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DNA is not destiny

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February 19, 2012

Nick Miller
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1 Schapelle Corby: Belief
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New York philosopher Jesse Prinz believes we are the product of our environment, not our genes. Photo: Dan
Callister

'THEY f--- you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the
faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.''
Philip Larkin's best-known poem sets the scene for one of the most hard-fought, even
acrimonious disputes in science. Ten years ago, the human genome crumbled into its
component parts. Here, we were told, was the blueprint for humanity. A child is a recipe written
at conception, pre-programmed with the genes for cancer, the genes for depression, obesity,
politics and sexuality, lives laid out in advance, assembling themselves in stop-motion as we
helplessly watch.
But New York philosopher Jesse Prinz wants to call a halt to the ''century of the gene''. In a new
book, Beyond Human Nature, he gathers the arguments of a growing number of scientists who
take the side of nurture against nature, in a backlash against the tyranny of DNA.

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As hard as it might be for parents to hear, he says, the evidence actually suggests that most of
their child's abilities, personality and future success depend on how and where they are raised.
Prinz is unmissable in the crowded Manhattan cafe where we meet. A mutual acquaintance
challenged me not to mention his hair in print but I have to; it's a faint pink (unlike the bright blue
it was a few months ago). He literally wears on his head a rejection of genetic determinism.

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''There was a sense that we were being seduced,'' he says of the recent flood of publications
from human naturists (as opposed to nurturists). ''But there was also a sense that we were
missing out on the most interesting aspect of the human story.''
Prinz, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, speaks at a million miles an
hour with a persuasive power that surely harks back to his grandfather, a rabbi from Nazi Berlin
who spoke out against Hitler, moved to the States and became an activist and one of the
organisers behind Martin Luther King jnr's march on Washington.
Prinz, of course, dislikes such pat genetic explanations. He is proud of his parents but he
prefers to see his own personality and interests as being shaped by being raised by his
intellectual, art-loving family rather than by grand-parental DNA.

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''I think a lot of what we call personality has to do with just the things that excite us in life,'' he
says. ''You might appear to be totally unmotivated, sluggish, bored if you are surrounded by
things that don't interest you. You might appear as an extrovert who's open to new experiences
if you are surrounded by the things that you like.''

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To understand what Prinz is reacting against, it's worth rewinding a bit. Ten years ago, scientist
and author Steven Pinker wrote a bestseller called The Blank Slate, in which he set out the
arguments for a genetically programmed human nature.
''What is the best predictor that a person will become schizophrenic? Having an identical twin
who is schizophrenic,'' Pinker wrote. ''Not societal stress or schizophrenogenic mothers.''

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Pinker wielded the formidable weapon of the scientific study of identical twins: genetically
identical beings.
''Identical twins, whether separated at birth or not, are eerily alike in just about any trait one can
measure - verbal, mathematical and general intelligence, in their degree of life satisfaction,
personality traits such as introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and
openness to experience,'' he wrote. ''They have similar attitudes towards controversial issues
such as the death penalty, religion and modern music. They resemble each other in gambling,
divorcing, committing crimes, getting into accidents and watching television. They even boast
dozens of shared idiosyncrasies such as giggling incessantly, giving interminable answers to
simple questions, dipping buttered toast in coffee and writing indistinguishable syndicated
advice columns.''
Twins studies are a powerful tool. By comparing twins with their siblings, scientists have
created numbers that measure the ''heritability'' of a trait - the degree to which it seems to pass
from parents to child. One of the ''converts'' to this field, known as behavioural genetics, is
Geoffrey Miller, associate professor at the University of New Mexico. Miller genuinely believes
behavioural genetics, along with evolutionary psychology (which explores ancient humanity for
the evolutionary pressures that shaped modern human nature), will permanently rewrite the
psychology textbooks.
''I felt like it was the most powerful way of looking at human nature and human behaviour that I
had encountered and I still think that's the case,'' he says.
He says twins research, which has really taken off in the past 10 to 20 years, has established
that virtually every aspect of personality is heritable.
For example, genetic differences account for about 50 per cent of the difference in general
intelligence between children. This actually increases to 80 per cent by old age, Miller says,
because higher intelligence tends to reinforce itself by driving inquiry but low intelligence will lead
us to ''watch reality TV, not read books and go to NASCAR races''.

