I. One of the scientific debates I try somewhat to keep up with is the so-called “nature versus nurture” debate, the debate as to whether and to what extent individual traits and abilities are determined by our biology (which is what I will use as for a catch all for genes and whatever other mechanism may be supposed to be doing this work) or by our environment, which is supposed to include all mechanisms other than those that are intrinsic to our individual biology, including our upbringing, what we are taught, and our social life.
Note that this question of biological versus environmental determination is different from the question of the heritability of individual traits and abilities. The heritability of a trait is the ratio of biologically caused variation to total variation of that trait within a specific population. Heritability is often used to support arguments that specific traits are biologically determined. But, as Ned Block carefully shows in his classic article on the matter, that a trait is heritable does not by itself entail that it is biologically determined, and this means that other (often highly controversial) background assumptions and arguments are required to make this step. The question of the heritability of a trait needs, therefore, to carefully be pulled apart from the question of whether it is our biology or the environment that actually determines an individual’s traits in a given situation.
There is no need, however, for you to understand heritability, as it is only the latter question I will be concerned with here, the biological versus environmental determination of human traits and abilities. However, what follows is not a direct intervention in this debate, but rather, a modest intervention into its supposed stakes for the lives of individuals, and how we conceive of those lives.
In what follows, I will suppose that the strongest version of biological determinism is true. If it were, all of my morphological traits, the actual and dispositional characteristics of my body, such as height and strength, as well as my behavioural traits, my actual and dispositional tendencies to act or react in a specific way in specific circumstances, are strictly determined by my biology. Even in the most extreme cases of environmental happenings, such as my going through apparently momentous events, like my entire family dying as a young person, extensive education in some specific subject, or anything else that would otherwise often be thought to change the way I act and react to certain things, are explanatorily inert with respect to these fundamental traits and dispositions. On this picture, the traits and dispositions that I have are wholly due to my biology, and they are immutable. They are fixed by my biological nature.
It is easy to imagine a picture of the world like this involves our biology having a kind of totalising control over our destiny in life. And indeed, friends of biological explanations of human behaviour and variance – at least as they are sometimes understood and deployed in the popular (and unpopular) imaginations – will adopt a biological fatalism that teaches there is nothing we can do to change what we are, which is ultimately a biologically encoded set of core traits and dispositions. Any aspect of our life thought to be outside of this is just contingent noise.
But, even if we accepted that a strict biological determinism such as this is true, this is not a picture of humanity we should accept. Before I go on to argue for this, I would like to note that a lot of what I go on to say may be seen as trivially obvious, or to miss the point of current scientific debates about the question of nature versus nurture. However, I am not really interested here in the appropriate breakdown of biological versus environmental explanations of differences between existing human populations. Rather, I am interested in how we do and should conceive of what a human life amounts to, what it is constituted by. In particular, I am interested in rejecting an account that implausibly tries to reduce it to our biology alone, or specific aspects of it. And I intend to do so by showing that even if the strongest form of biological determinism were true, our lives would still not be reducible to our biology. I argue for a more robust conception of our own lives that sees what we are as a historically constituted nexus of environment and biology. Through this, I hope to show that, no matter how the scientific debate pans out, we must always transcend our biology, and that the environments we are in always really matter to us – both in an explanatory and ethical sense – no matter what. Also, it almost always good to state the obvious. Onto the argument.
II. Even if the strongest version of biological determinism is true, the biological encoding of any particular characteristic, trait, or ability is essentially dispositional. Which is to say, whether any given aspect of one’s biology comes to be in a particular person is reliant on whether certain enabling conditions come about to realise them. Such conditions are always environmental conditions. This is what is meant when I say that the strongest such view assumes that biology determines us to act or react in a specific way in specific circumstances. Whatever environments we find ourselves in, our biology does all the work in explaining how those circumstances shape and affect us, as well as how we will respond to them. Intuitively, we can express how this in conditional statements of the following form:
- If Rowan (at time t) were in environment E, where E is any single event or series of events affecting or involving Rowan, then, due to his biology, he would do or be A.
