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Part I
Pathways to the present
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1
Envisioning Evolution
Representations of humanness and causation
Narratives about a dark, self-interested human nature call for a forbidding prehistoric world. Its inhabitants consist of energetic, menacing males who range around in the open while a few idle females huddle in caves looking after a string of babies. Their circumstances are grim: food is scarce in the hot savannah, predators and murderers lurk everywhere, and warfare knocks down those who have not already succumbed to disease, starvation, or violent death. There are no governments, police forces, or prisons to maintain order. Together the people and setting add up to short lives, social stratification, gender inequalities, and relentless violence.
This primordial scenario leads to seemingly self-evident conclusions, such as the idea that humans are born territorial and fearful of strangers, or that groups naturally organize around male relatives and their respective families – ready armies for the all-out warfare. It follows that this in-the-wild humanness has reached us through genes that orchestrate our every movement, but whose controlling role may be clouded by the distorting influence of civilization. In other words, nature and culture are separate things.
Alternatives exist: the noble savage, Adam and Eve before the Fall, the innocence of babes. These images of original goodness suggest that there may be more to human nature than cruel origins and a competitive-individualist nature. Casual observation shows that most behavior within and across societies is prosocial or at least neutral instead of antisocial, and that genetic expression is contingent and complicated. Mutual unconditional love and shared responsibility within families provides an antimodel for the collision-of-wills version of human relationships. “Modern” culture continues to connect humans, nature, and the supernatural through the mystical qualities assigned to power foods, weather events, and restorative travel destinations, in spite of a scientific rationality that allegedly dis-enchanted the landscape centuries ago. Medical procedures such as blood and organ transfer blur the boundaries separating bodies, digital information storage decenters and collectivizes knowledge, and mounting evidence shows that everything from habits to happiness moves through social networks.
Nonetheless, primitive individualism remains a dominant vision of humanness. It has informed Western government, philosophy, and science for many centuries.1 Economic theories presume individual responsibility and rational self-interest; political systems promise to subdue natural anarchy. By now, the idea of a genetically determined essence rooted in the faraway past is practically invisible as an indisputable truth rather than a culturally specific idea.
How we think about humanness matters for science, policy, and personal life. The following chapters trace some of the implications in relation to a set of interrelated themes concerning health, human differences, and conflict. This chapter lays the groundwork by identifying dominant ideas about evolution and causation through some of their surface manifestations, and examining the process by which conceptual categories shape perceptions of the world and its meaning.2
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As a cultural symbol, the gene plays momentous roles: psychic and sage, designer and destroyer. Genes give some people poverty, negativity, or chemical dependency; to others they grant happiness, leadership, or scientific proficiency. The complete gene set is construed as each person’s immortal essence, a blueprint or instruction manual that determines everything and is passed on intact from one generation to the next – as if the crossing-over and re-assortment that occur during meiosis did not shuffle genes, scramble chromosomes, and yield genetically unalike half-full sex cells. With its transcendent qualities and its status as the true, unadulterated distillation of individual identity, DNA is contemporary culture’s incarnation of the soul.
Although the Human Genome Project has shown otherwise (Commoner 2002), DNA continues to be depicted as an autonomous determining force which neither errs nor lies, unlike the outward actions and phenotypic traits of living things. Scientific and popular reports celebrate the sequencing of one after another organism’s genome, as if the truth about them were now being brought to light once and for all. Even the dead must give up their secrets, such as the 15th century English King, Richard III, whose DNA is being sequenced at the University of Leicester.
Visual representations of DNA, customarily described as “maps,” imply mastery of a territory. They suggest control over DNA, the chief orchestrator controlling us. In a vision popularized by Richard Dawkins (1976), this everlasting material essence only temporarily resides in individual bodies, which it uses for its own ends. People are just players in Nature’s evolutionary drama, our movements the result of subterranean selective pressures and the compulsion to replicate our genes.
The narrative of genetic essentialism lends a grandiosity to DNA’s powers that is reminiscent of religious accounts of the divine. The gene gives meaning to misfortune, explains why some individuals are more privileged than others, and holds the truth about human nature. It is no accident that genome sequencing is described as reading the mind of God, revealing God’s secrets, and cracking God’s code. As then-President Bill Clinton said at a White House event celebrating the sequencing of “the” human genome, “Today we are learning the language in which God created life” (New York Times 2000). Alternatively, knowledge and manipulation of DNA is criticized as “playing God”; to creationists, evolution is a fabrication, a form of trickery, an affront to the sacred.
The attribution of mystical qualities to DNA is apparent in advertising, the media, and everyday conversations that depict the gene as the essence of the individual and the engine of the living world. For instance, Pandora Media’s (2016) Music Genome Project© selects playlists for clients based on analysis of their unique music-DNA. The company’s official website explains that Pandora means “all gifted” in Greek, and that music from Apollo was one of several gifts the inquisitive maiden received from the gods. The chairman of the company is its “chief evangelist.” This set of symbols and meanings suggests that the product delivers not only individualized attention but also edification through a felicitous blend of spiritual redemption, scientific ingenuity, and ancient wisdom.
