Muddying the waters

Nick Miller interviewed a pink-haired Jesse Prinz in a Manhattan cafe about a new book which the City University of New York philosopher has written challenging the supposed orthodoxy of genetic determinism. But the current consensus on the old nature versus nurture question is not genetic determinism: it is a view which recognizes the complex interactions between human genes and the environment. Prinz is also arguing against the idea that our brains are, as it were, primed for language. And he tries to undermine the credibility of the studies of identical twins which underlie current mainstream views.

There is something going on here. Such overweening intellectual ambition and contrarianism can't be driven solely by a dispassionate reassessment of the evidence. Fortunately, Professor Prinz is very upfront about the ideological motivations of his ideas. Like his CUNY colleague, Massimo Pigliucci, his intellectual work is inextricably bound up with his passionate commitment to progressive causes. The trouble is, mixing ideology and science is at best a distraction, a muddying of the waters, and at worst positively dangerous.

For his article, Miller also interviewed Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico who effectively undermined the line which Prinz was taking by confirming what anyone with even a passing interest in these matters already knows: that studies of identical twins over the past two decades have demonstrated conclusively that virtually every aspect of personality is heritable (to a significant extent).

Steven Pinker, who has written on what he calls our language instinct as well as on broader issues of evolutionary psychology, is the most prominent public spokesman for the mainstream position which Prinz is setting out to attack. The following passage is from Pinker's book, The Blank Slate:

Identical twins, whether separated at birth or not, are eerily alike in just about any trait one can measure - verbal, mathematical and general intelligence, in their degree of life satisfaction, personality traits such as introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and openness to experience. They have similar attitudes towards controversial issues such as the death penalty, religion and modern music. They resemble each other in gambling, divorce, committing crimes, getting into accidents and watching television. They even boast dozens of shared idiosyncrasies such as giggling incessantly, giving interminable answers to simple questions, dipping buttered toast in coffee and writing indistinguishable syndicated advice columns.

If we want to improve our lives, the first step surely is to understand as best we can the situation we are in and this involves a recognition of the truly surprising power and influence of our genes.

Ten examples of racially-based thinking

1. A subjective preference to live and interact with one's own population group (defined in terms of genetic relatedness).

2. A subjective preference to marry within one's own population group.

3. A conviction that members of one's own population group are morally obliged only to marry within the group.

4. A belief that population groups (defined in terms of genetic relatedness) exhibit statistically significant differences in terms of psychological and cognitive characteristics and abilities.

5. A belief that one's own population group exhibits a higher incidence and/or higher levels of subjectively desirable psychological or behavioral characteristics than some other groups.

6. A belief that one's own population group exhibits a higher incidence and/or higher levels of subjectively desirable psychological or behavioral characteristics than all other groups.

7. A belief that one's own population group exhibits higher levels of objectively quantifiable cognitive abilities than some other groups.

8. A belief that one's own population group exhibits higher levels of objectively quantifiable cognitive abilities than all other groups.

9. A belief that one's own population group is intrinsically superior to some other population groups.

10. A belief that one's own population group is intrinsically superior to all other population groups.

The ground of being

For almost the whole of human history - until, say, the 19th century - the intellectually curious could expect their culture's deepest and most universal explanatory systems to be not only intellectually but also emotionally satisfying. Mythic, religious or metaphysical systems provided explanations (albeit inadequate as we now see) of both the natural and the social/moral world.

Our best theories of physics, by contrast, omit - as they must - all the things our complex brains seem primarily designed to deal with. And the men (and very few women) at the forefront of research in physics and related sciences often come across as lacking in social awareness.

Writing style (in non-technical contexts) gives a lot away about a person, and so often, when reading autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books by leading scientists, I find myself making allowances for what seems to be a certain childish quality, a lack of critical or social or psychological awareness or sophistication - even sometimes a certain moral immaturity and recklessness. It seems almost as though - as with autistic savants - these people's brains are not 'wasting' any time or energy on the immensely complex processing involved in being socially (and morally?) aware.

There are exceptions, of course. Seth Lloyd's book Programming the universe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is not only beautifully written in a spare and restrained style, but it is also saying something of profound importance. Lloyd takes the tradition of digital physics associated with such names as Edward Fredkin and John Wheeler and updates it to encompass the concept - and the reality - of quantum computing.

