The new information about genes is not just a matter of fresh dogma replacing old. The discoveries of behavioral genetics have shown the earlier environment-is-everything model to be half true, but a view of human functioning so myopic, so lopsided as to invalidate most of the findings based on it. It also caused considerable harm. A prime example would be the psychodynamic “cures” imposed on sufferers of conditions we now know can have genetic roots—calamities like schizophrenia, autism, obesity, and an array of neurotic symptoms. Harm was also inflicted when parents were blamed for childhood problems that stemmed from genetic irregularities. In addition to the injustice involved, placing blame in the wrong place moved practitioners further from remedies. For nailing down the cause of psychological problems, genetic knowledge now provides an additional suspect: pesky bits of nucleic acid contained in the genes that the parents may have provided but over which they have little or no control.
A PRINCIPAL REASON the extreme behaviorist, antigenes view dominated psychology for so many years was its strong political appeal. The liberal movements that flourished in the first half of the century based much of their theory on the concept of an infinitely malleable human. The world could be made better by making people better. Talk of genetic influences suggested unchangeable humans and was seen as justification for such societal brutalities as racism and slavery. Not only was a belief in gene-based behavior seen as an obstacle to improving the world, but it was also viewed as an excuse for not trying.
There were valid reasons for fearing a backward thrust to the genetic perspective. Charles Darwin had barely enunciated his theory of natural selection before it was brandished by conservatives as proof of the inevitability of social injustice. His monumental insight about evolution with its encapsulation, “survival of the fittest” (which referred only to procreational prowess), was wrenched into the service of reactionary systems such as Social Darwinism (if you are poor it is because you were born to be poor), eugenics (stop the unfit from propagating), and Nazism (eliminate the unfit already here).
Because of these bogus and preemptive applications of inheritance theories, the entire subject of genes and human behavior was stigmatized with ugly ramifications that linger today. In a look at this history further on, I hope to demonstrate that behavioral genetics knowledge, like all knowledge, is neutral and can be used to bolster any political position, left or right. To reject this fundamental information because of previous right-wing applications makes as much sense as rejecting electricity because of daytime television.
Today, however, the genetic evidence is too powerful for whimsical selection on political grounds of one behavioral theory over another. The abundant data now on the table is forcing both liberals and conservatives to grapple with the genes-environment-behavior nexus. The cumulative evidence from evolutionary psychologists, sociobiologists, and behavioral geneticists has established a new reality with which everyone must deal. Because this revised view of the human is gaining acceptance from people of all ideologies, it is highly unlikely that one group will succeed in commandeering it, at least not without a fight from the others.
The shrinking band who still oppose behavioral genetics on political grounds console themselves with fantasies that it is a passing phase. Prominent psychologist Leon Kamin of Northeastern University, who is one of the most bellicose critics, told me in an interview early in my research that genes-behavior theories make sporadic appearances on the intellectual landscape. With weary exasperation he added that these outbreaks forced him and other alert champions of environmental determinism to beat them back like so many brush fires—writing debunking articles and angry letters to editors. After my five years of research, which I summarize in this book, I feel his remark is akin to saying the spherical-earth theory is an idea that crops up with irritating frequency and must be repeatedly dispatched by scientists of sounder bent.
Political fears are not the only reason for resistance to the genes-behavior findings. Because of broadly held misconceptions about genes’ power, many people feel that awarding them a degree of control over our actions means we are no longer masters of ourselves. By admitting that genes influence our behavior, we will be admitting that we are not in charge, that we are operating on chemical remote-control.
The obvious power of genes to dictate physical traits like hair color and foot size has led many nonscientists to assume that if such dictatorial entities also affect behavior, their influence must ipso facto be equally strong in this area. The fear seems to be that if we yield to DNA a degree of sovereignty over our conscious thought, if we permit genes through the behavioral door, we will be acquiescing to the same genetic determination governing our body parts. An individual’s chronic pessimism, overeating, or fear of flying would become as unchangeable as eye color.
Behavioral genes don’t work that way. None of the data turned up by behavioral geneticists shows genes to be tyrannical commands, but rather nudges, sometimes strong, but more often weak. None of the research has found a single genetic influence on behavior that could be called “all-powerful,” even though the critics pin this belief on behavioral geneticists and stigmatize them with the frightening label “genetic determinists.”
A lot has been learned in the past year or so about the weakness of some genetic influence. As for the more powerful genetic triggers to behavior—particularly to negative behaviors like addiction and violence—we can now foresee interventions to reduce or alter the effects. It is as though in order to soften the jarring news of how pervasive and meddlesome genes can be, Mother Nature is providing us with calming insights into their uneven power and potential adjustability. With good-news-bad-news timing, we are learning of genes’ broad influence over our behavior at the same time we are learning that they are not as powerful as we feared.
