Born That Way

by William Wright

  Most interestingly, the scientists have located a center in the left hemisphere that processes and makes sense out of the impulses and messages constantly flowing from all other areas of both hemispheres—including the gene-based behavioral signals that are the subject of this book. Gazzaniga calls this region of the brain “the interpreter,” and it turns out to be quite a remarkable, resourceful, and not altogether honest aspect of our cognitive apparatus. In the experiments, testers gave instructions to the right side of a subject’s severed brain, then asked the left or “interpreter” side why the subject performed the requested action. Ignorant of the real reason, the researchers’ input, the subject’s interpreter had no problem ad-libbing a rationale.

  An example: The researchers held up a sign to one side of the subject’s brain saying WALK. When addressing the brain’s other side, the subject rose from his chair midtest and began to walk away. Asked what he was doing, he hesitated, then replied, “I’m going to get a Coke.” Another subject was shown a sign that said LAUGH. Later, when using her brain’s other half, she began to chuckle. Asked what amused her, she answered that she found it funny that people made livings asking such questions.

  Gazzaniga describes the interpreter as a kind of all-purpose public relations person, a front-office spokesman for all the independent brain modules. Its job is to explain and make sense of actions decided on by other brain segments—for reasons of which it is often ignorant. At first glance this seems a role similar to that of the White House press officer, who must put the most plausible public face on decisions he or she had no part in making and the real reasons for which, if he knows them at all, must not be revealed. But the analogy misses a major aspect of the interpreter’s role in our brains; it must deceive not only the outside world but must also deceive ourselves. Unlike the White House press officer, our brain’s interpreter believes what it says, no matter how far-fetched. So in terms of gene-based behavior, a bit of nucleic acid prompts an action; if the signal encounters no counter-signals as it speeds along the nerve network, it enlists the brain’s interpreter to provide as reasonable a rationale as possible for the action that it can muster, and the action occurs—armed with an explanation in case one is needed by others or by the individual taking the action.

  The implications are enormous for this human mechanism for invented explanations and off-the-cuff pretexts. When it is applied to the conclusion of behavioral geneticists—that we are all subjected to a continual barrage of biochemically delivered moods, nudges, shoves, impulses, craving, and aversions—it suggests that however bizarre, hurtful, or inappropriate one of our actions or mental responses may be, the interpreter module in our brain stands ready to provide it with a reasonable face. We are perfectly capable of saying, “I’m going to get a Coke,” when we actually have no idea of what we are doing or why. Of course, sometimes we actually want a Coke, but other times we concoct such a reason because we need a reason, not a Coke.

  As for the chances of seeing through the interpreter’s smooth baloney, the higher one’s intelligence, the more cunning one’s interpreter probably is at internal hoodwinking. Another mechanism may further strengthen our ability to delude ourselves. The more distasteful one of our own impulses is to us—that is, the more in conflict it is with our nobler impulses—the more adept the interpreter may be at inventing rationales and pretexts. And to raise the potential for self-delusion yet another notch, the more moral and decent we perceive ourselves to be, the more we may put our interpreters to work grinding out pretexts when those immoral and indecent genetic impulses, our caveman legacy, clamor for expression.

  NOWHERE DOES THE CONCEPT of “pretext” take on greater resonance than in humankind’s grim history of serial warfare. While our species’ built-in human predilection for homicide was a major thesis of the influential writings of Lorenz and Ardrey, it has been dismissed by many scientists and members of the public who reject such an unappetizing view. The denial is remarkable in the face of the historical record and the number of wars raging on the planet at any given moment—to say nothing of the countless “private” murders and the billions being raked in by the pornography of violence: films, television, computer games, mystery thrillers, toy guns, and the countless other murder substitutes our society offers. Self-delusion on this ugly element of our species’ basic equipment seems so widespread, it suggests millions of interpreters working full time to conceal the nasty truth about our homicidal leanings.

  Genetically oriented psychologists are now zeroing in on another built-in behavioral mechanism that may well hook up with our innate aggressiveness to make humans as warlike as we are. Since the 1950s, researchers have been examining the speed with which humans, even very young humans, can form themselves into “us” and “them” groups. The investigators also have found how quickly these identities can spawn hostilities between the in-group and out-group. It might be an arbitrary dividing of third graders into Blue Jays and Cardinals or summer campers into Rattlers and Eagles. No matter how arbitrary the groupings, animosities quickly emerge that can escalate into hostility, even violence. The most casual glance at other cultures suggests a specieswide aspect to the phenomenon. It might be anything from Rwandan tribes to Russian ethnicities to Liverpool soccer fans. The speed with which this mechanism operates can be seen most horrifyingly in the Serbs and Croatians, who, within a few months, discovered they loathed and wished dead the group they had lived with peaceably for years.

