Nature vs. Nurture

 A highly charged topic has, in the last few years, become very prominent among the interests of the laity who like to think about such matters. The topic is intelligence. Is intelligence hereditary or, to use another word for the same idea, genetic? Do different populations possess different IQs or g factors? I saw an interview with Douglas Murray in which he said that people would often come up to him after talks he'd given asking about intelligence, a question that made him uncomfortable – this suggests that the idea that people possess intrinsically different g factors has seized hold of the collective imagination. I suspect that the reason intelligence has become such a salient issue in many people's minds has a lot to do with an interview Sam Harris conducted with Charles Murray in 2017, viewable on Youtube under the title "Forbidden Knowledge". Murray had co-authored a book on intelligence variations between different populations, published in 1994; Harris has long felt that he has been been unfairly maligned (Ben Affleck called him a racist on Real Time with Bill Maher and Harris has never recovered from this) and justified his decision to interview Murray on the grounds that perhaps Murray had also been unfairly maligned. The interview is often cited by those who argue that different groups possess different intelligences. Another sign of how supposedly intrinsic intellectual differences have become a key concern among many people today is the success of the book The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits. Markovits argues that meritocratic systems inevitably promote inequality. I haven't actually read this book but, on my superficial understanding of it, its only possible conclusion runs as follows: either we fight inequality by abandoning the meritocratic ideal we have upheld for decades or we accept inequality as an inevitable byproduct of meritocracy. The first possible solution is embraced by factions of the Woke left while the alternative is espoused by the reactionary, bigoted right. The current internecine war being fought in the campuses and streets of America arises partly out of the tacit acceptance by both sides of the idea that intelligence is inborn and unalterable. It arises out of the current victory of 'nature' over 'nurture' as the governing idea behind human personality.

There are many reasons why the idea of intelligence as a fixed, measurable attribute of human minds has come to dominate political and social discussions. Perhaps the most important is the ascension of evolutionary psychology as the most popular paradigm within the social sciences. When I was first a university student, some twenty years ago, the dominant paradigm was postmodernism; when I returned to study at the University of Auckland English Department over the summer of 2017 and 2018, I was put with a supervisor, Brian Boyd, who had leapt aboard the evolutionary psychology bandwagon and had sought to explain narratives in terms of a kind of evolved, adaptive play. The shift from postmodernism to evolutionary biology can be traced to the influence of Richard Dawkins and to works like The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a book that contrary to its title is concerned with 'nature' over 'nurture' and which was first published in 2002. Many people are put into a paradoxical position with respect to intelligence. On the one hand, if intelligence is genetic and if Darwinism is true, different populations must have different intelligences because otherwise there is no variation on which natural selection can act: if intelligence evolved, different groups must have had different IQs. On the other hand, good liberals wish devoutly to deny that different groups have different g factors. In an interview with Coleman Hughes, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein tries to defend this self-contradictory position, declaring both views at once. (It can be found under the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtOtJFmwpq4.) It seems to me that Weinstein is displaying bad faith. Even as he seeks to argue that variations between groups are somehow unimportant when it comes to intelligence, he presents the view that differences in athletic ability are indeed genetic and do indeed vary between groups. It can't be racist to say that black people are born predisposed to be better at basketball than white people, or that Kenyans and Ethiopians are born genetically superior at marathon running! But of course it is. There is, in truth, no significant average difference between the heights and athletic abilities of blacks and whites – rather, for cultural reasons, black people feel encouraged to pursue careers in basketball more than white people, and this accounts for the apparent difference in participation between the two groups. Instead of presenting a hopelessly muddled attempt to marry evolutionary theory with good liberalism when it comes to intelligence, Weinstein should simply admit that intelligence isn't genetic.

The question of whether intelligence is the result of nature or nurture can be explored with respect to myopia. According to the Wikipedia article on the g factor, a high g score is positively correlated with short-sightedness. If we were to be strict evolutionary biologists, we would be forced then to suppose that the genes that influence intelligence are on the same chromosome and near the genes that cause myopia. But the idea that myopia is genetic is nonsense. Yes, it is true that the Wikipedia article on myopia attributes short-sightedness to a "combination of genetic and environmental factors" (the articles on homosexuality and schizophrenia say the same thing) but a fair reading of the article strongly suggests that myopia is wholly caused by environmental determinates. Consider the alternative. Myopia affects roughly fifteen per cent of the world's human population: if it were genetic, it would have evolved hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of eyeglasses even though it has no adaptive value, in fact would be deleterious to survival in hunter-gatherer times. As with homosexuality, it makes no evolutionary sense to see myopia as some kind of adaption. Rather, the truth is that myopia is a result of children ruining their eyesight by reading too much and spending too much time inside in front of TV and computer screens – it is a consequence of nurture rather than nature. If there is a correlation between g and myopia, it is simply that intelligent people read a lot when they were young. This raises another question. Are intelligent children more likely to read a lot, or does reading a lot when young make a person intelligent? Which came first – the smarts or the books? I believe the latter came first, that intelligence is the result of a lively curiosity combined with the opportunity to feed that curiosity. Interestingly, Bret Weinstein's wife Heather Heying, in one of the Dark Horse podcasts, comes close to saying the same thing.

