autobiography have been read and written down in English letters: 47 million As, Cs, Gs and Ts.
Near the tip of the long arm of chromosome 22 there lies a massive and complicated gene, pregnant with significance, known as
highly complicated protein that is expressed only in a small part of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The function of the protein is, generalising horribly, to endow human beings with free will. Without
The preceding paragraph is fictional. There is no
But who am 'I'? The I who, overcome by a silly impulse, decided to write a fictional paragraph? I am a biological creature put together by my genes. They prescribed my shape, gave me five fingers on each hand and thirty-two teeth in my mouth, laid down my capacity for language, and defined about half of my intellectual capacity.
When I remember something, it is they that do it for me, switching on the C R E B system to store the memory. They built me a brain and delegated responsibility for day-to-day duties to it. They also gave me the distinct impression that I am free to make up my own mind about how to behave. Simple introspection tells me there is nothing that I 'cannot help myself doing. There is equally nothing that says that I must do one thing and not something else. I am quite capable of jumping in my car and driving to Edinburgh right now and for no other reason than that I want to, or of making up a whole paragraph of fiction. I am a free agent, equipped with free will.
Where did this free will come from? It plainly could not have come from my genes, or else it would not be free will. The answer, according to many, is that it came from society, culture and nurture.
According to this reasoning, freedom equals the parts of our natures not determined by our genes, a sort of flower that blooms after our genes have done their tyrannical worst. We can rise above our genetic determinism and grasp that mystic flower, freedom.
There has been a long tradition among a certain kind of science writer to say that the world of biology is divided into people who believe in genetic determinism and people who believe in freedom.
Yet these same writers have rejected genetic determinism only by F R E E W I L L 3 0 3
establishing other forms of biological determinism in its place - the determinism of parental influence or social conditioning. It is odd that so many writers who defend human dignity against the tyranny of our genes seem happy to accept the tyranny of our surroundings.
I was once criticised in print for allegedly saying (which I had not) that all behaviour is genetically determined. The writer went on to give an example of how behaviour was not genetic: it was well known that child abusers were generally abused themselves as children and this was the cause of their later behaviour. It did not seem to occur to him that this was just as deterministic and a far more heartless and prejudicial condemnation of people who had suffered enough than anything I had said. He was arguing that the children of child abusers were likely to become child abusers and there was little they could do about it. It did not occur to him that he was applying a double standard: demanding rigorous proof for genetic explanations of behaviour while easily accepting social ones.
The crude distinction between genes as implacable programmers of a Calvinist predestination and the environment as the home of liberal free will is a fallacy. One of the most powerful environmental sculptors of character and ability is the sum of conditions in the womb, about which you can do nothing. As I argued in the chapter on chromosome 6, some of the genes for intellectual ability are probably genes for appetite rather than aptitude: they set their possessor on a course of willing learning. The same result can be achieved by an inspiring teacher. Nature, in other words, can be much more malleable than nurture.
Aldous Huxley's
alphas to epsilons - and obediently does the tasks and enjoys the recreations that society expects of him or her. The very phrase brave new world' has come to mean such a dystopia brought into being by central control and advanced science working hand-in-hand.
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It therefore comes as something of a surprise to read the book and discover that there is virtually nothing about eugenics in it.
Alphas and epsilons are not bred, but are produced by chemical adjustment in artificial wombs followed by Pavlovian conditioning and brainwashing, then sustained in adulthood by opiate-like drugs.
In other words, this dystopia owes nothing to nature and everything to nurture. It is an environmental, not a genetic, hell. Everybody's fate is determined, but by their controlled environment, not their genes. It is indeed biological determinism, but not genetic determinism. Aldous Huxley's genius was to recognise how hellish a world in which nurture prevailed would actually be. Indeed, it is hard to tell whether the extreme genetic determinists who ruled Germany in the 1930s caused more suffering than the extreme environmental determinists who ruled Russia at the same time. All we can be sure of is that both extremes were horrible.
Fortunately we are spectacularly resistant to brainwashing. No matter how hard their parents or their politicians tell them that smoking is bad for them, young people still take it up. Indeed, it is precisely because grown-ups lecture them about it that it seems so appealing. We are genetically endowed with a tendency to be bloody-minded towards authority, especially in our teens, to guard our own innate character against dictators, teachers, abusing step-parents or government advertising campaigns.
Besides, we now know that virtually all the evidence purporting to show how parental influences shape our character is deeply flawed.
There is indeed a correlation between abusing children and having been abused as a child, but it can be entirely accounted for by inherited personality traits. The children of abusers inherit their persecutor's characteristics. Properly controlled for this effect, studies leave no room for nurture determinism at all. The step-children of abusers, for instance, do not become abusers.1
The same, remarkably, is true of virtually every standard social nostrum you have ever heard. Criminals rear criminals. Divorcees rear divorcers. Problem parents rear problem children. Obese parents rear obese children. Having subscribed to all of these F R E E W I L L 3 0 5
assertions during a long career of writing psychology textbooks, Judith Rich Harris suddenly began questioning