We can therefore understand our deterministic biology, on this view, as the complete set of all conditionals describing the ways we would act, react, and be shaped by every different environment. This is not just limited to specific occurrences, like what food we order when we go to a restaurant. This will also include, in long complicated chains of such conditionals, whether and to what extent we will be good at playing specific instruments or sports, how well we do at different university courses, IQ tests, our weight, height, and agility. Indeed, on this view, it will include any other conceivable traits, characteristics, abilities, choices, or reaction: the people you fall in love with, the jobs you pursue and achieve. And so on.
Given this, the question I want to answer is: does, in this situation, our biology determine who we are? In a trivial sense: yes, it is does, because it determines traits, characteristics, abilities, choices, and reactions, in any given situation. But even so, the important part to note here is that we only do or are the way specified by our biology if we are in specific circumstances. If we are in other circumstances, we will be or do something else. While obvious, it is worth giving the reason why our biology can only be dispositional in this way. It is because our biology alone cannot determine that anything will go any way whatsoever. Some environmental factor could always get ‘in the way’ of certain traits coming to be. (Or, which amounts to the same thing, but put more accurately, we only are what we are and do what we do due to the environments we actually find ourselves in.) For example, instead of getting older, I could suddenly die due to a traffic accident. If I die, obviously none of the things that would be determined by my biology, were I to live, will come to be. Namely, because the enabling conditions of my biological dispositions, represented by the antecedent in the above conditional, no longer hold.
This does not just apply when I die, it generalises to all situations, because on this view our biology determines all of the ways we are and the things we do. But if this is the case, then my traits, characteristics, abilities, choices, and reactions equally depend on what environments I happen to be in, as much as they depend on the biology I happen to have. So, if this kind of biological determinism is true, it is equally true that a kind of environmental determinism is true, and that there is, therefore, an environment-biology nexus that determines all of the ways we are and the things we do.
To bring this out, suppose there existed a perfect biological duplicate of yourself, but who was thrown into a different environment, say, as a peasant in 13th century England. In this situation, what traits, characteristics, abilities, choices, and reactions come to make up your life will be determined by, and very different to, those you make in this life. After all, the drastically different opportunities for action and development afforded by this historical environment would interact with your biological dispositions in ways entirely different to how you interact with your environment now. The kinds of intellectual, physical, and vocational activities you could possibly engage in, and be good at, are completely different. And this is equally true of environments less drastically different. Suppose your duplicate were born in a town over from where you were born. Even here, the environment affords a different set of specific interactions with your biology, and therefore a different albeit more similar set of traits, characteristics, abilities, choices, and reactions. Of course, it would still be true of these duplicates that if they were born in the situation you were born in, they would do exactly what you have done. But they weren’t born in your environment, they were born in their own, different environment.
It might be objected that all this just shows that you, as determined by your biology, would do different things in different situations. But once you control for history, you still have the exact same person behind it all, the very same bundle of dispositions. In other words, I am just imagining what is essentially the same person acting differently in different situations, which the biological determinist would already accept as part of their view. But here’s the issue with this: the idea that we could, in any meaningful sense, ‘control for someone’s environment’, to get at the true essence of what an individual life is, is pure abstraction. There is no person, no human life, without the specific series of environments in which one’s biology moves through during its life. There are no traits, characteristics, abilities, choices, and reactions but for there being environments in which they can come to be. Any biological organism, let alone a person, cannot exist but for it having a specific environment, as without parents who give birth to you at a particular time and place, as well as the environments you come to grow up in, there is no life for one’s biology at all.
The point will be conceded here. It is true that our biology cannot determine what we are like wholesale, as we still need to be born to actual parents to exist, and we still need to go on living once born, and it is only those environments we come to be in that actualise our biological dispositions. Nevertheless, it will be said, this whole discussion misses the deeper point of those who argue that our biology determines who we are.
Our particular biology (again, on the assumption that biological determinism is true) is still the primary determinant of who we are, because it means that we repeatably tend towards certain outcomes as a result of our biology, other things being equal. This is because we have dispositions to act and react in specific ways in generically similar situations, and in any given life, any conceivable series of environments an exact biological duplicate of us could move through, there will be a preponderance of these similarities. For example, no matter what environments you are in, you will make friends, fall in love, work a job, develop habits and skills, face hardship, and expose yourself (or not) to new experiences. How you go about these things in any given environment will be determined by your biology and will generally be the same across each of them.
