Transcript for Zeitgeist: Moving Forward - The Genetic Argument (Snippet)

So you're a scientist, and ...

somewhere along the way, hammered into your head

is the inevitable “nature versus nurture”

and that's at least up there with Coke versus Pepsi

or Greeks versus Trojans.

So, nature versus nurture: This, by now

utterly over-simplifying view of

where influences are-

influences on how a cell deals with

an energy crisis up to

what makes us who we are on the most individualistic

levels of personality.

And what you've got is this complete false dichotomy

built around nature as deterministic

at the very bottom of all the causality.

Of 'life is DNA' and the 'code of codes'

and the Holy Grail, and everything is driven by it.

At the other end is a much more social science perspective

which is: We are 'social organisms'

and biology is for slime molds;

humans are free of biology.

And obviously both views are nonsense.

What you see instead is that

it is virtually impossible to understand how biology works

outside of the context of environment.

[ It's Genetic ]

One of the most crazy making yet widespread

and potentially dangerous notions is:

“Oh, that behavior is genetic.”

Now what does that mean? It means all sorts of subtle stuff if you

know modern biology, but for most people out there

what it winds up meaning is:

a deterministic view of life,

one rooted in biology and genetics.

Genes equal things that can't be changed.

Genes equal things that are

inevitable and that you might as well

not waste resources trying to fix,

might as well not put societal energies into trying to improve

because it's inevitable and it's unchangeable.

And that is sheer nonsense.

[ Disease ]

It is widely thought that

conditions like ADHD are genetically programmed,

conditions like schizophrenia are genetically programmed.

The truth is the opposite. Nothing is genetically programmed.

There are very rare diseases, a small handful,

extremely sparsely represented in the population,

that are truly genetically determined.

Most complex conditions

might have a predisposition that has a genetic component,

but a predisposition is not the same as a predetermination.

The whole search for the source of diseases in the genome

was doomed to failure before anybody even thought of it,

because most diseases are not genetically predetermined.

Heart disease, cancer, strokes,

rheumatoid conditions, autoimmune conditions in general,

mental health conditions, addictions-

none of them are genetically determined.

Breast cancer, for example. Out of 100 women with breast cancer

only seven will carry the breast cancer genes.

93 do not.

And out of 100 women who do have the genes

not all of them will get cancer.

[ Behavior ]

Genes are not just things that make us behave in

a particular way regardless of our environment.

Genes give us different ways of responding to our environment.

And in fact it looks as if some of the early

childhood influences and the kind of child rearing,

affect gene expression:

actually turning on or off different genes

to put you on a different developmental track

which may suit the kind of world you've got to deal with.

So for example,

a study done in Montreal with suicide victims

looked at autopsies of the brains of these people.

And it turned out that if a suicide victim

(these are usually young adults)

had been abused as children, the abuse actually

caused a genetic change in the brain

that was absent in the brains of people who had not been abused.

That's an epigenetic effect.

“Epi” means on top of, so that

the epigenetic influence is what happens

environmentally to either activate or deactivate certain genes.

In New Zealand, there was a study

that was done in a town called Dunedin,

in which a few thousand individuals

were studied from birth into their 20s.

What they found was that they could identify

a genetic mutation- an abnormal gene-

which did have some relation to

the predisposition to commit violence,

but only if the individual had also

been subjected to severe child abuse.

In other words, children with this abnormal gene

would be no more likely to be violent than anybody else,

and in fact, they actually had a lower rate of violence

than people with normal genes

as long as they weren't abused as children.

Great additional example of the ways

in which genes are not “be all - end all.”

A fancy technique where you can

take a specific gene out of a mouse,

that mouse and its descendants will not have that gene.

You have ”knocked out” that gene.

So there's this one gene that encodes for a protein

that has something to do with learning and memory.

And with this fabulous demonstration you “knock out” that gene

and you have a mouse that doesn't learn as well.

“Ooh! A genetic basis for intelligence!”

What was much less appreciated in that landmark study

that got picked up by the media left and right,

is take those genetically impaired mice

and raise them in a much more enriched

stimulating environment than your normal mice in a lab cage,

and they completely overcame that deficit.

So, when one says in a contemporary sense that

“Oh, this behavior is genetic”

to the extent that that's even a valid sort of phrase to use,

what you're saying is: there is a

genetic contribution to how this organism responds to environment;

genes may influence the readiness with which

an organism will deal with a certain environmental challenge.

You know, that's not the version most people have in their minds.

And not to be too 'soap-boxing'

but run with the old version of “It's genetic!” and

it's not that far from the history of Eugenics and things of that sort.

It's a widespread misconception

and it's a potentially fairly dangerous one.

One reason that the

biological explanation for violence,

one reason that hypothesis is potentially dangerous-

it's not just misleading it can really do harm-

is because if you believe that, you could very easily say:

“Well, there's nothing we can do

to change the predisposition people have to becoming violent.

All we can do, if somebody becomes violent is

punish them- lock them up or execute them-

but we don't need to worry about changing the

social environment or the social preconditions

that may lead people to become violent

because that's irrelevant.”

The genetic argument allows us the luxury of ignoring

past and present historical and social factors.

And in the words of Louis Menand

who wrote in the New Yorker, very astutely he said:

“It's all in the genes, an explanation for the way things are

that does not threaten the way things are.

Why should someone feel unhappy or

engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living

in the freest and most prosperous nation on Earth?

It can't be the system.

There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere.”

Which is a good way of putting it.

So, the genetic argument is simply a cop-out

which allows us to ignore

the social and economic and political factors

that, in fact, underlie many troublesome behaviors.