Genetic impulses are overruled all the time—when a fat person diets, for instance. As British geneticist Richard Dawkins puts it, when humans use contraception, they are defying their genes, which are bent on reproduction. Nuns and monks take rebellion to the limit and renounce sex altogether. Although the gene-based sex drive is as powerful as any genetic command, it can be disobeyed. However difficult or uninteresting, celibacy is still an option.
While genes are not all-powerful with behavior, evidence mounts they are all-pervasive in that they appear to influence, to however small a degree, our every thought and action. This sweeping claim is not just a verbal trick based on the physiological fact that genes have fashioned the brain with which we think and act. It is said in the more specific sense that human impulses, reactions, dispositions, desires, aversions—most facets of our personalities—are colored directly, if only to a minor degree, by each individual’s genetic makeup. In countless studies aimed at sorting out genetic from environmental effects, not one of the numerous traits examined failed to show at least some degree of genetic influence.
I have my own hunch why the loss-of-sovereignty fear may linger longer than the evidence should allow. The people most likely to reject the notion of a behaviorally programmed human brain are the brightest people among us, the brain-proud, those most disposed to believe their every thought flows from pure reason, nothing more. They are also the people who evaluate intellectual trends—writers, academics, and other opinion shapers. It is ironic that those who probably see themselves as having the most to lose by admitting that their behavior has genetic strings attached are the very ones we look to for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on new visions of human makeup. You might not be upset to learn that genes are manipulating us humans, but Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould hates the idea.
All of these perceived threats—to progressive politics, to scientific orthodoxy, and to self-esteem—have combined to hinder acceptance of the genes-behavioral revolution and to mute, sometimes to a whisper, the announcements of its remarkable findings. Of course, the validity of the new science in no way depends on our enthusiasm for its implications, but its acceptance, to a large degree, does. Even though the re
sistance is weakening, the result is that much of the public remains unaware of this landmark change in our understanding of the human or at best perceives the genes-behavior perspective as just one of a parade of fads in psychological truth.
Even worse, the old belief that the roots of all human behavior could be found in the rearing environment permeates much of our thinking and hobbles our quest for solutions to a broad range of problems—from individual quirks to societywide scourges like addiction and violence. Some argue that it’s only natural we look to the environment for solving problems because environments can be altered, genes cannot. While both points are untrue, the logic is skewed as well. To use behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin’s analogy, this is like the man who lost his wallet in an alley but looked for it in the street because the light was better.
The appealing notion that environments are always adjustable is turning out to be just as false as the notion that genes issue orders we can’t refuse. An example of an influential environment that is difficult, if not impossible, to adjust would be the womb conditions that can have lasting behavioral impact on the child to be. Also, the air we breathe and the water we drink—and here the two uses of the word “environment” converge—have elements that can affect behavior surreptitiously, as shown by recent findings about the devastating effects of lead pollution on children. Other troublemaking environmental conditions cannot be repaired because we don’t know they’re out there making trouble.
In spite of much scientific evidence to the contrary, the two fallacies—immutable genes and malleable environments—linger on. It is, I believe, the shadow of these misconceptions that explains why so many informed people accept in principle a genes-behavior dynamic but have yet to incorporate the new view into their cognitive data banks.
And behind all the pragmatic fears of genetic influence lies an emotional resistance. Will an understanding of the biochemical mechanics of behavior make us less interesting? Throughout history our fascination with ourselves has proved endless. Not only is all of world literature and drama evidence of this, we now have scores of satellites circling the globe, beaming hundreds of channels into millions of living rooms. Except for George Page on PBS and a few other animal programs, all of it is taken up with the rich variations of human behavior. Will an unraveling of behavioral biochemistry, a grasp of the black box, make us less intriguing? I suspect a deep-seated dread that reducing such worthy qualities as friendship, loyalty, ambition, and love to molecular interactions will dispel the mystery, diminish the glory. The resistance to knowledge about behavioral genes may not stem so much from what is implied about politics or self-command but from what it might do to our self-absorption. I like to think it will make us even more interesting, but in a different, more enlightened way. We might even net a few new plots in the human saga.
For all the advances in understanding of genes’ power over behavior, no geneticist denies that the environment still plays an important role. Researchers of twins are quick to point out that with separated identical twins, in spite of similarities that so vividly demonstrate genetic effects, their many differences are eloquent testimony to the environment’s power to mold.
The evidence we are about to examine leads to the conclusion that while the environment can have a major effect on forming personality and guiding behavior, much of the time it doesn’t. But the simple acknowledgment that, with any human behavior, genes may be involved is a momentous change in our species’ self-view, and a change with major ramifications for our approach to parenting, education, psychotherapy, and a host of other self-directed human enterprises.