Sure, there are environmental factors that temporarily push us away from these all-else-equal tendencies, like when certain socio-cultural tendencies push us to resolutely decide to go to the gym in the new year (only to stop a month later), when extraordinary events occur that drastically change the material affordances of our lives, or when our choices take us to rarified environments. But these are only temporary, once things return to normalcy, to being largely constituted by the generic conditions constitutive of any life whatsoever, and to the extent they will also contain these conditions, our biology again takes precedence. It is these biologically fixed tendencies – enacted analogously across many possible lives – that ultimately are what we are, not the contingent things that happen to push us off their course temporarily.
But this point just makes the same error I previously objected to. It assumes that, within our lives, we can bracket out certain environmental elements of it as inessential, or contingent, leaving only an essential core of what we are. But in reality, this is just another one-sided abstraction, albeit one much less misleading. The claim now is that certain tendencies of behaviour essentially constitute what we are, and that these tendencies constantly emerge in our lives, due to us having dispositions to act in similar ways in similar situations, all else being equal, which is to say, assuming that abnormal environments do not temporarily ‘interfere’ with their emergence.
It of course must be admitted that there is a great amount of truth in the idea that we as individuals have certain tendencies that lead to us to act or react in specific, similar ways in similar situations, and that these are largely independent of the environments in which we find ourselves, as long as we live. And if biological determinism is true, this would extend to biological duplicates of ourselves in other, even drastically different, environments. Nevertheless, this view cannot be right either. The issue with the view that an individual human is essentially certain core tendencies of their biology that manifest themselves in different situations, other things being equal, is that: there is no point in our life when all other things are equal, in the relevant sense. Your actual life, at each moment, as it is actually lived, is a series of completely novel – that is, unique – environments. And as novel environments, they will only determine you to be or act in line with these postulated tendencies to the extent that they share similarities with other environments in the total set of dispositions (including all other possible environments) making up your biology. But to the extent that they do not share similarities, they will determine you to have different traits, characteristics, abilities, reactions, and to make different choices.
The implication here is that these supposed tendencies are, with respect to our actual lives, at best generalisations of our behaviour across possibility space, not explanations of it. But given this, it cannot be right to identify them with our lives, even on the assumption of biological determinism, as they will necessarily fail to capture the unique differences that are due the environments you actually come to encounter. In other words, these tendencies are only idealisations of certain patterns of behaviour we might engage in, not something that, for any given concrete individual, actually happens in the precise way specified by these idealisations. But if this is the case at every moment of our lives, in every new situation, then there is no point at which all else is equal, and there is no point at which any arbitrarily selected biologically determined tendencies wholly determine what we are. At best, conceiving of ourselves as having such tendencies might function for us (probably quite effectively, on the assumption of biological determinism) as a heuristic device for deciding on future action – for deciding on what we may or not be good at, or what we may or may not be able to tolerate. But it still cannot tell us who and what we are.
This idea can perhaps be made starker with an example. Suppose you are in a long-term romantic relationship. Being in a such a relationship has two interesting properties for my purposes here. First, they involve environments that are highly specific to the person that you are with. Which is to say, the peculiar interactions between each of our preferences, desires, goals, and personalities generate environments specific to your relationship, and which are therefore unlike any other relationship you might have, in many (though obviously not all) important ways. Second, your life to some extent transforms with and around them, which means that the highly specific environments you are in due to the relationship are perpetuated and expanded to account for increasingly (and then perhaps decreasingly) large aspects of your life, at least until you are no longer together, or until you die.
This means that, to the extent that your relationship generates environments that are unique and different from other potential environments with other potential partners, will be the extent to which your biology will determine you to be a different person. Thus, here, as everywhere, all is not equal with respect to your biological tendencies. Your environment means that you are much different to what you otherwise would be. But suppose you meet this person at twenty years old and grow old together. All else would never be equal, for the rest of your life. It is no use replying here that being in a relationship is itself one of the tendencies in question, because even if were, it is the transformation imposed on us of being in a particular relationship with someone, not just any relationship whatsoever.
