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By Root 545 0

genes versus environment, human nature versus human culture, innate versus acquired, and all the dualisms that have plagued the study of the mind ever since René Descartes. For if the brain consists of evolved mechanisms, highly specific and intricately designed but flexible in content, then it is impossible to use the fact that a behaviour is flexible as an indication that it is ‘cultural’. The ability to use language is ‘genetic’ in the sense that it is inherent in the genes’ instructions for putting together a human body to include a detailed language-acquisition device. It is also ‘cultural’ in the sense that the vocabulary and syntax of the language are arbitrary and learnt. It is also developmental in the sense that the language-acquisition device grows after birth and feeds off the examples it sees around it. Just because language is acquired after birth does not mean that it is cultural. Teeth are also acquired after birth.

‘There is no more a gene for aggression than there is for wisdom teeth,’ wrote Stephen Jay Gould, implying that behaviour must be cultural and not ‘biological’.5 He is right, of course, but that is exactly why his implication is wrong. Wisdom teeth are not cultural artefacts; they are genetically determined, even though they develop in late adolescence and even though there is not a single gene that says ‘grow wisdom teeth’. By the term ‘a gene for aggression’, Gould means that the difference between the aggressiveness of person A and person B is due to a difference in gene X. But just as all sorts of environmental differences – nutrition, dentists – can cause A to have bigger wisdom teeth than B, so all sorts of genetic differences – that affect how the face grows, how the body absorbs calcium, how the sequence of teeth appears – can cause person A to have bigger wisdom teeth than person B. Exactly the same applies to aggression.

Somewhere in our education we unthinkingly absorb the idea that nature (genes) and nurture (environment) are opposites and that we must make a choice between them. If we choose environmentalism, then we are espousing a universal human nature that is as blank as a sheet of paper, awaiting culture’s pen, that humans are therefore perfectible and born equal. If we choose genes, then we espouse irreversible genetic differences between races and between individuals. We are fatalists and élitists. Who would not hope with all her heart that the geneticists were wrong?

Robin Fox, an anthropologist who has called this dilemma a quarrel between original sin and the perfectibility of man, portrayed the dogma of environmentalism thus:

This Rousseauist tradition has a remarkably strong grip on the post-Renaissance occidental imagination. It is feared that without it we shall be prey to reactionary persuasion by assorted villains, from social Darwinists to eugenicists, fascists and new-right conservatives. To fend off this villainy, the argument goes, we must assert that man is either innately neutral (tabula rasa) or innately good and that bad circumstances are what make him behave wickedly.6

Although the notion of a tabula rasa goes back to John Locke, it was in this century that it reached the zenith of its intellectual hegemony. Reacting to the idiocies of social Darwinists and eugenicists, a series of thinkers first in sociology, then in anthropology and finally in psychology shifted the burden of proof firmly away from nurture and on to nature. Until proved otherwise, man must be considered a creature of his culture, rather than culture a product of man’s nature.

Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology, set out his stall in 1895 with the assertion that social science must assume that people were blank slates on which culture wrote. Since then, if anything, this idea has hardened into three cast-iron assumptions: first, that anything which varies between cultures must be culturally acquired, rather than biologically; second, anything that develops, rather than appears fully formed at birth must also be learnt; third, anything genetically determined must be inflexible.