While all humans’ nearly identical DNA could be celebrated as a source of unity, the minute differences tend instead to be amplified in constructions of DNA as the reason for people’s appearance and behavior, ancestry and destiny. Genes are credited with giving people special talents and determining their success or failure. Alternatively, genes may be invoked to absolve the individual of responsibility, as in the case of disease or deviant behavior. Either way, genetic essentialism makes learning and social context irrelevant. Nature and nurture, biology and environment, appear to be separate and distinct influences on development.
The idea that genes “for” particular traits ineluctably will reveal themselves sooner or later is buttressed by technological feats such as the high-fidelity storage of information in the form of DNA. Nick Goldman et al. (2013) have translated Shakespeare’s sonnets, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches, and other documents from computer to nucleotide code, replicated the DNA strands, and translated the copies back to English. While the work showcases the quality of DNA as an information storage and replication system, it also seconds the prevalent notion that there is no interference between code and message, DNA and trait.
Media coverage disproportionately showcases studies that appear to demonstrate the existence of a “gene for” a particular attribute, and downplays multiple-gene causes and gene-environment interactions. For instance, a study reporting that a particular gene variant is associated with a higher likelihood of depression, provided it is combined with psychosocial stress, is announced with the headline, “Depression Gene Really Exists, New Study Claims” (Pappas 4 January 2011). Alternatively, there is a gene for joy: “‘Happiness Gene’ Discovered” (Adams 2011).
Even marital faithfulness appears to depend on a gene: “‘Fidelity Gene’ Found in Voles” (Kettlewell 2004). This story refers to manipulation of genes affecting vasopressin receptors in montane moles, which results in more trust and approach behavior. The voles behave similarly to prairie voles in that they form “monogamous” pair bonds instead of mating “promiscuously.” Correlations between men’s responses to a survey that included questions about intimate relationships, and the number of vasopressin-receptor gene copies they carry, are taken as proof that the same mechanism explains human marital fidelity: “Monogamy Gene Found in People” (Shetty 2008).
Other genes cause people to be rash and reckless: “Male Impulsivity and Addiction Linked to One Gene” (Pappas 18 November 2011). Yet others make people destined for crime: “Life of Crime Is in The Genes, Study Claims” (Telegraph 2012); “Can Your Genes Make You Murder?” (Hagerty 2010). These stories have a concrete impact. Judges and juries have demonstrated more leniency towards violent criminals who carry gene variants associated with a higher frequency of violence, such as a variant of the gene for monoamine oxidase A that, however, correlates with increased violence only if combined with stressful life circumstances (Aspinwall et al. 2012). Evidently, it is assumed that these genes make criminals incapable of exercising free will and moral responsibility and therefore that they should be punished less severely, even though the same logic of hardwiring suggests that these criminals are destined to repeat violent behavior and consequently should be subjected to stricter sentencing.
Political sympathies too would seem to come down to the genes: “Political Beliefs May Be Rooted in Genetics, Study Says” (Castillo 2012), and “Could Your Genes Influence How You Vote?” (Storrs 2012). This idea is based on twin studies, the source of data for many claims about the genetic determination of behavioral and cognitive traits. Researchers compare the scores of fraternal and identical twins on tests or surveys and attribute differences between the two groups’ results to an inferred genetic mechanism. Castillo (2012) quotes an expert observer as stating that beliefs about issues including abortion and the death penalty are “strongly rooted in genetics. These are attitudes towards reproduction and survival.”
Based on higher levels of agreement between identical than fraternal twins on 28 statements concerning social issues, political scientists John R Hibbing et al. (2013) conclude that political orientation is in the genes. While media reports imply that party affiliation is genetic, they favor the idea of a “political phenotype” or “predisposition” to view issues a particular way. In a study comparing levels of agreement with 28 statements concerning social issues such as taxes, pornography, and unions, they found a 53% genetic component for statements overall versus a 14% genetic component for party affiliation. The authors suggest that people’s genetically determined social orientation towards either conservatism or progressivism is the reason why some individuals change party affiliation: they only overcome the environmental influence of being raised in a politically mismatched family after achieving independence in adulthood. The authors add that the growing polarization of gene pools owing to the tendency for people to choose ideologically similar spouses is the reason for the increasingly degraded tone of political debate and campaigning.
These far-reaching conclusions are drawn from modest data which have been generated through questionnaires rather than laboratory studies. The authors admit that most participants in the study did not answer consistently one way or the other across all the questions but rather had a slight bent towards conservative or progressive views. In addition, the level of agreement between fraternal twins was far from zero, while the level of agreement between identical twins was far from complete – as in the 0.46 versus 0.66 correlations for fraternal versus...