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Then there is personality, often broken down by psychologists into separate traits such as
extroversion, agreeableness or emotional stability. They turn out to be ''moderately heritable'',
Miller says, somewhere between 30 and 60 per cent, depending on which trait.

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The rest doesn't necessarily come from the family home, Miller says. ''What you often find is
family environment explains 10 to 20 per cent of the remainder [with the rest] basically noise,
random effects.''

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Behavioural geneticists become ever bolder in what they believe genes can influence in our
nature. Some studies show heritability in religiosity - how strongly you believe, how often you
pray. Other show heritability in political attitudes, whether you incline to liberalism or
conservatism. Even getting divorced seems determined by your DNA. As is being a psychopath.
''I think the important thing is for parents to recognise that they aren't at fault [if they happen to]
raise a psychopath - though they might have been at fault in choosing the wrong mate,'' Miller
says. But should this inspire despair? Doesn't it mean we can't improve our kids, that the die is
set?
''If you're single, it's great news,'' he says. You just need to choose the right mate. It also means
parents can relax: ''You feed them and they will grow you're not going to be able to change
their basic intelligence or personality very much.''
It even has implications for the education system. ''I think the US is wasting hundreds of billions
of dollars a year trying to give university educations to young people who can't actually handle
university,'' Miller says.
This is where we need to turn back to Prinz. Because this kind of talk really makes him mad.
''I think the claims being made are often irresponsible and dangerously so,'' he says. ''If you
really thought there were biologically based differences in intelligence, the thing you should
promote is IQ enhancement through education, because this would equalise the differences.
The people who believe in genetic differences in intelligence often oppose affirmative action but

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it seems like they really should be the biggest supporters of affirmative action.''
Prinz says people who argue for these biological stories often feel persecuted by the ''political
correctness police'' and accused of supporting eugenics.
But they're not necessarily bad, he says. Just wrong.
For a start, in Beyond Human Nature, he mounts a rigorous attack on the twins studies that are
the backbone of the naturist argument. ''The heritability numbers are meaningless,'' he says.
The same mathematics would tell you that girls wearing pink or women wearing lipstick were
heritable traits.
The deeper problem is that the separated twins used in the studies are often raised in very
similar social and economic families - adoption agencies work hard to make this happen - so
naturally the effects of environment will be hard to spot. And when scientists are comparing
identical twins with their siblings, they fail to recognise that identical twins are treated far more
similarly to non-identical siblings.
What about the amazing stories of coincidences between long-separated twins, the strange
parallels in behaviour, of lives that seem to have been almost mystically connected? Surely
that's genetic? Well, no, Prinz says. He likens the meeting of long-lost siblings to a first date,
when we go through our interests and preferences and fixate on the similarities while brushing
over the differences.
''It's like those moments when you hit on, 'Oh you like jazz, too' - suddenly this becomes a
justification for your attraction and you can say, 'We have so much in common','' Prinz says.
''But any two randomly selected individuals will have lots of very random things in common.''
So what does make us who we are? Family, school, friends and most importantly the culture we
are raised in, he believes.
A lot of Prinz's arguments come from the relatively unploughed field of cultural psychology. If
genes are so powerful, he asks, how come different cultures seem to cause such strong
differences in our behaviour?
There are some astonishing examples. People raised in Western countries tend to see the
trees before the forest, while people from the Far East see the forest before the trees. In southeast Asia, there is a common form of mental illness, unheard of here, in which people go into a
trance-like state after being startled.
One of Prinz's favourite examples involves Australian women. Researcher Stanley Milgram ran
a famous series of tests in which he assessed people's level of obedience to authority by
making them think they were electrocuting people by following an experimenter's instructions.
''He showed that 65 per cent of Americans were willing to administer what they believed to be a
lethal dose of electricity on a stranger [and] the assumption was that he had discovered a
human universal, that human beings are, in general, extremely obedient,'' Prinz says.
''Well, the same study, or a version of it, was run in Australia and the average level of obedience
dropped down to 40 per cent and if you looked at Australian women, they were obeying authority
to this extreme only about 10 per cent of the time. You can tell something about the spirit of
independence and defiance and mistrust of authority [in Australia]; it's deeply entwined in the
culture.''
And perhaps most astonishingly, the language we speak seems to determine our very thoughts.
This is the part of Prinz's book that is likely to offend the most scientists, who believe we have
inherited a part of the brain primed to learn language - and they use that as a wedge to argue
how other parts of our genetic inheritance can explain our behaviour.
Prinz believes the evidence points the other way - that babies are born ''profoundly dumb
less like their parents and more like the family pet''. But they have big brains that can spot all
sorts of patterns in the world and if one of those patterns consists of grown-ups constantly
trying to communicate with them, they're going to pick it up. ''There is not a single way of
thinking shared by all human beings - a universal logic of thought. Rather, there are different
thinking styles that emerge though enculturation,'' Prinz argues. ''One thing really striking me
about research on human behaviour is we have this very obvious variable, we have a very good
understanding of how it works, it's very easy to measure and it's hugely influential, namely
culture. But instead of going for it we tend to look for something biological.
''It's as if, when somebody has a gun to their head and they hand over their wallet to a mugger,
we ignore the gun and say, 'Oh they must have been biologically disposed to be charitable', to
give over their money to strangers.
''Well, no, they had a gun to their head, there's a glaring variable in their environment.''
This has considerable consequences, Prinz says. It means we can, and must, do more to help

