(chaotically determined by myriad external factors), or somebody else's decision to ask me out to lunch (he being a deterministic being over whom I have no control). This interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
We can never escape from determinism, but we can make a distinction between good determinisms and bad ones - free ones and unfree ones. Suppose that I am sitting in the laboratory of Shin Shimojo at the California Institute of Technology and he is at this very moment prodding with an electrode a part of my brain somewhere close to the anterior cingulate sulcus. Since the control of
'voluntary' movement is in this general area, he might be responsible for me making a movement that would, to me, have all the appearance of volition. Asked why I had moved my arm, I would almost certainly reply with conviction that it was a voluntary decision.
Professor Shimojo would know better (I hasten to add that this is still a thought experiment suggested to me by Shimojo, not a real one). It was not the fact that my movement was determined that F R E E W I L L 313
contradicted my illusion of freedom; it was the fact that it was determined from outside by somebody else.
The philosopher A. J. Ayer put it this way:9
If I suffered from a compulsive neurosis, so that I got up and walked across the room, whether I wanted to or not, or if I did so because somebody else compelled me, then I should not be acting freely. But if I do it now, I shall be acting freely, just because these conditions do not obtain; and the fact that my action may nevertheless have a cause is, from this point of view, irrelevant.
A psychologist of twins, Lyndon Eaves, has made a similar point:10
Freedom is the ability to stand up and transcend the limitations of the environment. That capacity is something that natural selection has placed in us, because it's adaptive . . . If you're going to be pushed around, would you rather be pushed around by your environment, which is not you, or by your genes, which in some sense is who you are.
Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else's. It is not the determinism that makes a difference, but the ownership. If freedom is what we prefer, then it is preferable to be determined by forces that originate in ourselves and not in others.
Part of our revulsion at cloning originates in the fear that what is uniquely ours could be shared by another. The single-minded obsession of the genes to do the determining in their own body is our strongest bulwark against loss of freedom to external causes. Do you begin to see why I facetiously flirted with the idea of a gene for free will? A gene for free will would not be such a paradox because it would locate the source of our behaviour inside us, where others cannot get at it. Of course, there is no single gene, but instead there is something infinitely more uplifting and magnificent: a whole human nature, flexibly preordained in our chromosomes and idio-syncratic to each of us. Everybody has a unique and different, endogenous nature. A self.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y A N D
N O T E S
The literature of genetics and molecular biology is gargantuan and out of date. As it is published, each book, article or scientific paper requires updat-ing or revising, so fast is new knowledge being minted (the same applies to my book). So many scientists are now working in the field that it is almost impossible even for many of them to keep up with each other's work. When writing this book, I found that frequent trips to the library and conversations with scientists were not enough. The new way to keep abreast was to surf the Net.
The best repository of genetic knowledge is found at Victor McCusick's incomparable website known as OMIM, for Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man. Found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.gov/omim/, it includes a separate essay with sources on every human gene that has been mapped or sequenced, and it is updated very regularly — an almost overwhelming task. The Weizmann Institute in Israel has another excellent website with 'gene-cards'
summarising what is known about each gene and links to other relevant websites: bioinformatics.weizmann.ac.il/cards.
But these websites give only summaries of knowledge and they are not for the faint-hearted: there is much jargon and assumed knowledge, which will defeat many amateurs. They also concentrate on the relevance of each gene for inherited disorders, thus compounding the problem that I have tried to combat in this book: the impression that the main function of genes is to cause diseases.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y A N D N O T E S 3 1 5
I have relied heavily on textbooks, therefore, to supplement and explain the latest knowledge. Some of the best are Tom Strachan and Andrew Read's
As for more popular books about the genome in general, I recommend Christopher Wills's
In each chapter of this book, I have usually relied on one or two main sources, plus a variety of individual scientific papers. The notes that follow are intended to direct the interested reader, who wishes to follow up the subjects, to these sources.
C H R O M O S O M E I
The idea that the gene and indeed life itself consists of digital information is found in Richard Dawkins's
1. Darwin, E. (1794).
2. Campbell, J. (1983).