And now we come to a second important point. How do we measure g? If g is innate and unalterable, differences in g should be evident in childhood. I would like to tell a couple of stories from my own childhood that indicate indirectly the problem with the idea that g can be accurately assessed. I remember, when I was five, a trainee teacher trying to teach a group of us that half of ten was five. I argued emphatically, at the time, that half of ten was five and a half. My logic was impeccable – 5 1/2 is exactly halfway between 1 and 10. The flaw in my logic was that you need to start with 0.  5 is exactly halfway between 0 and 10. But the poor trainee teacher was completely incapable of spotting the flaw in my logic and pointing this out to me. When I was eleven, my class sat a kind of mathematics test. The test was divided into six levels of difficulty: if you passed levels 1 through 3 and failed levels 4 through 6, you were awarded a 3. A day or so after we did the test, my teacher laughingly informed the whole class that I had passed levels 2 though 6 and failed level 1.

The truth is that there are many different types of cognitive task and that we can improve our performance in a particular task through learning, through teaching ourselves, that domain specific intelligence is neither fixed nor unchangeable. For close to twenty years, I have been doing the daily cryptic crossword in the Herald. When I first attempted the crossword some twenty years ago, I would struggle to fill in a couple of answers. Today I can usually complete it in about twenty minutes. Consider driving. Driving is a skill we acquire through lessons and practice. If we accept the "massive modularity hypothesis" of evolutionary psychology, we might suppose that there is a 'car-driving module" in the mind or brain. But this would be absurd. Driving has only been common for the last hundred years, far too short a period of time for evolution to have had any effect. And it does not seem to me that there is any evolutionary pressure selecting for better drivers over worse ones. The ability to drive well is acquired through practice. Not only is the brain plastic enough to continually learn new skills, the skills we have can be continually improved through learning. The more IQ tests we do, the better we get at IQ tests. Today I was thinking about birds. If we accept the tenets of evolutionary psychology, we might suppose that there is a 'flying module' in the mind or brain of a bird, that flying is an instinct, but in fact it is quite possible that we are wrong. It might be that birds, finding themselves with wings in the world, teach themselves to fly.

So far in this post I have been focussing on intelligence, arguing for nurture over nature. At this point I would like to turn to a topic I discussed in the previous post, the causes of schizophrenia. In that previous post, I stated that the cause of schizophrenia is different for every person to whom the label has been applied, and I would like to elaborate on this. For a number of years, I have talked to many men and women diagnosed schizophrenic; all of them have some theory as to the cause of their specific 'illness'. One woman,  Clare, attributed her illness to 'adverse experiences' when she was young. She did not spell it out, but I speculate that she might have been sexually abused. Another patient, Robert, told me that he believed the cause of his illness was 'hormonal changes' when he was a teenager. Yet another, Seamus, strongly believes that his illness was caused by illegal drugs, methamphetamine and magic mushrooms. A fourth, Madeleine, told me that the cause of her illness was her mother, who she believed to be a narcissist (in its clinical definition). I have only met one patient who attributed his illness, in his case bipolar disorder, to a neurotransmitter imbalance; this patient, Jeremy, was a student of microbiology and genetics. In passing one day, he talked about his birth-parents and I asked him, "Are you adopted?" He said he was and went on to say, after I asked him about it, that he had always known he was adopted. He did not seem to connect his bi-polar disorder with the fact of his adoption. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me, if not to Jeremy himself, that the root cause of his illness is low self-esteem resulting from his knowledge that he is genetically unrelated to the people who had raised him. (In support of this hypothesis, I direct the reader to the story "Good Ol' Neon" by David Foster Wallace.) In my case, I had incurred a vulnerability to psychosis as a consequence of my parents' divorce when I was seven and had become psychotic, to put it perhaps too simplistically, in 2007 because a rumour had got around some of the people I knew that I was gay when I'm not. 

Every person has a different story to explain his or her own life. However, if you talk to many people who work in the Mental Health System and even many ordinary people, you find that the true stories people tell about why they have become ill tend to go unacknowledged, ignored. The cause of mental illness is usually attributed to bad genes or to a combination of environment and bad genes. This raises a serious problem. If the root cause of serious mental illness is genetic, if we suppose DNA outweighs experience as a causal factor, there is no way to treat these conditions, they can only be compared to type-1 diabetes.  If we suppose, by contrast, that life-experiences and situations trigger episodes of mental illness, conditions like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder can instead be construed as temporary deviations away from a healthy norm – treatment (in the form of talk therapy rather than medication) and perhaps full recovery become real possibilities. A sufferer needs to identify and articulate the particular, idiosyncratic causes of his or her illness and he or she needs to be understood by those treating him or her before any kind of help can be given. In the song 'Albertine', Brooke Frasier sings the Catholic credo from James 2:24 "Faith without deeds is dead" – I feel that, analogously, compassion without understanding is dead. One can't have real compassion for a person if one fails to understand that person. It is partly because of the situation I have been trapped in for so long, treated by people who think recovery is impossible, that I so strongly favour nurture over nature.

In this post, I have criticised evolutionary psychology and the idea that faculties and behaviours are congenital, genetic, rather than acquired. I have been thinking about evolutionary biology for years now, and the more I have thought about it, the more I have come to the conclusion that it is bullshit. For instance, I believe that the Darwinian motto "Survival of the Fittest" could and perhaps should be replaced with the motto "Survival of the Luckiest". But this is an idea I will have to explore more full in a later post. In the meantime, stay well and be good.