The Nature V. Nurture False Dichotomy

[alanjjohnstone]

I found this video rather illuminating and simple to understand about genetics.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/this-video-dispels-every-nature-vs-nurture-myth-youve-ever-heard/

Very much supportive of our pamphlet on Genes

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/are-we-prisoners-our-genes

[moderator1]

That snippet is from TZM Moving Forward.

[alanjjohnstone]

There is even a snippet of that snippet doing the rounds on the internethttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Est6nay4Z5EI have suggested that we try the same with Kids Stuff…produce stand alone short clips from it

[DJP]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

I have suggested that we try the same with Kids Stuff…produce stand alone short clips from it

I think short clips are the way forward.This clip came through on my facebook feed this morning, not too bad if a little vague. Haven't watched the full film.http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-one-simple-truth-about-our-existence-that-everyone-needs-to-know/

[Anonymous]

ajj said in a recent post on Hunter-Gatherer Violence:    "This recently added video of a talk by WSPUS member, Karla Rab, may be of interest to some participants of this thread     …(and a    bit about language, too)     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8V4uV0_NxE"ajj, I hope you don’t mind that I have moved this youtube clip to this thread, as it is more appropriate to the nature v nurture argument.You say nature v nurture argument is a false dichotomy, and I agree.Perhaps, then, we are both in agreement with what Steve Jones says in “The Language of the Genes”:“Geneticists find queries about the importance of nature and nurture dull, for two reasons.  First, they scarcely understand the inheritance of complex characters (those, like height, weight or behaviour which are measured rather than counted) even in simpler beings like flies or mice and even with traits that are easy to define.  Second, and more important, geneticists know that the perpetual interrogation – gene or environment? – is often meaningless.  Its only answer is that there is no valid question.Although genetics is all about inheritance, inheritance is certainly not all about genetics.  Almost every attribute involves the joint action of the internal and the external world.  A characteristic such as intelligence (or height) is often seen as a cake ready to be sliced into so much nature’ and so much ‘nurture’.  In fact, the two are so closely blended that to separate them is like trying to unbake the cake.  A failure to understand this fact leads to confusion or worse.” (p 96)However, I think that in its eagerness to refute the “human nature” argument, the SP has gone too far to the other end of the argument.  The SP argument seems to be that once we get rid of capitalism, all the nastier side of human nature/behaviour will disappear like morning mist in sunshine.I do not think this is correct.If we listen to Karla’s talk, we will hear the standard SP arguments that we have heard many times before.  I do not disagree with all of them.For example, she says that human nature is extremely adaptable.  This is true.  Just look at the way we have adapted to life from the tropics to the Polar Regions, from the rain forests to arid deserts and high mountain regions.  Also, we are able to step straight from a Stone Age culture to a modern high tech society.  I have this picture in my mind from a TV documentary of a young member of a New Guinea tribe, whose parents used only stone tools – yet here he was filmed, nonchalantly hanging out of a town centre bus, talking on a mobile phone.  Moving from a simple technology culture to our own isn’t always without its difficulties, of course, as the problems in many Inuit and Australian aboriginal groups have shown.  But it can be done.She narrows the “human nature” components down to the bare bones; we learn to speak a language, we sleep at night and are awake in the day, we are social/gregarious animals, we have a distinctive human gait, we generally need help in childbirth.  Baring an upbringing which teaches us otherwise, we are generous, sharing, altruistic and emphatic – these tendencies disappear in children by the time they go to school, she says.  “Altruism goes out of the window by the time they go to school.”  I strongly disagree, which I will come to below.I think our natural behaviours are much more complex than the list she gives.  