ALTHOUGH SOME ACADEMICS continue to fight for the blank-slate view of the human, the biological-genetic perspective has now established itself in universities throughout the country and, more and more, with the public. Young academic disciplines such as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are totally rooted in this gene-based view. Increasingly, the traditional social sciences are introducing genes into their grab bags of variables on almost any aspect of human activity. Serious writers are doing the same.
Major behavioral genetics research projects involving teams of scientists are under way at the universities of Minnesota, Texas, Virginia, Colorado, and Louisville, and at Penn State and the Medical College of Virginia. Individual scientists are pursuing smaller studies at Harvard, California State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as at Northwestern and Boston universities. Research at many U.S. hospitals on such medical problems as alcoholism and obesity fall under the category of behavioral genetics. Important research is also in progress in Sweden, Denmark, England, Australia, and Canada.
Increasingly there are signs of gene-behavior awareness seeping into the national consciousness. A New York Times crossword puzzle—perhaps as good a bellwether as any other of mainstream acceptance of controversial knowledge—not long ago required a four-letter word that meant “personality determinant.” The word was “gene.” During a television interview, author Russell Baker was asked by Charlie Rose his opinion about the source of a sense of humor. Without hesitation Baker replied, “It’s genetic.” Only a few years earlier, few educated people would have held such an opinion, or if they had, would have let it fall so casually from the tongue in front of a large audience.
Now, however, the genes-behavior link has been accepted to such a degree, in both academia and with the public, that opponents are shifting their field to a pose of “what else is new?” While I was talking with Professor Kamin, he launched into a slash-and-burn diatribe against the most prominent behavioral genetics studies. Did he then, I asked, believe human behavior was without genetic influence? With no hesitation Kamin replied, “Of course there’s a genetic component to behavior.” You would never detect this view by reading Kamin’s many attacks or those of his allies.
Other members of the opposition, the stop-genes group some term the “radical environmentalists” and I term the “genophobes,” slip similar admissions into their antigene screeds. But these offhand capitulations have a false resonance, akin to a chorus of fifteenth-century bishops after learning of Columbus’s voyage, saying, “Of course the world is round. We knew that. Let’s get on to something more interesting.” To that, one could only say, “Not so fast, gentlemen. For one thing, you’ll have to change all your maps.”
Whether we welcome or resist a genes-behavior link and whether or not the link is seen to be compatible with this or that political vision, the evidence is now overwhelming that our nature is as much a product of evolution as our physiques, that each of us is born with an array of behavioral dispositions—some noble, some ruthless, some species-wide, some individual, some general, some of a birth-mark specificity—and that the more we know about these internal givens, the more effective we will be at dealing with ourselves, with others, and with the psychological and societal problems that, till now, have proved intractable.
The research that brought us to this new view of the human is fascinating and eye-opening enough to make every one of us see ourselves differently. The nature-nurture war is over, but the way it played out says volumes about political visions’ ability to block scientific advances. It also says much about how easily hopes for the way we would like things to be can blind the best intentioned of us to the way things are. Finally, a retracing of this exciting and epoch-defining transformation will illustrate that improving the world will happen not by bending our view of the human to fit our solutions but by understanding the givens we have inherited from our evolutionary past and basing solutions upon them.
TWO
BIRTH OF A STUDY
ONE MARCH EVENING IN 1979, Thomas Bouchard, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, received a phone call from a friend telling him of an article in a local newspaper about a set of male twins in Ohio who had been separated at birth, had lived with no contact for their entire lives, and had found each other two weeks earlier. They were now thirty-nine years old, three years younger than
Bouchard. The article stressed the many remarkable similarities between the two men raised by different families.
The friend knew Bouchard would be interested, having heard him discuss the powerful experimental possibilities in raised-apart twins. Bouchard thanked the friend and asked her to drop the story into his mailbox the next day. When he arrived at Elliott Hall, the university’s psychology department, he found in his mailbox the clipping plus a second copy left without comment by another colleague. As Bouchard stood in the mail alcove reading the article, he was excited by the account, but unaware that the newspaper story would change the course of his life.
Bouchard, tall, heavyset, with an enthusiastic, outgoing nature and an intense gaze undiminished by the glasses he always wears, was recognized as one of the leading psychologists of his day. For all of his scholarly eminence, he still had the unembellished directness as well as the high-energy gusto of his New England farm forebears. While he projected an outdoorsman’s heartiness more than the suavity of an intellectual, he quickly revealed a keen mind, a scholar’s exactitude, and a rapacious intellect. This last could be seen in his avid consumption of all the literature touching his field and extended as well to a curiosity about everyone he met. His career choices had revealed a taste for bucking prevailing orthodoxies, but this iconoclasm also surfaced in trivial ways, such as flaunting his enthusiasm for junk food in front of his nutritionally correct associates.
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