  If there is a genetic mechanism that makes us prone to identify with one group and hostile to another, it appears to be closely related, may in fact activate, a genetic mechanism for aggression. The same neurological parlay that converts normal humans into lynch parties and murderous mobs may be more benignly at work in nursery schools and fraternity houses. Whatever the premise for group identity, it doesn’t take long for the out-group to go from being “different” to being inferior, unworthy, evil, contemptible—until they are seen as needing harassment, punishment, retribution, perhaps annihilation.

  Among the few writers who have addressed this human gusto for identifying, then killing enemies, one of the most succinct was Francis Ford Coppola in his screenplay for Patton. After a particularly grizzly battle, George C. Scott, as Patton, surveys the killing field strewn with smoking tanks and bloody corpses. As the camera pans across the horror spread before him, audiences await the obligatory war-is-hell line that absolves Patton for his murderousness (and absolves viewers for paying to watch it). Instead they are jolted to hear Patton say, “I love all this. God help me, but I love it.” While George Patton could be dismissed as a blood-thirsty anomaly, the same unsparing self-awareness was evinced by as disparate a figure as Marianne Moore when she wrote,

  … I must

  fight til I have conquered in myself what

  causes war …

  So far, few have demonstrated this knack for harsh self-analysis. Instead of looking inside ourselves to explain human activities we abhor—crime, war, violence, oppression, worker exploitation—we invariably have at our disposal a catalog of environmental explanations—Hollywood, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Gangsta Rap, the N.R.A., and, the old standbys, derelict parents. If we run out of present-day causes, we have the past to draw on. A dig into history is sure to unearth the root of trouble and pinpoint a historical reason one group or another has strayed from our species’ alleged peaceful, nonviolent nature. (Good grief, are they doing it again?)

  Recently, this reflex was most poignantly demonstrated with the Bosnian tragedy. In trying to determine why these former Yugoslavians found it necessary to uproot, kill, and torture one another, the New York Times doughtily dug back to the fourteenth century—to the battle of Kosovo in 1389. This event, it seems, festered for six hundred years, only to produce mass slaughter in the 1990s. Although the journalists are simply doing what tradition holds to be a thorough analysis, they rely on the assumption that explanations for such irrational behavior must lie somewhere in the environment, ev
en a centuries-old environment.

  I hear no one suggesting that the prior events may not be causes at all but may merely be earlier symptoms of the same built-in malaise—or, more likely, earlier symptoms of shared human behavior that erupts with disheartening regularity throughout history (when environmental conditions are right, to be sure). In addition to the possibility that the past-scanning analysis may miss the mark—be nowhere near it, in fact—the earnest efforts of the more serious journalists to locate historical reasons has the inadvertent effect of dignifying the present carnage, elevating it to the logical result of earlier events. Historical precedents are forced into service to make the insane appear sane, or, in my view, to make the genetic appear environmental. Once again, interpreters working big time.

  One of the best analyses of the Bosnian horror was Peter Maass’s 1996 book Love Thy Neighbor, in which the author refuses to credit the historical explanations for the killing and speaks instead of manipulations by evil leaders of “the wild beast” within us all. This, I feel, brings Maass closer to the truth than most war-watchers; he feels that historical antecedent is inadequate explanation of the genocidal rampage and looks instead for something in the makeup of all humans.

  While I cheer this shift of focus, I also feel that in 1998 we can do better than such pallid literary metaphors as the “beast within us.” In fact, we don’t need metaphors at all. We are close to understanding the precise biochemical mechanisms that can, with apparent ease, lead us to declare a group the enemy and attack it. That aspect of human personality that engenders atrocities like Bosnia is not merely “like” something in raw, brute nature. It is an integral, if perhaps often dormant, part of our nature and one that behavioral geneticists are understanding better every day.

  Two present-day developments hold out hope that humans may at last be able to see beyond environmental circumstances that are constantly served up by history-minded journalists to explain ubiquitous warfare. One, of course, is the dawning genetic self-awareness that is the subject of this book. The other is the nonsensical nature of the current crop of conflicts. At no time in recent history has the planet seen more wars fought for such strained and implausible rationales. Perhaps at the moment there is a dearth of incontestable, morality-grounded reasons for fighting such as those that ennobled World War II. Then, too, perhaps the universal interpreter has grown careless or just run out of credible reasons for humans to kill other humans. But puzzling, baseless wars are proliferating as never before, and they appear to be as lethal as the high-minded ones.

  In Civil Wars, a 1994 book of essays about the rash of senseless violence that has plagued the world since the end of the Cold War, Hans Magnus Enzenberger despairs that wars are no longer waged for righteous causes; instead, “violence has freed itself from ideology.” What Enzenberger seems to see as an unfortunate development—where are the nifty wars of yesteryear?—I see as a rare opportunity for humans to perceive their aggressions for what they invariably are: ancient genetic impulses that aided survival at one time but now work against it. The rash of ill-founded wars may help us look beyond the pretexts of the moment to the underlying human mechanisms. The senseless wars may help us better understand the genetic underpinnings of the “sensible” ones. When about to march off for God or country, we would do well to consider the New Guinea highlanders who periodically attack their neighbors because they feel like it. We should also consider chimpanzees, our closest relatives, who regularly stage murderous raiding parties on neighboring tribes for no discernible reasons of hunger, sex, or territory.