For all the positive traits she mentions, we can find examples of opposite ones; we are also stingy, greedy, unfeeling and sometimes violent.Children, far from starting out in life as emphatic, are not able to put themselves in somebody else’s place, to see the world from another’s vantage point, until they are about 6.  That is when a normally developing child will develop ‘theory of mind’.  As toddlers, children are extremely ego-centered, will not easily share, will have tantrums if they do not get their own way and will mostly play alongside other children, rather than interacting with them.  As parents, we have to teach them to share and all the other social niceties; this becomes easier once the ‘theory of mind’ milestone is reached.Empathy is a variable trait like any other, some people will be more emphatic than others, being able to gage the emotional state of other people with more ease, and be able to ‘feel their pain’, which is what empathy is – as opposed to just ‘sympathy’.  Some people at one end of the scale, psychopaths, have no empathy or conscience at all.  People with autism have difficulty with ‘theory of mind’, and with reading facial expressions, so often measure low on the empathy scale.  For the rest of the population, their ‘empathy quotient’, if you like, will vary from high to low.About 85/95% of all murders and virtually 100% of rapes are committed by men.  Imagine for a moment that this is not because we have been conditioned by capitalism, but that these are behaviours that come as baggage of our evolutionary past.Karla says that soldiers have to be trained to kill.  This is true, and many suffer trauma because of it, both in their training and in war situations.  But some do not.  I watched a WW2 documentary recently of how German commanders and soldiers went about their killing business in Eastern Europe.  They had orders to kill everyone, by whatever means, men, women and children.  Many suffered trauma as a result of what they had to do; this was close combat, face-to-face killings of the most brutal kind.  Hitler had to change his murderous methods because of the number of psychologically ruined young men that came back, and he came up with the gas chambers.  But some of the generals and soldiers went about their task with gusto.Karla, like many before her, makes much of the claimed similarity between humans and chimpanzees, particularly the peaceable bonobos.  Our genomes are about 98.6 % identical.  The remaining small percentage, though, can be responsible for huge differences, for many reasons; for example, the genes may be expressed differently and we now know that one gene can code for many different proteins.  Also, what was once considered “junk DNA” is gradually being analysed; some of it actually codes for useful things.The chimpanzee immune system, for example, is very different to ours.  You may remember some years back a group of young people were helping to evaluate a drug that had been previously tested on chimps.  The human subjects were give doses 500 times diluted from what the chimps were given; they all still got seriously ill and just about pulled back from death’s door.  The human and chimp lines diverged about 6 million years ago, that gives 12 million years’ worth of accumulating difference (counting down both branches).  There are claims that we have seen quite rapid human evolution since we became agriculturalists (only 10,000 years ago) , due in no small measure to the change in staple foods.I just wish than instead of looking to bonobos, or hunter gatherers, for examples of how humans could behave, we look at how humans actually do behave, here and now, as children and as adults.  The SP says it is all down to capitalist conditioning; I very much doubt that.  If all the bad behaviour we see is all due to capitalist conditioning, how come so many of us are displaying very caring and altruistic behaviour, how come so many were able to escape this “conditioning”?Do I therefore think that our human nature/behaviour precludes us being able to get rid of capitalism?  I do not.  I think our behaviour is ‘adequate’ to make such a change, providing we don’t think we are going to live in a utopian world where there is never going to be violence or murder, and providing we lean on and develop our "civilising" inventions, like some kind of system of socialist law.The SP should, I think be able to answer critics who say “what do we do about anti-social behaviour” with some more concrete proposals, rather than just refer to the “conditioning” of capitalism.

