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.

New or old, some ways are good and some are not

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, social anthropology, syntheses

In his new book The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?, we learn that Jared Diamond has spent 3-4 weeks every year, for some 50 years, in New Guinea. He wasn't there to study the people, but the birds. But he had to learn a number of the languages—or at least know the names of common birds in the more common languages used there—, interact with the people, and live among them. You could say that cultural anthropology came along for the ride. He is a synthesist (AKA a systems analyst), as amply shown by his books Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel. In this book he seeks to answer the question embedded in its title, by finding what is different, and what is the same, between large-scale, modern, "state government" societies, and smaller-scale traditional societies.

As he does, let us first classify societies according to scale:

• A Band consists of "a few dozen" individuals, typically one or a few extended families.
• A Tribe can contain hundreds, with the characteristic that everyone knows every one. Dunbar's Limit, canonically 150, but in the range 100-230, is the number of relationships a person can sustain.
• A Chiefdom, which can only arise where agriculture is practiced, consists of a few thousand or several thousand persons.
• A State ranges in size up to a population of a billion or so.

Scale alone explains some of the differences. Politically, a band or tribe will have a loose dominance hierarchy, of the type we call a pecking order. Chiefdoms require hierarchy, a separation between decision makers and everyone else, while states require much more governmental organization and specialized trades, otherwise the result is not actually anarchy, but instead a quick return to many chiefdoms and bands. As we can see in most modern nations, governing a million to a billion persons requires several levels of organization. France, for example, has 27 Régions, 101 Départements, 342 Arrondissements, 4,032 Cantons and 36,781 Communes, at last count. That is a total of six governmental levels. In the U.S. we have four levels of government, but below the national and state levels, the names vary: counties and parishes are at the same level, just in different states; and for that matter, Pennsylvania is formally a Commonwealth.

There is a bigger, day-to-day consequence of having centralized government. One of the first things a state government will do is assume a monopoly on violence. Vengeance for wrongs done is disallowed by government. Among bands or tribes we find frequent conflict. The book's third chapter is about a "tiny war" that occurred in 1961 in New Guinea among rival tribes of the Dani, an upland people in New Guinea. Two tribal alliances totaling 10,000 people fought a series of skirmishes and pitched battles between February and September. One massacre killed 125, while all other dead numbered 11. 136 dead in 8 months seems tiny to us, but it amounts to about 1.4% of the populace. The number who died in the American Civil War a century earlier was about 625,000 out of a total population of about 34 million. The death toll was thus 1.8%, on the same relative scale as the war among the Dani. Yet it took 4 years, not just 8 months.

The "war between the states" was America's bloodiest war. It was one of only three very bloody wars in 230+ years. But the Dani in New Guinea were at constant war, and some still are. The 1961 war was just one of many. It is exceptional only in that it was well observed and recorded by Western observers. The war I remember growing up was the Vietnam War, during which 58,000 Americans died over a 20-year span. As horrendous as it seemed to us in the 1960s and 1970s, that was the actual "tiny war" (Of course, the number of Vietnamese dead was much greater, from a much smaller population. It isn't tiny to them by any measure!). American dead in all the wars since has yet to rise above 10,000.

To my point: every level of government has its own appointed killers (AKA peace-keepers): police, sheriffs, national guard and the five national armies (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard). They and they alone are permitted to use legal violence. It may seem unfair. However, the risk of dying in armed conflict in a modern state is between 1/10 and 1/100th the risk experienced in a traditional society.

As Diamond sees it, agriculture brought new risks and actually led to a lower standard of living for most, that is for everybody except a small number of state-supported elites. Raising that standard of living by government-led distribution of food and goods, by division of labor, and then by public health measures, has been a 9,000-year learning experience. Yet this is only "yesterday", which is the author's thesis. Humans had about 100,000 years to learn to live in bands and tribes. We are just beginning to learn to live properly in larger societies.

The learning experience is ongoing. So far, "The West" has achieved many benefits: doubling of life span, very low infant and maternal mortality, near-elimination of starvation among them. Yet the universal distribution of abundant food, for example, has risks of its own. People in traditional societies (several hundred exist today) typically die before the age of 50 of an infection or by violence. People in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) societies typically die in their 70s or later of heart disease, diabetes or cancer.

This particular difference shows that natural selection is ongoing. The rate of morbid "late onset" diabetes (AKA Type 2) among Europeans and Euro-Americans is about 6% (ranging from 2% to 10%), while it is in the 30% to 50% range among people recently Westernized. Living in a feast-and-famine environment selects for "thrifty" food storage. But that thriftiness leads to obesity once food is always abundant. Life in a WEIRD society gradually results in premature death for the most thrifty, and selects for those able to maintain healthier weight and healthier blood pressure. Basically, in about half a millennium, the Euro-world has made a head start in doing so. Natural selection in action! It is fascinating.

