Nature-nurture synthesis

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, social science, genetics, dichotomies, syntheses

Many years ago I wrote a song for my parents, upon the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary. It was comprised of family stories based on the saying, "You came by that naturally." Among a cluster of verses, there are two refrains. The first is:

Is it Nature, is it Nurture? I don't know. Should I care?
In body, mind and feeling I'm their son.
Part of me is what they made me. Part of me I made myself.
What comes naturally, that's what I've been and done.

The second refrain is:

Is it Nature, is it Nurture? Why should anybody care?
We are dealt the cards, but our own hand we play.
When you put two lives together, almost everything you get,
You could say that you have come by naturally.

Of course,  the millennia-old debate between "naturists" and "nurturists" continues apace. One evocative song won't change that (though I hoped it might). I have always understood that everything, all our behavior, is an inextricable composite of "natural" (i.e. genetic) and "nurtural" (i.e. upbringing and environment), plus a strong component of our own free will.

Yes, I believe strongly in free will. That's where the second line of the second refrain originates. The "cards" are the natural and environmental raw materials from which we build a life. But make no mistake about it: we do the building. In everyone's life we find surprises, actions and decisions that nobody can attribute to a foreordained "cause."

In The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture, by Dalton Conley, the Möbius strip is used as a metaphor for what seems to most of us a two-sided matter. If you've never played with a Möbius strip, try this. Cut a strip about an inch wide from the side or end of an ordinary sheet of paper. Tape or glue the ends together, but with a single half twist in the strip. Now you have an interesting geometrical item: a three-dimensional object that has one surface and one edge. You can verify this by drawing a line down the middle, all the way until the end of the line meets the beginning; also by coloring the edge with a felt tip marker, all the way until the end meets the beginning. Although at first glance this object seems to have two sides and two edges, they are actually one.

For a fun experiment, make a second Möbius strip and cut it down the center. I'll let you find out the result. If it evokes interesting thoughts, feel free to leave a comment about it.

I generated the image above using OpenArt's Qwen engine. I made dozens of images using six art generation tools before I found one I liked well enough to include here. This one is extra interesting because of the geometric shapes along the Möbius strip. Some of the shapes hint at chemistry, while others (especially the little heart in the blue circle) evoke relationships and other things.

Dr. Conley asks us to consider a family scenario. Looking first at genetics, let us consider a child's reaction to something new. Some children are shy, others bold, and some don't pay much attention after a first look. Can we say that this reaction is based purely in genetics? With a newborn who has hardly had time to observe his or her parents "in action," perhaps it is. Now consider the child after a few weeks, having observed the parents' reactions to various events. Has the baby's apparently instinctive reaction changed? If so, is it an entirely environmental influence? How much of either parent's reactions to new things is due to that person's generics, and how much to prior "environment", including upbringing? The chain goes back into prehistory! And that is just one characteristic among hundreds.

Looking again at free will, which Dr. Conley doesn't spend much time (or ink) on: Considering my son, I find several instances in which he took a direction that neither my wife nor I expected, based on family history. For example, before we married, my wife was an office worker, and I was a science major in college. I was hoping our son would be good at science. He is, but he has less interest in it than I expected; he became an English major. However, it is interesting that after we married, both my wife and I were educators. Our son's M.A. degree is in education, and he works as an educator.

Much of the book uses "genetics-environment" chains such as the one above to buttress an introduction to the "new science of nature and nurture" that the author is promoting, the science of Sociogenomics, which he and his colleagues are presently constructing. Much of the discussion centers on two key terms: GWAS and PGI:

• GWAS – Genome-Wide Association Study. A very broad-based study of specific characteristics of many people and their genomes. Many "traits" are found to be due to dozens or hundreds of genetic indications.
• PGI – PolyGenic Index. A "score" based on GWAS's for a specific trait, such as successful response to education. Few PGI's reach a level of great significance, so they are rather weak indicators.

