First Principles

Nature, Nurture, Nature, Nurture

Curious little article here in The New York Times: “Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look.”

by John Derbyshire

The tainted history of using biology to explain criminal behavior has pushed criminologists to reject or ignore genetics and concentrate on social causes: miserable poverty, corrosive addictions, guns. Now that the human genome has been sequenced, and scientists are studying the genetics of areas as varied as alcoholism and party affiliation, criminologists are cautiously returning to the subject. A small cadre of experts is exploring how genes might heighten the risk of committing a crime and whether such a trait can be inherited.

And so the wheel turns. In economics you have the business cycle. In the human sciences you have the nature-nurture cycle.

Two or three hundred years ago it was all nurture, so far as enlightened people were concerned. From John Locke to Karl Marx, human nature was merely the impress of social or economic forces on a waiting slab of wet clay, a blank slate. The effect might be for the better (Hobbes) or for the worse (Rousseau), but the finished human being was seen as a molded thing shaped entirely by circumstance or education.

Then came Darwin with a persuasive theory to explain the great variety of living creatures. Biology now had a large organizing principle. Might that principle encompass human beings, too? Darwin certainly thought so. Though he was, for social and marital reasons, diplomatic in speaking about the matter, it is plain from everything he wrote that Homo sapiens was, for Darwin, just another branch on the tree of life, continuous with the higher animals.

Are we indeed in a continuous line of descent from beasts, or are we a new creation altogether? Religious folk line up on the latter side of the argument, but you don’t have to be religious to agree with them. Quantity begets quality; it may be that in attaining its enhanced complexity, the human brain crossed some threshold into a new dimension of awareness, like the first creatures that could see.

At any rate, biology ruled the latter part of the 19th century, when the human sciences were just emerging as empirical disciplines. Instinct theory in psychology, race theory in anthropology, and “social Darwinism” in political science all testified to Darwin’s influence.

In the first two decades of the 20th century a reaction set in, driven in part by progressivist social optimism, in part by a desire for more scientific rigor. Both factors were incarnated in Franz Boas, a key figure in the early 20th century’s steady drift away from biology in the human sciences. Boas’s 1911 study on the changing body shapes of recent immigrants to America was empirically rigorous and put the lie to at least the most extreme claims of racial anthropology. Yet that 1911 study had been preceded by a long paper trail of writings urging environmental explanations for human differences over biological ones.

Boas and his supporters won all their arguments in anthropology. At the same time John B. Watson was purging psychology of all notions of instinct or innate ability, creating the behaviorist paradigm that dominated that discipline though the next few decades. By the 1920s, in the USA at least, nurture had the upper hand and held it for 40 years. Anthropologist Leslie White wrote in 1949:

Instead of seeing the individual as a First Cause, as the initiator and determinant of the culture process, we now see him as a component part, and a tiny and relatively insignificant part at that, of a vast, socio-cultural system that embraces innumerable individuals at any one time and extends back into their remote past as well….For purposes of scientific interpretation the culture process may be regarded as a thing sui generis; culture is explainable in terms of culture.

Culture was caused by culture was caused by culture. It was turtles all the way down. Biology? Genes? Fiddlesticks!

Notice the diminishing—the belittling—of the human being in this outlook. Nurturism is commonly presented as the humane, optimistic view of human nature. If we just get the environment right—level the playing field! fix the schools!—human nature will be cleansed of all impurities, of all prejudice and injustice. Naturism, by contrast, is cruel and hopeless. You’re stuck with your bestial nature and genetic heritage. Nothing much you can do—sorry, pal.

Yet in fact the nurturist sees us as interchangeable units, such individuality as we possess stamped on us by external forces. It is the naturist view that more easily accommodates real individuality and freedom. To be sure, the individuality is innate, not acquired, and the freedom is tethered by genetics, but at least we are not mere lumps of modeling putty. Biology is freedom! (In more senses than one.)

The common perception is that biology began its comeback in the human sciences with E. O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology; or with William Hamilton’s “kin selection” papers of 1964; or at the earliest with the 1953 discovery of the DNA double helix. In fact psychologists took the lead as early as the 1940s, bringing back instinct theory out of frustration with behaviorism’s dry tautologies, and persuaded by decades of piled-up results from ethology (studies of animal behavior).

Resistance to the biological revival was very fierce, though. Social engineers had captured all the Western nations’ political establishments. The broader intellectual culture was steeped in sub-Marxist egalitarianism. Even as innate qualities were being tentatively readmitted to psychology, race was being driven from its last redoubt in physical anthropology.

The anthropologists are still holding fast today, responding to the incoming evidence from genetics mainly by sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!” The other human sciences are more and more open to arguments from biology, though—most recently, to judge from that New York Times article, the criminologists.

Biology’s comeback has been so arduous and hard-fought, it is hard to believe that when it is complete at last, round about 2025, it will easily yield to a new cycle back to nurturism and behaviorism. Future paradigm changes will likely be mere shifts of emphasis, not purges and revolutions.

Perhaps one day we’ll even wean the politicians away from nurturism. Although then, unable to promise improvements to our lives through social transformation, what on Earth will they say?