[alanjjohnstone]

i had no intention of being critical of a person's talk but what i found questionable was the exchange on cannibalism. I first heard the rationale about the lack of protein from some French (or was he Spanish) historian/anthropologist, forget his name or the book, it was a long time ago, and he tried to use the Aztec sacrifice and the preponderance of only maize in the diet to explain human sacrifice and cannibalism. Not sure but i think that interpretation has been challenged. Many cannibalistic traditions is in the form of religious ritual and shamanism..acquiring the power of another person etc, or so i have been led to believe. 

Quote:

Children, far from starting out in life as emphatic, are not able to put themselves in somebody else’s place, to see the world from another’s vantage point, until they are about 6.

 i am no expert on child psychology but the simple google search confirms your statement but adds a caveat, qualifying it 

Quote:

 but youngsters do have the emotional – rather than cognitive — ability to pick up on another child's feelings and match them with their own.

http://www.sesamestreet.org/parents/topics/getalong/getalong01But i repeat i have not read very much about it. I agree about how basic training and the dehumanisation of the enemy plus the fear of military disciplne turns ordinary ( but perhaps testosterone-high males) into killers.I recall reading Himmler visited the eastern front to inspect the slaughter of Jews and Communists and returned with the opinion that there has to be a better (sic) way…a less personal manner of extermination because ot it. But here the debate over Hitlers Willing Executioners is of interest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executionersi read about the Bonobo before…apparently aside from human females they are the only other species where females experience orgasms…(but have they tested dolphins, i ask you, eh?)I think we can all agree with your conclusion that we can generalise and accept the exceptions to the rule or a particular contradictory study and support the position that  basically human nature is not an obstacle to either establishing socialism or a socialist society's functioning. How we develop psychologically and socially once capitalism is ended , well, the science fiction writers such as Marge Piercy is better qualified to speculate.

[Anonymous]

I doubt that life in a hunter-gatherer society was always what it is sometimes cracked up to be, see my #257 on the Hunter Gatherer thread.  Granted, the Tierra del Fuego tribes mentioned were living at the extremes.    I think HG tribes often considered people in the next valley as non-human and therefore part of the wild life, to be hunted down if they got the chance.  Our "visceral insulation" may make it difficult for us to envisage this.  But I have a reading list to get through on HG's……….Great to see you quoting from a Sesamestreet website…

[Anonymous]

The last couple of sentences disappeared from my last post, I meant to ask you…….You did not state explicitly whether you agree with the SP case on "capitalist conditioning".  If you agree, how would you answer my question at the end of my paragraph third to last in my (previous to last) post?

[robbo203]

Meel wrote:

I doubt that life in a hunter-gatherer society was always what it is sometimes cracked up to be, see my #257 on the Hunter Gatherer thread.  Granted, the Tierra del Fuego tribes mentioned were living at the extremes.    I think HG tribes often considered people in the next valley as non-human and therefore part of the wild life, to be hunted down if they got the chance.  Our "visceral insulation" may make it difficult for us to envisage this.  But I have a reading list to get through on HG's…………

   (my bold) Hmmm. Don't know if I would go along with that, Meel….Ethnographic research in HG's societies like the '!Kung and the Australian Aborigines suggest otherwise – an elaborate support network consisting of  blood relatives and friends extending over literally hundreds of miles  ( Peter J. Richerson, Monique Borgerhoff  Mulder, and Bryan J. Vila, 1996. Principles of Human Ecology. Pearson      Custom Publishing, Part II, ch 3).  This was – is – not just a function of the normal process of fissioning, the break up of the hunter gatherer band into smaller units for environmental and social reasons, but also of course because of the operation of the incest taboo. Quote from the above: The !Kung, according to Polly Wiessner, used a gift exchange system to cultivate friendships with people in distant bands.Women exchanged fancy beadwork and men arrows. The Central Australians had elaborate “section” systems of extended kinship that classified marriage with allbut a few women as incestuous. Men might have travel hundreds of kilometers to find an eligible mate. According to Aram Yengoyan and Wiessner the effect of these institutions was to ensure that every family had friends and inlaws scattered everywhere.When subsistence or political problems occurred, people could seek aid from any of a number of kin or friends in a number of different environments Also , there is that recent notable study of violence in HG societies carried out by researchers from  the Abo Academy University in Finland which showed that such violence as there was,  was "driven by personal conflicts rather than large-scale battles" and  that "war is not an innate part of human nature, but rather a behaviour that we have adopted more recently" .  Using contemporary evidence  the research team looked at 148 documented cases of violent deaths.  Patrik Soderberg, one of the authors of the study, reported that:"Most of these incidents of lethal aggression were what we call homicides, a few were feuds and only the minority could be labelled as war..  Over half the events were perpetrated by lone individuals and in 85% of the cases, the victims were members of the same society."   ("Primitive human society 'not driven by war' ", BBC News: Science and Environment,  18 July 2013) The nomadic nature of HGs means that there was little reason to regard people in the next valley with animosity let  alone to "to be hunted down if they got the chance" since there was no real sense of territoriality among such groups.  On the contrary , there was probably far more reason for them to cooperate with their neighbours .in the next valley, some of whom would likely be individuals that once belonged to their own group…