This is a stark example of the kind of changes our environment might impose on us, and we can easily imagine others, such as a childhood of poverty, or our growing up in a vastly different culture. Even if specific environments did not make any long-lasting difference to a cluster of traits in the long run, that is, even if we returned to a sort of ‘normal’ on our exiting specific ‘abnormal’ environments, like the parenting and schooling we received or the relationships we were in, they did make a difference when we were parented, schooled, and in love, and these are all non-trivial parts of our lives that shaped us in a particular way for that particular time. When we moved past them, we simply moved on to other things that made other differences. And so on for our entire lives.
The lesson of this is that even if biological determinism is true, there is still an essential role for the environment to play, one that can’t be explained away as mere obstacles to specific, in-built core biological tendencies possessed by each person.
III. So far, I have argued that, even if biological determinism is true, there is an essential role for the environment to play in determining who we are, and therefore, what we are and what we do cannot be reduced only to our biology, or to certain regularities in the dispositions that make it up. But perhaps, to return to a point made earlier, another objection to this might go as follows.
Even once you account for the fact that certain environments may push us away from or further into well represented regularities we see in a person’s total set of dispositions, there will still be a large number of generic similarities within them that form part of what we might call our personality – the largely environment-invariant ways that we tend to approach things such as making friends, falling in love, working a job, developing habits and skills, facing hardship, and exposing yourself to new experiences. By ‘tendencies’, all that is meant is robust generalisations of dispositions across our biologically determined space of possibilities – think things like the “big five” personality traits postulated by personality psychologists, or Myers-Briggs, if you are unfamiliar with the big five. These are supposed to largely be held constant across our lives. What we are, it could therefore be said, is essentially our personality, the biologically determined ways that we actually or possibly tend to approach generic situations.
However, again, I think this too takes a too narrow conception of what we are. This would only be correct if what we are is exhausted by the ways we could or do interact with different situations. But we are clearly not exhausted by this. To see this, we need to distinguish our personality, which I have just explained, from our history.
By history, I mean the specific circumstances and events that have constituted your life so far. This includes the family you were born to and how they raised you; the friends (and, if applicable, enemies) you have made, and times you’ve spent with them; the romantic partners you have been with, and the lives you have built together; the specific events in reaction or response to which you formed specific social, cultural, and political beliefs; the artistic and media environment which has shaped your specific aesthetic tastes and preferences; and the choices you have made in your life to get to the point you are now, especially those involving education, training, and work, those things which, in this economy, are most determinative of its overall character most days of the week. These all form what I am calling our history.
Suppose that a perfect biological duplicate to you, with an identical personality to yours was born in the town over from you. If what we are is essentially generic personality traits that are strictly determined by our biology, then we should expect that yours and your duplicate’s life should basically be the same. However, this would clearly not be the case. They would not meet all the same friends, have all of the same formative experiences, fall in love with the same people, pursue the same goals in life, get into exactly the same jobs, and live in the same places. Their specific experiences of growing up and moving through the world would be entirely different to ours in the sense that their environment – the people, places, and things around them – are different. And these differences of environment, particularly their memory of, and effect on them, are clearly determinative of what it is to be this person, in contrast to what it is to be us. This would be the case even if there were deep analogical similarities you could draw between each person’s experiences, owing to their identical personality. Thus, even with their biology and personality held constant, your own life and your duplicate’s clearly have essential differences between them.
The reason for this that our history is just as constitutive of what we are, as our personality is. What we’ve done and who we are connected with is just as integral to what we are, and our own self-conception, as how we tend to act and react to our environment. Even a deterministic biology cannot determine these historical aspects of our lives, it can only determine our personality. But if even a deterministic biology cannot determine the historical differences that make a human life what it is, then it cannot wholly determine who we are.
The effect such differences have on our conception of another’s life comes out especially if we imagine our duplicate was born on the other side of the world, in a completely different culture, at a completely different level of economic development, or even just to a different family in different socio-economic conditions. Consider the historical path dependencies generated by manipulating any one of these factors, even those which you wouldn’t typically think of as making a large difference. For example, suppose your duplicate was born a town over from yours, one that is even very similar. They would go to a different school where they would meet different people – some of which may become lifelong friends, they would be encouraged to do different things, have different opportunities, develop different preferences based on their sociocultural and media environment, and in general see the possibilities of their own life in a way that is wholly different to what your own possibilities seemed to you, despite your biological identity, and strict biological determinism.
