently described in biology as machines or mechanisms, but that is altogether wrong. Steve Talbott has a fine piece on this in The New Atlantis.
Think first of a living dog, then of a decomposing corpse. At the moment of death, all the living processes normally studied by the biologist rapidly disintegrate. The corpse remains subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the live dog, but now, with the cessation of life, we see those laws strictly in their own terms, without anything the life scientist is distinctively concerned about. The dramatic change in his descriptive language as he moves between the living and the dead tells us just about everything we need to know.
No biologist who had been speaking of the behavior of the living dog will now speak in the same way of the corpse's "behavior." Nor will he refer to certain physical changes in the corpse as reflexes, just as he will never mention the corpse's responses to stimuli, or the functions of its organs, or the processes of development being undergone by the decomposing tissues.
Yet…
Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning.
A living dog is what Aristotle called an ousia, or substance, about which characteristics like size and shedding are predicated. Its substance or reality consists only secondarily in its material, as Talbott illustrates above. The organism is the processes and functions by which its life is maintained and in which its life consists. Aristotle proposed that this complex, directed activity is the psyche, or soul of the organism. He was right.
The genes are an essential element in the functioning soul of any organism, including yours truly. But the organism is not the elements, it is the whole that comprehends and integrates the elements. There is no reason to fear reductionism here. The very fact of life refutes reductionism.
But perhaps Aristotle's ousia is merely a product of the human tendency to arbitrarily distinguish between object and background that Lewontin complains about.
As we change our intent, also we identify anew what is object and what is background. When I glance out the window as I write these lines I notice my neighbor's car, its size, its shape, its color, and I note that it is parked in a snow bank. My interest then changes to the results of the recent storm and it is the snow that becomes my object of attention with the car relegated to the background of shapes embedded in the snow. What is an object as opposed to background is a mental construct and requires the identification of clear boundaries.
Lewontin is no doubt correct that this tendency can lead to errors but that only means that sometimes we pick the wrong object to focus on, not that objects are arbitrary constructs of the human mind. If you notice that a bear is stalking you on a hiking trail, it won't help to change the focus of your attention to the evergreen trees and blue sky. The bear is unbearably real and so are you, at least for a little while longer.
It's time to be rid of materialism and rehabilitate Aristotle's biology. Then we could stop being afraid of genetic determinism and other such phantasms.
Food and reproduction, Doc:
Posted by: larry kurtz | Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 08:33 PM
Larry: generally something comes after a colon, even if it's poop.
Posted by: Ken Blanchard | Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:18 PM