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the disadvantaged, especially when young enough to overcome their initial deprivation.
Anyone can turn out bad if their environment is bad. ''Patterns of poverty, of alcoholism, of
deprivation of opportunity are going to be much bigger players in governing whether somebody
in a biologically isolated group ends up committing acts of abuse,'' Prinz says.
But also, it means the least promising student may, in the right environment, given the right help,
outperform any son or daughter of privilege - studies show that IQ increases three points for
every year of schooling, that a 15-point IQ difference can be cut in half by four years of
university. It means our personality and intelligence grow as a result of how our parents treat us,
how much they speak to us, how much they encourage us to embrace new experiences, how
they deal with anxiety in front of us.
''Parents are, in the early years of life, the most important factor in determining intelligence
outcomes, because they have so much control over a child's environment,'' Prinz says.
''Parents [should] give their children challenging problems, convey an excitement about learning
by modelling that enthusiasm, put a child in contact with materials of instruction that are
stimulating.''
The scientific debate goes on. But what does a parent make of all this? I thought I should go and
ask one. So I spoke to my friend Hayley, who in 2010 had a beautiful daughter called Betty. And I
filled Hayley in on some of the high points of Prinz's research.
The first reaction was comedy. After all, what do you expect a mother to do when told how vitally
important talking to a young child is for their future academic achievement?
But after some introspection, Hayley emailed me this: ''If science was to prove that pretty much
personality was created from our environment I think I would feel surprised and annoyed. I'm
constantly beating myself up about something so finding out that her personality is all 'up to
me' is not comforting.
''If we were to find out that it was all genes then I think I would feel more comforted by that.
''I would still beat myself up about all those things but I wouldn't feel like I was failing her as
much.''
But, Hayley says, she doesn't think any of this will change the way she raises her daughter.
''I'm curious what creature she turns into but at the moment I'm enjoying the ride, watching her
grow and taking the cues off her. And telling her that's she's OK - and loved.''

Beyond Human Nature by Jesse Prinz is published in Australia next month by Penguin.
Hardback rrp $45
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