Biological Determinism

The theory of biological determinism, also called genetic determinism, is in essence the exact opposite of the Standard Social Science Model described in Evolution and Human Nature. Whereas the SSSM assumes that no part of human nature is inherited and all human attributes are fixed by cultural forces, biological determinism assumes that all or virtually all human behavior is innate and cannot be changed or altered.

What Biological Determinism Claims

Biological determinism as a theory claims that humans - their appearance, behavior, and even long-term fate - are entirely determined by genes. Biological determinists disregard or deny the effects of environmental variables on the expression of a given gene, and often assume that a single mutation can have far-reaching effects on the phenotype.

Many biological determinists see far-reaching policy implications in this view that everything about a person is innate. Such a viewpoint leads logically to the idea that criminals cannot be reformed - they were, in effect, "born that way" (which immediately suggests a defense for the criminal in question). Essentially, biological determinism taken to its logical conclusion divorces human action from human responsibility, placing the blame - or the credit - for actions on the genes exclusively. Indeed, in this form biological determinism negates the idea of free will entirely, placing all behavior in the realm of control by the genes.

Genes and Determinism

Biological determinism stems from what is essentially a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between genes and organisms: biological determinists assume that the environment is not at all important in the determination of appearance, behavior, and functionality. This seems to stem from an even more fundamental confusion over the fact that genes are not, despite the popular metaphor, blueprints for the phenotype. As has been pointed out many times, genes are not blueprints that correspond exactly to portions of the body. Instead, genes are more like a recipe for a cake (This edition of The Extended Phenotype, p.174). The recipe contains the instructions for baking a cake, but a successful cake depends on many things besides the basic recipe - the quality and availability of ingredients, the skill and attention of the cook, the length of baking time, the baking temperature, the type of oven used, the position of the cake in the oven, etc.

Clearly a successful cake depends on many factors external to the recipe; but this is the fact overlooked by biological determinists with regard to the much more complex case of human beings. The combination of their confusion over environmental variables and the nature of genes results in a theory that is increasingly obviously wrong in its pure form.

Popular Perceptions of Determinism

Interestingly, it is the popular media and the general public that subscribe to biological determinism much more often than biologists. Most, if not all, professional biologists comprehend the fact that genes interact with environmental variables to produce phenotypes. The classic example of this is height - a person's height is largely determined by genes, but environmental factors such as malnutrition can alter the effect produced by genes.

Many popular journalists (especially those with a sensationalist bent) downplay the roles of environmental forces when reporting on new discoveries in the scientific world. It is through this simplification and sensationalization that we get headlines announcing the discovery of a gene for homosexuality, philandering, or driving ambition. These "discoveries" are rarely presented with the proper caveats warning of environmental factors.

Moreover, even those that reject such outright determinism often fall prey to some assumptions also made by the media and even some science writers. One of the most obvious is the assumption that a person's clone would be essentially the same as that person - implying that a clone of Hitler would be power-hungry, a clone of President Clinton would philander, and a clone of Einstein would be a brilliant physicist. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth - the particular characteristics of each man have been shaped by a complex interplay between genes and environmental variables, including family, social context, economic fluctuations, life experiences, etc.

The same argument applies to the idea that many copies of the same genome would become identical soldiers that pose a great military danger to the free world. Even if one cloned the same genome hundreds or thousands of times, each individual clone would be quite different, and would vary based on his environmental climate. If one clone was placed in every currently existing culture on earth, the effect would hardly be noticeable. And even if two clones were each raised in a similar social context - each by a typical American middle-class family, for example - their different families and different experiences would yield major personality differences, though many details could turn out similar.

Reactions to Determinism: The Bell Curve

Though the general public often seems to be relatively more deterministic than the scientific community, their reactions to implications of determinism are often quite negative. Determinism seems to many people to imply a negation of egalitarian ideals. For example, The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, has provoked a storm of controversy because it is seen to conclude that real differences exist between the relative performances of different races on standard IQ tests. In addition, the book asserts that IQ is largely innate and cannot be altered significantly through intervening measures.

The Bell Curve certainly contained questionable statistical methods and unwarranted assumptions about the predictive validity of IQ tests. However, it is also true that even if a certain race or group was on average more or less intelligent than another, no predictions about any specific individual of any race or group would follow logically. Statistical averages are just that - averages. They do not apply in every case, and generally are just abstractions extracted from mounds of data, corresponding to no one particular person in reality.

A Better Metaphor

In his book The Moral Animal, evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright reveals a much better metaphor reflecting the relationship of genes to the final products we call human beings. He calls biologically determined aspects of human behavior the "knobs" of human nature, and environmental factors the forces responsible for "tuning" those knobs. In other words, all humans have the capacity for feeling guilt, but environmental variables determine when a person feels guilty and how strong the feeling is.

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Looking Further: Links and References

The following links and references are useful in the study of the theory and policy implications of biological determinism.

• Books
  • The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
  • The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
  • Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth by Claude S. Fischer et al
  • The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

• Websites
  • Genetic Determinism from Stormwind
  • What Your Genes Reveal About You by Richard Dawkins
  • How Do You Wear Your Genes? by Richard Dawkins
  • Thoughts on Cloning Humans by Richard Dawkins

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