[Anonymous]

I was trying to keep HGs out of this thread – my fault for mentioning them!  Robbo, I still have a lot of reading on HGs on the back burner – so will try to get round to it this summer.However….I still think that we rely too much on "proving" that either HGs – or bonobos – were/are peaceful, therefore we must be (innately?) peaceful, therefore socialism is possible.I am not at all sure about that line of reasoning.  Chimps/bonobos aren't all that close to us anyway, according to some recent reading I have done.***I can see that HGs living in harsh circumstances would have a harsher life style whereas others in more lush surroundings would not need to kill their grandmothers!  (Any idea why the Fuegians did not just move further north if their circumstances were so precarious, by the way?  Perhaps because HGs need quite a large area to gain their subsistence, and the land further north was already taken?)  I have no trouble agreeing with you that HGs weren't all, or "inherently" war-like, but remain to be convinced about men being violent to other men over women……***I think we ought to look at human behaviour in the present.  According to the SP, our behaviour is conditioned by capitalism.  If this is so, why do we find such varied behaviours; acts of incredible cruelty alongside acts of bravery and kindness?  There are wide differences of behaviours and personality types among children growing up in the same family.  Only today I read in the paper about a man who slung his 4 year old daughter off a cliff because he did not want to pay maintenance.  A day or two ago there was a story of a man found dead, he had killed himself after first killing his twins and their mother.  These stories of men killing their families appear quite regularly, it usually happens if the wife or partner has moved out to be with another man.  Mass killings, school killings etc., are virtually always carried out by young men.I no longer believe that capitalism "conditions" us into various personality types.  At the extremes, yes, conditions of life can impact on us – think children that grew up in the awful Romanian orphanages, child soldiers being brutalised in Africa, American marines going through their training.  I am convinced we are not born as "blank slates".  I don't think this needs to be a barrier to changing society – as long as we don't look for perfection, a utopia!Perhaps any other points about HGs perhaps should be raised on the other thread?  So, if anyone replies to the paragraph within the ***'s, could they raise it under the HG thread?

[Dave B]

I always find it a bit surprising when this kind of thing is discussed how little attention is paid to the opinions of the man himself, Darwin, as he sort covers all the bases. And even as just as a historical scientific document. CHAPTER III.COMPARISON OF THE MENTAL POWERS OF MAN AND THE LOWER ANIMALS—continued. http://darwin-online.org.uk/converted/published/1871_Descent_F937/1871_Descent_F937.1.html I sometimes think that I am only person to have read it; apart from fellow scientists like Panneokoek and Kropotkin. And an almost very modern sounding passage in retrospect slotted in by Karl into this in volume one; that can, at a bit of a stretch perhaps, be interpreted in a kind of ‘epigenetic’/ Pangenesis way, same thing, as outlined in that you-tube video. (It is good for me to now see ‘epigenetics’ and crypto Lamarkism gone mainstream.)  The Selection of dog nature into this is interesting and more than accidental I think; 50.Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man… https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm  It was fairly well understood then I think that dogs were one species having originated from wolves etc. And that they had been changed into a variety of forms by selective breeding for their various utilities. And Karl in a somewhat even pre genetic time seems to ‘suggest’ in this passage that there is a general dog nature and a general human nature. And  you could look at dog breeding as ‘epigenetic’ selection for the suppression and expression of genes rather than selecting for cosmic ray induced mutations? It is also pretty close in subject material and approach to Darwin’s “The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication” that whilst Darwindidn’t publish till just after Volume One he seems to have been tossing it around after a few years before. Was Karl really up to speed?  Eg  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Variation_of_Animals_and_Plants_under_Domestication The epigenticists are laughing now the classic Lancashiresoooty black specked moth thing that I was taught a school as cosmic ray mutation is now looking like bollocks. And we also have the woolly deep freeze mice phenomena that Rentokil are trying to exterminate. There was also incidentally a really interesting and detailed academic discussion document on primitive communism dating back to around the 3rdor 4thcentury written by some kind of ‘Jewish’ historian that I have, to my intense annoyance, lost.