Wheeler suggested that the bit (i.e. information) was the fundamental building block of reality rather than the physical particle; Lloyd and his colleagues deal not in bits but in qubits (quantum bits). The cosmos is not a classical computer but rather a quantum computer - computing itself. A more recent work by Vlatko Vedral, Decoding reality (OUP, 2010), makes similar claims.

According to this way of thinking, in order to understand any complex system the most important thing is to understand how information is represented and processed within that system. But underlying all systems are just a handful of simple logical operations. There is something very beautiful about this, and I am sometimes tempted to devote myself in a serious way to learning more about these fundamental processes - and even writing about them. But I'm not sure the payoff would be worth it. Fascinating as these ideas are in general terms, I fear that the deeper one goes, the less interesting they become - except in a technical sense. The puzzles of quantum computing are fascinating - but no more so than any other complex joint problem-solving exercise. The fascination is not the emotionally satisfying fascination associated with a global understanding of one's place in nature.

My provisional conclusion is that ultimately our ordinary lives are more complex and interesting than these fundamental processes. To imagine otherwise is to exhibit traces of theological thinking, the old sense that there is something very wonderful at the heart of reality - God, the Ground of Being. But it's looking increasingly likely that there's just a whole lot of computing going on, willy-nilly, and without a master programmer.

Two kinds of people

We all have a tendency to think in terms of simple dichotomies, and often these dichotomies are strongly value-based and involve taking sides (good and bad, friend and foe, right and left ...).

The English writer Alan Bennett recalled that, as a child, he often saw inanimate objects as either good or bad, friendly or not friendly: one shoe brush (maybe the one for putting on the polish) was bad, the other (for polishing) good; one spoon was good, its fellow was bad, and so on.

Needless to say, these tendencies are stronger in some people than in others. They often manifest themselves in sporting or political contexts. Some people can watch a sporting contest or listen to a political debate without taking sides. Others - perhaps more naturally competitive - just can't be impartial.

A particularly amusing case relates to an old controversy between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz whose respective claims to have invented the calculus led to much dispute at the time. The mathematician Gregory Chaitin couldn't resist joining the fray - more than 300 years later! - and, what's more, highlighting the personal and moral qualities of the two long-dead antagonists:

"Newton was a great physicist, but he was definitely inferior to Leibniz both as a mathematician and as a philosopher. And Newton was a rotten human being ... Leibniz invented the calculus, published it ... and then was astonished to learn that Newton, who had never published a word on the subject, claimed that Leibniz had stolen it all from him. Leibniz could hardly take Newton seriously!

But it was Newton who won, not Leibniz.

Newton bragged that he had destroyed Leibniz and rejoiced in Leibniz's death ...

Morally, what a contrast! Leibniz was such an elevated soul that he found good in all philosophies ... It pains me to say [really?] that Newton enjoyed witnessing the executions of counterfeiters he pursued as Master of the Mint." [Meta math! The quest for omega (Vintage Books, 2005), p. 57]

Later, Chaitin pities Voltaire, who satirized Leibniz and praised Newton:

"Poor Voltaire - if he had read Newton's private papers, he would have realized that he had backed the wrong man!" [p. 59]

The smelly pony

Modern psychology has confirmed the deep psychological insights of a few 19th century thinkers (most notably, perhaps, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche) about the extent to which we are strangers to ourselves. We often do not see ourselves as clearly as others - even chance acquaintances - see us, or know our own minds.

I once read an account of a young woman who realized with great surprise that she had really hated the pony she thought she had loved as a girl. All girls love their ponies, don't they? And her younger self had duly conformed. But, looking back, she suddenly realized that that girl did not love her pony at all. It was evil-tempered and evil-smelling. A burden was lifted, an unnecessary self-deception revealed.

I can think of similar examples from my own adolescence. My 'love' of playing cricket lasted into young manhood, and it took a mere acquaintance (an older man, the captain of a team for which I was playing) to ask the obvious question - and to dispel the illusion. Again, a burden was lifted. At my father's initiative, I had had extensive training in the game, and, until that slightly embarrassing (but liberating) conversation, I continued to play it out of habit or duty or a delusion, not that I was good at it (I clearly wasn't), but that I enjoyed it.

Now, this may be drawing a long bow, but I recently wondered whether my love for the English language might not be another case of 'the smelly pony'. English is a brute of a language to use well. I don't know about you, but, even as a native speaker, I find it a struggle sometimes. I don't really feel at home in my own language!

