Hi Brian, At 13:45 30/11/01 -0500, you wrote: >I have been thinking about a way to begin to respond to Keith >Hudson's recent writings on genetics and intelligence. This obviously >connects with recent educational issues raised by Keith as well. The >following quote by R.C.Lewontin will begin my response:
Well . . this is an interesting topic! Much more interesting than multinational corporations. I'd like to make one or two comments below, but before I do so, let me set out my stall. Lewontin, together with Leo Kamin and Steven Rose (all authors of "Not in our genes", 1984), and others, take up quite a hard stance against those who believe in the predominant influence of genes. They therefore charge their opponents, such as Matt Ridley, Mark Ridley, E. O. Wilson and others with a far too extreme a position at the other end -- by saying that they have a deterministic position that's close to fatalism. As someone who is an interested observer in these matters and not an expert, it is not for me to advance a strong position, in either the geneticists' or environmentalists' camp. However, it has to be acknowledged that, since 1991 (the date of your extract from Lewontin below), there has been a veritable avalanche of genetic research which now clearly links well over 1,000 diseases to specific genes. This isn't to say a specific gene or a lack of one will inevitably produce a particular illness, but certainly a strong propensity to it. In most case, though -- but by no means all, such as Huntington's chorea -- these propensities can be modified by environmental circumstances. So you can place me as someone who is in the middle. Both genes and environment are important. But in what follows Lewontin makes a leap to matters on which other disciplines have a great deal to say: (RCL) >"The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make >us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many >connections as it has. However, there are not enough genes to >determine the detailed shape and structure of that nervous system nor >of the consciousness that is an aspect of that structure. As regards the development of the central nervous system, Lewontin is correct. Generally, the genes design the main "trunklines" -- that is, the heavy-duty white matter that connects the main processing centres of the brain (visual, audio, etc) with one another and with the deeper evolutionary older brain, and with the more important control centres in the rest of the body. Also a veritable forest of finer interconnections between individual brain cells develops in the foetus and this is still going on the very young child. Even in the foetus some of these finer interconnections are being strengthened -- trained by the environment (such as the audio brain cells tuning themselves to the mother's voice frequencies). The environment has a much stronger effect, however, in the days, weeks and months after birth. The finer connections start dying in large numbers according to what is absent in the environment (so that, for example, Japanese baby, never hearing English, will never for the rest of his life be able to hear or pronounce the difference between "r" and "l" because the brain cells that would have been involved now longer exist). So, once given the main structure of the brain, according to our genes, the environment now has increasing effect in refining our individual abilities and personalities. (RCL) >Yet it is >consciousness that creates our environment, its history and the >direction of its future. This then provides us with a correct >understanding of the relation between our genes and the shape of our >lives. I wouldn't disagree that our consciousness plays an important part in our history and will do so in our future destiny. But his phrasing above gives the impression that consciousness is somehow the special prerogative of homo sapiens alone. This is too anthropocentric. People outside biology have a great deal to say about consciousness without giving it any special human significance. Quantum physicists such as Bohm or Wigner or Penrose say that it is about the act of perception itself whereby the observer takes a decision based on a choice among other possibilities (the so-called "collapse of the wave equation"). This is deep stuff indeed, and some go even deeper. Dyson, for example, believe that all lifeforms have consciousness and will one day colonise the universe, others such as Deutsch thinks that consciousness could actually control the universe at some distant time, others such as Wheeler thinks that the universe as a whole already has consciousness. All the above are not lightweight thinkers. All this might be thought to be too wide-ranging and ambitious and nothing to do with human culture, but my point is that the mere use of the term "consciousness" in *any* context is ambitious! No-one knows how to define it, even if it exists. Indeed, I don't know whether you, Brian, have consciousness. You might be a clever robot for all I know. It's an act of faith that makes me believe that you have consciousness, but it doesn't take much additional faith on my part to believe that porpoises or bonobo chimps have consciousness, too. (RCL) >Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and physiologies. >In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes >human beings. But having made that brain possible, the genes have >made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and >possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human >consciousness has already made possible. In Simone de Beauvoir's >clever but deep apothegm, a human being is "l'etre dont l'etre est de >n'etre pas," the being whose essence is in not having an essence. > >History far transcends any narrow limitations that are claimed for >either the power of genes or the power of the environment to >circumscribe us. Like the House of Lords that destroyed its own >power to limit the political development of Britain in the successive >Reform Acts to which it assented, so the genes, in making possible >the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power >both to determine the individual and its environment. He's now made an unjustifiable jump. First he says that both genes and environment are involved in the development of culture (with which I agree); then he suddenly says that because there's such a thing as "human" consciousness (as though we are the sole possessors of it) then genes no longer matter. This is a non sequitur. (RCL) >They have been >replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social >interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be >understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, >social action." > > Page 97, Biology as Ideology: The doctrine of DNA, R.C. Lewontin, >Anansi Press, 1991 > >--------------------------------------------------------- (BMcA) >That's enough for now, more to come as time permits. Look forward to it. Best wishes, Keith ___________________________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________________