[Anonymous]

Hi Dave BI'll try to find time to read your Darwin link – I read his "Expressions of the emotions in man and animals" quite a while ago, it was very good.Darwin was a product of his time – although against slavery, he was a believer in the civilising influence of the British and their empire.  And he thought his wife, Emma, was less intelligent than he was, and that all women trailed behind men in intelligence.  I know I read this recently, but cannot for the life of me remember where….  just a footnote, really, it doesn't detract from his theories.I'm not entire clear about how you link your comments to the previous discussion, though?Where do you stand on the claim that capitalism conditions our behaviour, for instance?

[Dave B]

I was I think picking from the you-tube video. One view is that we have genetic hardwired pre- dispositions towards certain kinds of behaviour, nature and not nurture; egregious or otherwise, depending on your view. Another is that we our blank slates and behaviour patterns and attitudes are just acquired as ‘aggregates of social relations’, nurture and not nature. And in fact hardwired nature does not exist at all! Another is that behaviour etc is an interaction rather than a composite of the two and they remain in essence mutually exclusive The recent proposition is that hardwired nature can be trans-generationally ‘nurtured’. Although it is early days yet, and I am open minded on it; as this Lamarkian heresy is only just recently out of the bag, there is already some intriguing results on experiments on aggression in male mice etc etc. I suppose standing back a bit and looking down on the ever changing ‘aggregates of social relations’ of fast breeding mice in humanly controlled experiments one might say what does it matter? So the social relations of mice are made stressful and competitive, with ‘interesting’ trans generational results, and then made less so to see what happens etc. But? Incidentally I have not doubt my blank slater friends are utterly doubly appalled at even conceiving of such an idea. I think capitalist and ruling class conditioning is generally not very imaginative and lazy; working with the raw material it finds itself with. Including basic Kantian like moral precepts. Eg Belgian babies on bayonets, right to protect humanitarian intervention and WMD’s. Kant is quite simple really. Why is the following universally funny; for most of us anyway?ReligionThe Ferengi concepts of the afterlife are a mirror of their pursuit of wealth in life. When a Ferengi dies, he is said to meet the Blessed Exchequer, who reviews the financial statements of that Ferengi's entire life. If he earned a profit, he is ushered into Ferengi heaven: the Divine Treasury, where the Celestial Auctioneers allow him to bid on a new life. Ferengi who were not financially successful in life are damned to the Vault of Eternal Destitution.When a Ferengi prays or bows in reverence, he holds his hands in a bowl shape with his wrists together. A typical Ferengi prayer begins with this phrase: "Blessed Exchequer, whose greed is eternal, allow this bribe to open your ears and hear this plea from your most humble debtor." As is typical, this is accompanied by placing a slip of latinum into a small statue made in the Exchequer's likeness  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi  I wasn’t trying to be sexists like the Ferengee with my ‘Man himself’ thing.    

[alanjjohnstone]

Meel, you previously asked a question but i had an enforced absence so apologies for not responding but the conversation i see has moved on. However for the record

Quote:

You did not state explicitly whether you agree with the SP case on "capitalist conditioning".  If you agree, how would you answer my question at the end of my paragraph third to last in my (previous to last) post?

The obvious anser is that there has to be very much more to human nature/behaviour than "capitalist conditioning" simply for the fact that capitalism didn't become the dominant social system until the 16/17th C. Other pre-capitalist relationships had their effect and as Marx said the "muck of ages" can persist long after the need for it. Attitudes of racism,sexism,etc etc despite being used by some for division are more undermined by capitalism itself. Our pamphlet on apartheid i think expressed it ..the belief in apartheid (and its ideology of racial superiority) had to fall for the benefit of capitalism to fully develop. I go along with the prevailing view that we have various genetical dispostions to certain ways of acting (both negative and positive) but that social/societal situations are required to trigger them.  i expect you have by now read the references to this reporthttp://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists

[robbo203]

This will be of interest to you, Meel -"Nature vs Nurture results in a draw, according to twins meta study http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-nature-nurture-results-twins-meta-study.html Coming from a family with two sets of twins – identical and fraternal – I can sort of relate to this…

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