  The hope is that instead of swallowing without question the moment’s rationales for killing, we might one day come to see ourselves, when in the warlike mode, in the grip of a genetic restlessness, perhaps a DNA surge of group aggression triggered by a circumstance or by a demagogue, an underlying motivation that renders our war no more rational than those of the New Guinea tribesmen. In this regard, the only difference between our two cultures may be that, unlike ourselves, the New Guineans feel no need for hypocritical, self-justifying rationales to kill others. They know they slaughter to relieve boredom and because they enjoy it. We love all this, God help us.

  WHETHER OR NOT the young science of behavioral genetics finds the root cause of behaviors we deplore, like war and racism, this field of inquiry, along with its sister science of evolutionary psychology, is arriving at a broad new understanding of our species. In addition to seeing ourselves as products of culture, education, and upbringings, we can also see ourselves as blinking switchboards of gene-fired impulses, some older than the species itself, some weak, others powerful, some ever-present, others sporadic—but all waiting their moment to take charge of the entire vessel, to move us to an action that evolution at one period in our four-million-year history decided increased chances of survival.

  After only two decades of concerted research into this aspect of our makeup, we can now address human dysfunctions, contradictions, and self-destructiveness armed with a grasp of an important new component, perhaps the most important of all: the powerful effect on behavior of the human genome, the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that produced our eyes, feet, and kidneys, and play a role in every aspect of our behavior.

  1The April 21, 1997, issue of U.S. News and World Report quoted Leon Kamin as saying that the simplest way to discover someone’s political leanings is to ask his or her view on genetics. Old myths die hard.

  Appendix

  The following letter appeared in the July 1972 issue of American Psychologist.

  BEHAVIOR AND HEREDITY

  The posthumous Thorndike Award article by Burt (1972) draws psychological attention again to the great influence played by heredity in important human behaviors. Recently, to emphasize such influence has required considerable courage, for it has brought psychologists and other scientists under extreme personal and professional abuse at Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Connecticut, Illinois, and elsewhere. Yet such influences are well documented. To assert their importance and validity, and to call for free and unencumbered research, the 50 scientists listed below have signed the following document, and submit it to the APA: BACKGROUND: The history of civilization shows many periods when scientific research or teaching was censured, punished, or suppressed for nonscientific reasons, usually for seeming to contradict some religious or political belief. Well-known scientist victims include: Galileo, in orthodox Italy; Darwin, in Victorian England; Einstein, in Hitler’s Germany; and Mendelian biologists, in Stalin’s Russia.

  Today, a similar suppression, censure, punishment, and defamation are being applied against scientists who emphasize the role of heredity in human behavior. Published positions are often misquoted and misrepresented; emotional appeals replace scientific reasoning; arguments are directed against the man rather than against the evidence (e.g., a scientist is called “fascist,” and his arguments are ignored).

  A large number of attacks come from nonscientists, or even antiscientists, among the political militants on campus. Other attackers include academics committed to environmentalism in their explanation of almost all human differences. And a large number of scientists, who have studied the evidence and are persuaded of the great role played by heredity in human behavior, are silent, neither expressing their beliefs clearly in public, nor rallying strongly to the defense of their more outspoken colleagues.

  The results are seen in the present academy: it is virtually heresy to express a hereditarian view, or to recommend further study of the biological bases of behavior. A kind of orthodox environmentalism dominates the liberal academy, and strongly inhibits teachers, researchers, and scholars from turning to biological explanations or efforts.

  RESOLUTION: Now, therefore, we the undersigned scientists from a variety of fields, declare the following beliefs and principles:

  1. We have investigated much evidence concerning the possible role of inheritance in human abilities and behaviors, and we believe such hereditary influences are very strong. />
  2. We wish strongly to encourage research into the biological hereditary bases of behavior, as a major complement to the environmental efforts at explanation.

  3. We strongly defend the right, and emphasize the scholarly duty, of the teacher to discuss hereditary influences on behavior, in appropriate settings and with responsible scholarship.

  4. We deplore the evasion of heredity reasoning in current textbooks, and the failure to give responsible weight to heredity in disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, social anthropology, educational psychology, psychological measurement, and many others.

  5. We call upon liberal academics—upon faculty senates, upon professional and learned societies, upon the American Association of University Professors, upon the American Civil Liberties Union, upon the University Centers for Rational Alternatives, upon presidents and boards of trustees, upon departments of science, and upon the editors of scholarly journals—to insist upon the openness of social science to the well-grounded claims of biobehavioral reasoning, and to protect vigilantly any qualified faculty members who responsibly teach, research, or publish concerning such reasoning.