Much is said regarding a person having a PGI that is "for" some trait or behavior. Later chapters dig into the influence of opportunity. For example, someone who "has a strong PGI for" educational attainment may never exhibit that trait if there is no opportunity to be educated: poverty, incarceration (maybe this one "learned" criminal behaviors better than others!), or living in a war-torn area. 

Looking back at that last sentence, I recall something my youngest brother said at our mother's funeral. Being the youngest, he was shown various techniques by his older brothers that became useful shortcuts in some of his classes. After telling a couple of stories he said, "Education is what happened when we weren't being schooled." Though he had done well in school, it is clear he didn't care much for it. He is the only one of us without a college degree but he led a successful life anyway (we are all in our seventies now).

It seems to me that Sociogenomics is in its very early days. It appears a bit ill-formed as yet. I wish Dr. Conley well in his endeavors. The "new science" could be promising. But it is unlikely to do much to end the N-N debate, at least among the ardent proponents of one or the other "ism".

==============

Errata etc.

• On p. 5 I find the first of several instances of "million" where "billion" is meant, when noting the three-plus billion nucleotides that make up the human genome.
• On p. 79, a typo: The surname "Woolf" is spelled "Wolf".
• On p. 82 we read, "…one's DNA blueprint is fixed at conception." Not entirely. We accumulate SNP's and other kinds of mutations in every cell of our body at the rate of about one per year. Frequently, a very early mutation results in different parts of our bodies having different genetics, often learning more toward one parent or the other from place to place. Visible evidence of such mosaicism in another species is the calico cat. Each visible body patch has different genetics.

I noted in passing a few other very minor typos and didn't bother to take note. All evidence of either a poorly educated copy editor, or the entire lack of one.

Intertwined biographies of man and fish

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, oceanography, fishing, tuna, fish tagging, biographies

What a title to begin with: Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas, the new book by Karen Pinchin, chronicles the life of Al Anderson, the most prolific tagger of tunas and other fish, along with the natural history of bluefin tunas and the life of one particular fish that oceanographers named Amelia. In Mr. Anderson's website about the tagging of bluefin tuna, the fish in this photo is said to be Amelia, a fish that was first caught and tagged as a juvenile (the tag is the orange thingy hanging below the forward dorsal fin), then caught three more times; the records of her catch locations, and locations logged by a data logger upon her second "encounter" with oceanographers, robustly demonstrated that bluefin tuna range right across the Atlantic Ocean. This blew a big hole in a decades-old "two populations" convention that governed the catch quotas of fishing fleets. There is only one population of Atlantic bluefin tuna.

There! How's that for a spoiler? This lovely book winds together the lives of Al Anderson, his love of fishing, his eventually greater love of using tagging to gather scientific data about tunas, and the lives of the tunas themselves and Amelia in particular. Bluefin tunas went from being considered trash fish to become nearly the most valuable sea animal, on a dollars-per-pound basis. When big money is in play, old laws that permit or encourage overexploitation become deeply entrenched and unchangeable.

In the middle of the book the author notes in passing that bluefin tunas have chromatophores in their skin, and they can exhibit color and pattern changes similar to those of a squid. Note the skin pattern on Amelia in the photo. In most pictures showing a bluefin tuna, the blue-above-white color scheme is smooth, usually because the fish is dead. Amelia appears agitated, as a fish out of water ought to be! She lived another dozen or so years, and by her final capture and death in Portugal she weighed perhaps 600 pounds.

The book's title mentions obsession. Everything about fishing touches obsession: Al's obsessive love of fishing as a young man; his equally obsessive tagging program that began not that much later; the obsession of sushi-lovers for bluefin nigiri; the obsession for money that drives the entire bluefin fishery… The list goes on. Few people consider the tuna's obsession with staying alive.

Funny side note: We once met an elderly woman in South Dakota, who asked if I liked to fish. I don't, but I've done it whenever someone asks me along. I replied to her that I had fished a little, but I wasn't good at it, and that catching fish seemed to cost me more than going to the store to buy fish. She snorted, "Nobody fishes for economic reasons!" She loved to fish. I have my own obsessions, just not fishing!

In this case, a cluster of obsessions is driving the bluefin tuna to extinction. The future is bleak for this species.