Nature via Nurture: genes, experience and what makes us human, by Matt Ridley

Some of the worst intellectual extremism of the 20th century came from partisans in the 'nature vs nurture' debate. But current science, argues Colin Tudge, shows we don't need to choose

Friday 28 March 2003 20:00 EST
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Socrates suggested that we can arrive at truth only by dialogue: pitching one proposition against another. Karl Marx observed a couple of thousand years later that all life is dialogue. Ecology is dialogue: all discourse between human beings, all relationships between living things.

The dialogue begins within. As Matt Ridley beautifully describes in Nature via Nurture, our genes are in constant discussion with their surroundings. Genes are not, as the destructive metaphor has it, "blueprints", dispensing life's prescription from the sanctum of the nucleus. They are second-by-second active players, engaged in life's rough and tumble from the time of conception, and acutely alert to all that goes on around them.

So life is not nature (symbolised by the genes) versus nurture (the environment). Nature operates through nurture. Each gene has the potential to do its thing; but what it does, within any one person (or mushroom or oak tree) depends in large measure on what it is allowed to do, by other genes, the rest of the cell, the body and the environment at large. Our nature is realised, made manifest, via nurture.

The truth of this could be illustrated by a billion examples; Ridley provides a well-chosen score or so. Though twin studies have a slightly murky history, in modern hands they are highly instructive. Thus people commonly speak of the "cycle of violence". Children who were beaten up by their parents tend to beat up their own children – and it is largely taken for granted in this still Freudian age that each generation simply learns its bad habits from the one before.

But if one of a pair of identical twins from a violent home is adopted by kind, non-violent people, he or she is still likely to grow up as a child-beater. Yet the adopted twin is less likely to be violent than the one who stayed in the atmosphere of violence. The propensity for violence is to some extent innate – "in the genes" is a shorthand way to express it. But the propensity is modified by upbringing; and if the innate tendency is not too strong, it may never be manifest at all.

Such formal studies are costly and difficult. Yet, as Ridley says, the results seem common sense. Who doubts that "nature" and "nurture" both play their part? The idea resounds through all literature. In many a folk tale, the noble's son's nobility shows through, though he be dressed in peasant garb; and in many a movie, the killer cowboy is tamed by the love of a good widow woman, and the admiration of her freckly small son. Stories are stories, but they are not lies.

It's the task of experts and intellectuals to improve on folk wisdom. They tend first to suggest that common sense is a very poor guide, and then to adopt some extreme position that flies in the face of it. Society at large rewards extremism. But as extremism reigns, so humanity suffers.

The 20th century in particular suffered mightily from extreme positions in the "nature-nurture" debate. The "nature will out" school manifested as "genetic determinists", who include the eugenicists who thought it was proper to improve the human "stock" by selective breeding, as cattle are bred. Hitler made the nastiness apparent, but in the early 20th century eugenics was modish. It was espoused by such socialist luminaries as G B Shaw and the Webbs, while H G Wells effectively proposed the elimination of almost everybody who was not middle-class Caucasian. Eugenics was opposed in Britain by Catholic and high-church gentlemen like G K Chesterton and Conan Doyle, but many other countries (particularly the US) sterilised thousands deemed "inadequate".

As Ridley points out, the "environment is all" school can be equally violent. Stalin and Pol Pot, in their twisted versions of Marx, believed that anyone could be anything if only properly "conditioned". Less horrible but still sinister was the treatment handed out to Edward Wilson. He founded sociobiology – the notion that human predilections and aversions are to some degree inherited, and have evolved just as our bodies have evolved. Stated thus, the central premise seems undeniable, but it went against the political mood of the Eighties. When he prepared to debate at Harvard, he was douched in iced water.

One salutary feature of the "nature-nurture" debate that has so scarred the 20th century is how crude human beings can be. The extreme positions that we seem to find so attractive become dogma; and any perceived deviation – any attempt to examine it, with a view to improvement – is seen as heresy, and punished as absolutely as the society allows: the stake, the gas chamber, the electric chair, the glass of cold water in the face. In our love of dogma and our fear of heresy we have not advanced one whit since the Middle Ages.

There's a further twist. Some modern writers, like Steven Rose and Richard Lewontin, have emphasised the extreme influence of environment, and roundly condemned the sociobiologists' agenda. Others, like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker, are at least perceived as champions of the genes. But both schools insist that while they are able to see both sides, it's their opponents who are the dangerous extremists. Both sides have pointed out the supreme importance both of genes (nature) and of environment (nurture).

Ridley provides a series of quotes from all of the above (and others) and invites the reader to guess who wrote what. You can't tell. They all say the same thing. But it hasn't stopped them having a fine old battle. As they say in Yorkshire (and this might be the ultimate statement on human nature), "There's nowt so queer as folk."

The term "science writer" has an unfortunate ring: it seems to suggest a blend of amanuensis, slavishly recording whatever wisdom scientists dispense, with hard-nosed cynicism. But some science writers show that theirs is a noble and valuable craft; not simply communicating ideas, but also tidying them up, and often advancing them. Ridley belongs to the coterie that truly pushes science forward, and brings it within the broader purlieus of "culture". Nature via Nurture is another fine contribution to an already outstanding oeuvre.

Colin Tudge's book 'So Shall We Reap' will be published by Penguin later this year

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