Nature via Nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human. Matt Ridley
or a cuckoo, such modules may have to ‘get the behaviour right’ first time and may be comparatively indifferent to experience. But in the case of the human mind, almost all such instinctive modules are designed to be modified by experience. Some adapt continuously throughout life, some change rapidly with experience then set like cement. A few just develop to their own timetable. In the rest of this book, I propose to try to find the genes responsible for building – and changing – these circuits.
PLATONIC UTOPIA
One of the besetting sins of the nature-nurture debate has been the habit of utopianism, the notion that there is one ideal design of society that can be derived from a theory of human nature. Many of those who thought they understood human nature promptly turned description to prescription and set out a design of the perfect society. This practice is common to those on the nature side of the debate as well as those on the nurture side. Yet the only lesson to be drawn from utopian dreaming is that all utopias are hells. All attempts to design society by reference to one narrow conception of human nature, whether on paper or in the streets, end in producing something much worse. I propose to end each chapter mocking the utopia implied in taking any theory too far.
William James and the protagonists of instinct did not, as far as I can discern, write a utopia. But Plato’s Republic, the father of all utopias, is in many ways close to a Jamesian dream. It is imbued with a similar nativism. The Republic has been called a ‘managerial meritocracy’ in which the same education is available to all, so the top jobs go to those with the innate talent for them.47 In Plato’s metaphorical republic (probably never intended as a political blueprint), everything is governed by strict rules. The Rulers, who make policy, are assisted by the Auxiliaries, who provide a sort of civil and defence service. Together these two classes are called the Guardians, and they are chosen on merit, which means on native talent. But to prevent corruption, the Guardians live lives of austere asceticism, unable to own property, to marry, or even to drink from gold cups. They live in a dormitory, but their miserable existence gladdens their hearts because they know it is for the good of the society as a whole.
Karl Popper was not the first, nor will he be the last, philosopher to call Plato’s dream a totalitarian nightmare. Even Aristotle pointed out that there was not much point in a meritocracy if merit did not bring rewards – of wealth and sex as well as power: ‘Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common.’48 Plato’s citizens were expected to accept any spouse nominated by the state, and (if female) to suckle any baby. Some chance. But grant Plato the backhanded compliment of having this insight, at least: even the meritocracy is an imperfect society. If all people receive the same education, then the differences in their abilities will be innate. A truly equal-opportunity society merely rewards the talented with the best jobs and relegates the rest to doing the dirty work.
CHAPTER THREE A convenient jingle
Professors are inclined to attribute the intelligence of their children to nature, and the intelligence of their students to nurture.
Roger Masters1
Disagreement thrives on uncertainty. In the 1860s, uncertainty over the source of the Nile was the source of a bitter dispute between two English explorers, John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton. Only two men who have shared a camp for many months could disagree so violently. Speke favoured Lake Victoria, which he had discovered while Burton lay ill in a tent at Tabora; Burton insisted that the source lay in or near Lake Tanganyika. The feud only ended in 1864 when Speke shot himself (perhaps accidentally) on the day he was to debate with Burton in public. Speke, by the way, was right.
Watching this dispute from an influential position in the Royal Geographical Society, and occasionally fanning the flames on behalf of Burton, was a distinguished geographer by the name of Francis Galton. It was Galton’s fate to ignite an even bigger feud in that same year, one that would run for more than a century: nature versus nurture. The nature-nurture debate is a bit like the argument over the source of the Nile. Both thrived on ignorance; the more that came to be known, the less the argument seemed to matter. Both seemed unnecessarily petty. Surely, what mattered more than which lake was the source of the Nile was that Africa contained two vast lakes new to Western science. Likewise, it surely matters less whether human nature is more innate or more learned, but instead the precise way in which it is both. The Nile is the sum of thousands of streams, no one of which can be truly called its source; the same is true of human nature.
Galton’s passion was quantifying. In a long career, he invented, coined or discovered a wide range of things: northern Namibia, anticyclone weather systems, the study of twins, questionnaires, fingerprints, composite photographs, statistical regression and eugenics. But perhaps his most lasting legacy is to have inaugurated the nature-nurture debate and coined the very phrase. Born in 1822, he was a grandson of the great scientist, poet and inventor, Erasmus Darwin, by his second wife. He found his half-cousin Charles’s theory of natural selection both convincing and inspiring, ascribing this immodestly to ‘an hereditary bent of mind that both its illustrious author and myself have inherited from our common grandfather, Dr Erasmus Darwin’. Thus emboldened by his own pedigree, he now found his true calling in the statistics of heredity. In 1865, deserting geography, he published an article on ‘hereditary talent and character’ in Macmillan’s Magazine, in which he revealed that distinguished men had distinguished relatives. He expanded it into a book called Hereditary Genius in 1869.
Galton was simply asserting that talent runs in families. Exhaustively and enthusiastically, he described the pedigrees of famous judges, statesmen, peers, commanders, scientists, poets, musicians, painters, divines, oarsmen and wrestlers. ‘The arguments by which I endeavour to prove that genius is hereditary, consist in showing how large is the number of instances in which men who are more or less illustrious have eminent kinsfolk.’2 It was not very sophisticated reasoning. After all, one might just as well argue the opposite, that the rise of humble men to great eminence would reveal their innate talents triumphing over the disadvantages of circumstance; the clustering of talent in families might indicate shared teaching. Most reviewers thought Galton had overstated the role of heredity and ignored the contribution of upbringing and family. In 1872 a Swiss botanist, Alphonse de Candolle, asserted as much at book length. Candolle pointed out that great scientists in the previous two centuries had come from countries or cities with religious tolerance, widespread trade links, a moderate climate and democratic governments – suggesting that achievement owed more to circumstance and opportunity than to native genius.3
Candolle’s attack stung Galton into a second book, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture, in 1874, in which he employed a questionnaire for the first time, and repeated his conclusion that scientific geniuses were born, not made. It was in this book that he coined the famous alliteration:
The phrase ‘nature and nurture’ is a convenient jingle of words, for it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed.4
He may have borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare, who in The Tempest has Prospero insult Caliban thus:
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick.5
Shakespeare was not the first to juxtapose the two words. Three decades before The Tempest was first performed, an Elizabethan schoolmaster by the name of Richard Mulcaster, the first headmaster of the Merchant Taylors’ school, was so fond of the antiphony of nature and nurture that he used it four times in his 1581 book Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children:
…[Parents]