So, doctors can say all they want to us about eating better and getting more exercise. A few will, but most won't. We are lazy by nature. I suspect there is a genetic influence on how well we listen to our doctors, or at least on how well we actually take care of ourselves. In another 500-1,000 years, if humanity survives, I suspect people will be better adjusted to a world of abundance…unless that has collapsed. Who knows, the world may return to a much smaller human population living in bands and tribes again. Natural selection would then switch course again.

Jared Diamond has a great ability to put together a big picture. I have just skated the surface of a few issues that caught my interest as I read. This book joins a small collection of those to which I periodically return. I don't spend all my time reading only new books.

Nightmares packaged to order

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, commentary, syntheses, surveys

I just had to show you the cover of this one (from Amazon's sales page). This has to be one of the best "bug-eyed monster" paintings from Sci-Fi's golden age. I don't know the original provenance of this cover art, but the copyright is now held by the Wood River Gallery (the 2006 date makes me think the rights cover the entire layout, and that the BEM artwork is old enough to be public).

OK, so what scares you? I grew up being taught how to grab my knees under my school desk so I could kiss my ass goodbye for a nuclear attack. What formula did all the pulp SF mags use? It was mainly Campbell's Dictum: "Pose a problem, then fix it. Do it in 5,000 words or less." For a novel, the author was allowed no more than two sub-problems and 40,000 words.

There were problems aplenty for the writers of 1950s SF to mine: nuclear, germ, and chemical warfare; the grandson of Eniac that would run your life; the Red and Yellow perils—indeed, rampant xenophobia of all sorts—; "big Brother"; renegade robots. Prior to the 1940s, there was plenty of writing about "ultimate weapons", but few guessed such a weapon would be atomic or thermonuclear. A few who did were investigated, as far back as 1935. The nuclear warhead became the enfant terrible of Sci-Fi once the first nuclear attack actually happened. The Cold War was fueled by MAD fears, and our fiction followed right along.

Along the way, we also scared ourselves with alien abduction, giant insects and lizards, mutant superheros and supervillains, and various vague plagues. Today we have a host of new things to fear: AIDS, SARS, West Nile, and Ebola among the plagues; a rapidly-growing list of smaller nations that are developing or have developed "the bomb", or that plan to; Frankenfoods and other genetic experiments that we expect to go awry...and it is certain that some of our experiments will go awry.

All this and more Heather Urbanski covers in this, her expanded PhD thesis, Plagues, Apocalypses, and Bug-Eyed Monsters: How Speculative Fiction Shows Us Our Nightmares. She proposes the Nightmare Model to provide structure to her work. While much speculative fiction, from "hard" science fiction to the SF-Fantasy mixes that are most popular today (e.g. Star Wars), to sword-and-sorcery that seems to fill a good third of the "science fiction" shelves at my local library...while much of it is escapist and oriented positively, well more than half deals with a threat that must be averted.

The biggest threats in Jules Verne's work were either technological challenges that were risky in themselves, or overwhelming natural forces, or a few disgruntled villains. By contrast, today's threats tend to be unforeseen results of our good intentions. The Nightmare Model covers these in particular, under three heads and seven major areas:

• Science and Technology: Nuclear War; Information Technology; and Biology
• Power: Power of the Individual and Power of the State
• The Unknown: Monsters, Aliens, and "Other Beings"; and Progress

Cautionary tales regarding each of these have saturated print, film, and small screen media. Consider these seven terms:

• Dr. Strangelove
• Colossus
• Andromeda Strain
• Darth Vader
• Big Brother
• Alien
• Modern Times

Each is the title of a book, film, or TV episode (or all 3) that relates to the seven nightmares, in order. Consider just one, Colossus. I don't remember the name of the movie made from the book, but the title character is a computer system that really does take over the US, while its Russian counterpart takes over Europe (the Far East is ignored). I've worked with computers since 1968. In 1986 my uncle asked me, "Do you think computers could take over the world?" I replied, "They already have. Most people can't do simple addition now, without their calculator. Soon we will all wear small computers that do so much for us, we'll die if the battery runs out." Today this statement is nearly true.

Colossus is dated and obsolete. We have new fears, and are justifiably concerned that the next gadget after the iPhone will have more brains than most of us do.

It is sad but true that writing about our favorite stories is less compelling than the stories themselves. Nonetheless, Ms Urbanski's thesis bears consideration and if we might say, "So what?" about the Nightmare Model, it is simply because the model is right, particularly in its added provision: being entertained into thinking about our fears goes a long way toward dispelling them.