The refutation of genetic determinism: Why genes are leftwing

[Hannah Bell]

When the map of the human genome was presented to the world in 2001, psychiatrists had high hopes for it. Itemising all our genes would surely provide molecular evidence that the main cause of mental illness was genetic – something psychiatrists had long believed. Drug companies were wetting their lips at the prospect of massive profits from unique potions for every idiosyncrasy.

But a decade later, unnoticed by the media, the human genome project has not delivered what the psychiatrists hoped: we now know that genes play little part in why one sibling, social class or ethnic group is more likely to suffer mental health problems than another.

This result had been predicted by Craig Venter, one of the key researchers on the project. When the map was published, he said that because we only have about 25,000 genes psychological differences could not be much determined by them. "Our environments are critical," he concluded. And, after only a few years of extensive genome searching, even the most convinced geneticists began to publicly admit that there are no individual genes for the vast majority of mental health problems. In 2009 Professor Robert Plomin, a leading behavioural geneticist, wrote that the evidence had proved that "genetic effects are much smaller than previously considered: the largest effects account for only 1% of quantitative traits". However, he believed that all was not lost. Complex combinations of genes might hold the key. So far, this has not been shown, nor is it likely to be...

Writing in 2000, the political scientist Charles Murray made a rash prediction he may now regret. "The story of human nature, as revealed by genetics and neuroscience, will be conservative in its political (shape)." The American poor would turn out to have significantly different genes to the affluent: "This is not unimaginable. It is almost certainly true..."

Instead, the Human Genome Project is rapidly providing a scientific basis for the political left. Childhood maltreatment, economic inequality and excessive materialism seem the main determinants of mental illness. State-sponsored interventions, like reduced inequality, are the most likely solutions...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/12/why-genes-are-leftwing

[The Magistrate]

1. Murray, Ma'am, Was, Is, And Always Will Be, A Blithering Idiot....

[Ozymanithrax]

2. Charles Murray is a social darwinist...who believes the rich are...

genetically superior. Pretty slimy.

[Swamp Rat]

3. "However, he believed that all was not lost. Complex combinations of genes might hold the key..."

... to making brazillions of $$$ for Big Pharma.

[MikeH]

4. This bears out what Alice Miller has always maintained

The recently deceased Swiss writer and psychotherapist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_%28psychologist%29">Alice Miller, in her http://www.alice-miller.com/books_en.php">books and on her http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php">web http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/">sites, wrote about the consequences of childhood abuse and mistreatment.

In the opening to one of her articles titled http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/childhood_trauma.html">Childhood Trauma, which she originally presented as a lecture in October 1998, she deals with the question as to why many people take pleasure in tormenting and humiliating others, while others do not. She rejects, among other things, the idea that genetic makeup has anything to do with the matter, or that some people are "born bad".

Since adolescence I have wondered why so many people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge to hurt is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question and the Freudian theory of the death instinct has never convinced me. Nor could I make sense of genetic explanations of the evil, of the naive idea that a human being can be "born bad." Nobody could answer the crucial question: How is it that so many turn-of-the-century German children were born with such malignant genes that they'd later become Hitler's willing executioners? It has always been inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective caregivers could become a monster. Then, by closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially mass murderers and dictators, I began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but in the earliest days of life. Today, neurobiological research seems to fully corroborate what I discovered almost twenty years ago.

(Emphasis mine)

In her now online book http://www.nospank.net/fyog.htm">For Your Own Good she http://www.nospank.net/fyog4.htm">documents horrendous child rearing practices that were openly advocated and practiced in past centuries, including in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, i.e. during the time that the future perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust were being raised as children.

In http://www.nospank.net/fyog9.htm#values">this section of For Your Own Good she makes the statement (at the end of the fourth paragraph from the start of this section):

Among all the leading figures of the Third Reich, I have not been able to find a single one who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing. Shouldn't that give us a great deal of food for thought?

She writes about specific figures in the Nazi regime, and has an http://www.nospank.net/fyog13.htm">entire chapter about Hitler and how he was raised. She documents how the authoritarian an totalitarian household in which Hitler was raised, where he was often beaten by his brutal father, anticipated the authoritarian and totalitarian regime which Hitler as an adult later came to establish in Germany.

She also has a http://www.nospank.net/fyog15.htm">chapter about the child murderer Jürgen Bartsch, and how the manner in which he we was mistreated as a child came to manifest itself (unconsciously to Jürgen) in the way he would later come to murder young boys.

Finally, an interesting http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=63&grp=13">article on Alice Miller's web site (not written by Alice) deals with findings of the book http://www.librarything.com/work/554266">Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill? by Jonathan H. Pincus. The following conclusions from the book are enumerated in the article:

Without any doubt and with no exception the inquiries regarding serial killers and their relatives proved the following:

1. every perpetrator had been exposed to extreme physical and sexual childhood abuse at the hand of their parents;
2. each homicide reflected the very kind of brutality the murderer had suffered as a child;
3. the control of hatred and aggression accumulated in childhood is generally not being erased by genetical defects but by brain damage, usually as an after-effect of the toddler's brutal mistreatment or the mother's drug abuse during pregnancy;
4. poverty does not cause aggressive impulses, but enforces the urge to act them out (many serial killers are of white middle-class origin, meaning that every social class is involved in generating hatred and perversions);
5. former parental cruelty gets directed at others as a form of retaliation;
6. none of the perpetrators dared to incriminate their abusive parents, even in the case of being consciously aware of what had happened to them as children;
7. the perpetrators' perversions were identical with the perversions their parents had inflicted on them as children;
8. the biographies of the murderers represent hermetic systems of terror which get directed back at society: even previously non-involved members of society are being hurt and consequently have to suffer the very same way the former child suffered.

(Emphasis mine)

[leftstreet]

5. ...

Wow. I didn't know she'd died

:-(

Excellent body of work

[RainDog]

8. great post n/t

[Odin2005]

6. Genetic Determinism was always based on biased popularizations of known science.

Popular ideas of genetic determinism over the last 30 years are inventions of ideologically biased pop-sci writing. Ask any serious expert on human genetics and nearly every one will tell you that human nature is an insanely complex interaction between genes and the environment. Genes do not exist in a vacuum, the expression of many genes is strongly modulated by the environmental conditions, and that is especially true with genes involved with the development of the nervous system.


Oh, and Charles Murray can go f*ck himself with an IQ test.

The notion that there is a single universal "human nature" in anything more than basic biological drives and instincts is complete nonsense.

[Hello_Kitty]

7. People LOVE to trot biological determinism out to defend sexism.

Men are naturally polygamous and women monogamous.

Men are "visually oriented" when it comes to selecting mates yet somehow this visual acuity goes out the window when it comes to things like seeing a dirty floor. Women, OTOH, are hot for old geezers with money and inherited the housework gene.

Men are innately more logical rational than women and should be in charge of all important institutions. OTOH, where sex is concerned men are raging beasts with no control over their actions. Therefore women are responsible for the sexual behavior of every man in their midst.

And so on and so forth. It's all driven by biology and natural selection. Culture has nothing to do with it. Nope. No way.

[Odin2005]

9. Exactly!