Back to Basics  #23

                  I'll open with a statement of faith: I believe in free will.

                  I feel that I make real choices, and I know that an absence of free will has implications for ethics, law, and politics that I really don't like. Still, it is quite possible that we are programmed to feel free, and it is certain that the inconvenience of a truth is no argument against the truth of a truth.

                  Also, as more evidence accumulates for our decisions being determined one way or another, the idea of free will becomes more difficult to squeeze under "Occam's Razor": it becomes increasingly an unnecessary hypothesis.

                  So I believe in free will but will not press the point here.

                  I also distrust simple formulas. In physics, simple formulas may give you useful laws of motion or for the behavior of gasses — or a strong hint that with enough money and effort you can build a very powerful bomb. Still, in complex systems one should be very cautious about simple formulas; and my more sophisticated students informed me strongly that I passed over some complexities with my Nature/Nurture shtick.

                  Still, I have a simple formula for you, one of the more basic of the "Basics" to get back to. To wit: Ignoring free will and with (at most) negligible exceptions,

environment

Genotype  ---------———————-----> phenotype.

time

Spelled out — the genetic complement of an organism interacting with its environment over time produces its phenotype, that is, everything that can be observed about the organism.

                  In case the formula isn't a self-evident truth, consider these reductions to the grotesque of the sort of lines one might have heard when I was growing up. A dogmatic Behaviorist might ask, «How would the organism respond in this stimulus environment?» To which one should answer with the smart-ass querying whether "the organism" is a dog, a dogfish, or a dogwood tree. A dogmatic "nature" man might ask how an organism would develop without environmental impingements. One variety of smart-ass might wonder aloud if the question was some sort of Zen koan, where you try to picture an organism in itself, with no context. A different variety of smart-ass might conjure up a picture of throwing the organism into outer space, as minimalist an environment as one is likely to think of.

                  There is no "the organism": we're all members of various species, with different genetic endowments; even if "the organisms" are all dogs, those genotypes differ even among the different breeds of dog.

                  But however obvious once we think about it, this simple formula also has complex and important implications.

                  In a sexually reproducing, mammalian species such as humans, the genetic complement is fixed at the moment of conception (when sperm combines with egg). The environment of humans starts in the womb and, with luck, expands for the rest of our lives.

                  So even monozygotic siblings — "identical" twins and triplets and such — are going to be born slightly different because they have slightly different environments in the womb: Twin A is twin to Twin B, and vice versa (and, "and so forth" with more fetuses). As Jerry Hirsch liked to say — and as remains true even if he got his math wrong, individuality is a human birthright.

                  There are exceptions, but these (fortunately!) are statistically trivial, and we can say that with birth humans enter human culture: with a family, neighbors, language, history. As the great ethologist Konrad Lorenz taught, We are by nature creatures of culture, and our most immediate environment is cultural.

                  Human beings, then, in all ways that can be observed, are the products of heredity and environment — including our societies and cultures — of nature and nurture.

                  For populations, scientists can use statistical methods to determine "heritability" of a trait and can tell you to what extent in the population the trait is the result of heredity or environment. And with perfecting of understanding of the human genome, a scientist of the future might be able to tell you with some confidence how much of one of your individual traits is due to genetics or environment.

                  The answer, though, can be less important than it sometimes appears in political controversy.

                  Liberals and leftists (and decent folk generally) have good reasons to be suspicious of arguments out of human nature generally and genetic-deterministic arguments in particular; such arguments have been long used to justify such evils as slavery, racism, and the suppression of women. But we shouldn't automatically assume that a strong genetic component is automatically an argument for inevitability.

                  To use a standard example: myopia and some forms of hearing loss are strongly genetic; undoubtedly there are things you can do to exacerbate your near-sightedness, and for sure pounding loud music into your earbuds is going to harm your hearing. But these common problems are largely genetic, and at least in the case of myopia, easily treated: glasses, contact lenses, maybe laser surgery. With hearing loss, there are hearing aids and things one can do socially, and soon there will be medical treatment.

                  Given that the human animal is an animal, racism must have some sort of deep, obscure genetic roots, possibly in whatever underlies what's been called "the amity/enmity complex" — if nothing else, in our capacity to learn. It's still clear that racism is an –ism, an ideology, and as such is cultural, very strongly cultural: as the song in South Pacific says, "You've Got to Be Taught."

                  Mostly genetic myopia we handle quite well; that product of warped culture, racism, we're doing better on lately, but still not so well. We can hope for a technological quick fix for nearsighted people; we should be so lucky with bigots!

                  So when asked if something observed about an organism — anything, about any organism, emphatically including humans — is due to heredity or environment, respond like a wise-ass Zen master with "wu" (or "mu"), which can be rendered with "Neither one nor the other, not 'yes,' not 'no'; the question itself implies you are far from enlightenment." Or you can just say "Both" and write out the formula.