English is classed as Germanic, but is really a mixture of Germanic and Romance. The double vocabulary (Anglo-Saxon/Norman), reflected in legal phrases like 'last will and testament' and 'storm and tempest', is well known and results in an unnecessarily large and unwieldy lexicon. But English sentence structure - not just the lexicon - seems also to have been influenced by the French-speaking Normans, to the extent that German sentence structures sound strange to us. (For English and the Romance languages the basic word order for transitive sentences is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), whereas German has verb-final order in subordinate clauses.) I wonder if native speakers of, on the one hand, Germanic languages like German or Swedish, or, on the other, of French or the other Romance languages, ever feel daunted by - not at home in - their own tongue. I doubt it.

The ghost in the machine

I have been reading The rise and fall of the soul and self: an intellectual history of personal identity by Raymond Martin and John Barresi (Columbia UP, 2006). The basic theme is that just as the idea of the soul has disappeared from scientific explanations of behavior (and from most people's thinking) so the idea of the self (which replaced the soul) is now being questioned if not rejected.

Much of the book, especially the later chapters, focuses on scientific research but philosophical approaches are also covered extensively. One thing that strikes me is the extent to which 20th century psychology was unscientific insofar as many theories and  approaches clearly serve as vehicles for individual (value-laden) points of view rather than contributing to a gradual increase in understanding (as truly scientific work tends to do). I was impressed at how well the Anglo-American analytic philosophical tradition seemed to stand up when compared with certain branches of psychology, and with much continental philosophy.

The gulf between the Anglo-American and continental styles of philosophy is brought out in an anecdote featuring the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle:

'...Ryle attacked not only the Cartesian idea of a self distinct from the body - "the ghost in the machine" - but the very idea of an inner life. In The Concept of Mind (1949), he argued that all meaningful talk of mental episodes - "twitches, itches, and twangs," even a person's being angry - was not about anything private to a person's interior life but about bodily "dispositions to behave."

In  the 1950s and 1960s, in England, ordinary-language philosophy, whose hallmark was to deny the inner life, came into full bloom. Meanwhile, on the continent, phenomenology, whose focus was the examination of inner life, was gathering steam. There was little love lost between the proponents of the two approaches. At a conference, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in a conciliatory gesture, remarked to Ryle, "But are we not doing the same thing?" Ryle responded, "I hope not!" ' (p.244)

Early influences

I would like to highlight a point I made in a comment attached to my previous post - namely that if an individual's political (or for that matter religious or philosophical) views are affected by basic character and personality traits, and if such traits are in part determined by genetic factors and/or by very early experiences, then an individual's views will be less a product of mature reason and analysis than is generally assumed. Consequently, we should be more skeptical of our own convictions.

Recent work in developmental psychology has showed convincingly that - and to some extent how - the sense of self arises from social interaction, but basic personality traits seem to have a strong genetic foundation. This is brought out by the controversy about the influence of birth order. Some (very cursory) reading has led me to the provisional conclusion that the 'first-borns tend to be more conservative' idea is indeed true, but only within (not between) families. Within families first-borns score higher on conservatism, conscientiousness and achievement orientation, later-borns on rebelliousness, openness and agreeableness. The results only work within families because genetic effects are stronger than birth-order effects. The birth-order effect is real but weak.

It is of course intuitively plausible that first-borns might favor the status quo insofar as they often bask in the undivided attention of their parents until the dreaded sibling comes along to drive them out of this childhood paradise.

Little Hitler

Two young women – sisters – chatting in the kitchen of a suburban house. One sister – the visitor – unscrews the lid of a jar of boiled sweets and helps herself to some.

A little boy, about three or four years old, wanders into the kitchen after his afternoon nap. He sees the open jar. The candies were his and he had a strict, self-imposed regime of two per day. No doubt, if asked, he would have shared them with his aunt. But he is shocked and angered that the proper protocols were not followed.

"No more lids are to be taken off in this house!" he thunders.

The sisters laugh.

"And there is to be no more laughing in this house!" he orders.

The sisters laugh uncontrollably.

__________


The child was me, and the incident raises the issue of the early formation of psychological characteristics, and also the link with an eventual social philosophy.

It is generally accepted that a person's basic character traits are determined within the first couple of years of life. And clearly one's personality and character affect one's views of social arrangements and ultimately one's (implicit or explicit) social philosophy.

A conservative tendency? The incident suggests - let's be honest - a leaning towards something a little more authoritarian.