Even if educational attainment, income, and a specific type of career, could somehow be predicted with great accuracy, merely from looking at one’s biology, the specific way in which one’s life will have unfolded to get to these positions, the memories made, the network of specific people connected with, the value and effect of the particular jobs you take; these will all be drastically different across different lives. Yet they are just as important to us in determining what we are as our personality is, which at best merely determines the ways we tend to react to situations involving generic features you might see in any possible human life.
The determinative effect of history comes out starkly in again considering long-term romantic relationships. There are a large number of people out there who – biological determinism or not – are potential long-term partners, people you could be with for a long time, even until your death. Which of these people you might end up with is dependent on an incredibly broad range of factors, sheer contingencies, and dumb luck.
Once you are together, and especially once you are together for a long time, your life transforms around your particular relationship. The immense amount of time you spend together, your peculiar combination of compatible and incompatible desires and preferences, the social life and specific activities these engender you doing, the time with their and your own family, the trade-offs and compromises made to accommodate each other’s specific goals, the specific children you may end up having together. These are all make for a highly specific history you otherwise would not have had. No doubt, the general character and temperament of your day-to-day relations are determined by your personality, which we are supposing to be wholly determined by our biology. Most of your worst fights are likely the result of entrenched, unchangeable, and incompatible character traits, clashing once again. However, the specific way in which such a relationship forms and transforms your life – given its utter centrality to what I’ve called our history – cannot but said to be determinative of what we are. And yet this series of experiences is not simply reducible in any meaningful sense to our biology.
Perhaps the determinist could concede this but note, more modestly, that our possibility space is heavily constrained by our personality. Suppose you take someone who is not very ambitious, intelligent, or open to experience. It could be argued that if you place biological duplicates of them in one hundred different small towns in New Zealand, the broad trajectory of their lives would be largely the same. Suppose this is right for people like this (as it well could be if biological determinism of this kind were true). From the outside, it may indeed seem correct (for some of those hundred) that the “broad trajectory” of their life is the same. However, this still completely erases what are fundamental differences between the lives of these individuals, even those that are the most similar. These people will spend their life around completely different – if similar – people, will have completely different – if similar – memories of completely different – if similar – events, activities, and environments. Even if we take into account their similarities, their life is uniquely what it is because of these differences, and they are not differences in biology.
IV. Thus, biological determinism, insofar as it takes our biology to be wholly determinative of what we are, takes a too narrow conception of our own lives. What we really are is an irreducible nexus of biology and environment, a combination of our personality and our history. Once this point is taken in its proper proportion, it can easily be seen how much our environment is just as determinative of who we are as our biology, even on the most deterministic view of the latter.
Perhaps the biological determinist was never making claims that go any further than this, and it is enough that their view facilitates the relative stability of certain generics traits in the modal space of a specific biological person. If so, that is fine. However, in more than one situation I have seen discussions of how genes (do or might) determine human behaviour slip from an account of the make-up of human populations to an entire, and unduly fatalistic, conception of human existence. And as I said right at the start, my concern is more with fending off the encroachment of such a conception, as well as the implausibly narrow, biological account of individual human lives that seems to invite or attract this kind of view.
What I have shown is that any such account, and the fatalism it appears to sometimes bring with it, is unjustified. We are more than just a set of behavioural dispositions and tendencies. There is an irreducibly historical, which is to say, environmental, explanation for the specifics of what we are like, what we care about, who we spend time with, and what we get up to. And the totality of these specifics just is our life. Even if biological determinism were true, therefore, what environments we come into will always really matter for us, both in their being enabling conditions for biological dispositions that are better for us, rather than worse, and in cultivating a history that is better and more cherished by us, rather than one that is worse, and regrettable. But this also means that how we go about shaping the environments that constitute us, at least those things we have control over, such as culture, art, politics, and economics, will always really matter. What the true breakdown is of biological versus environmental causes of individual human traits and behaviour does not, and cannot, change this fact.
While not a direct intervention into the debate between the role of nature and nurture, I hope to have achieved here a modest intervention into its supposed stakes.
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