If You Think Being An Ape Descendant Is Bad

I work at the Department of Health and Family Services. Doing so, I encounter various people at work everyday who are very different than me. On a quotidian basis I encounter mentally retarded people being led around by a social worker, people with Down Syndrome, and people whose extremities are malformed. There's a womyn here whose job it is to run carts full of shredded documents to a room for disposal. She's looks to be in her late 40s, though I can't be certain. Her facial features are more...more...more scrunched together than on most people. And she cannot speak a language but rather in loud (sometimes very loud) grunts and groans. Upstairs is another womyn who is not mentally impaired in any way but rather physically impaired. Her left hand looks like it's from The Simpsons - she has only three fingers – while her right forearm is dramatically shorter than the left. She could have been a Thalidomide baby but I don't know. What I do know is that, however crappy my life may seem at any given moment, I have a normal morphology and a (fairly) sound mind in comparison to these folks. While I don't claim to be superior to them, I do recognize that I conform to certain norms whereas these people do not. I also recognize that the reason these people and I differ in some very tangible ways is that they got different results from the genetic lottery than I did. In fact, very different results than most people, for that matter.

I have also noticed from speaking with people on the left and the right that many, if not most, people have this nebulous concept of genes and what they do and don't do. For example, I've encountered many people who speak of genes in an almost completely deterministic way and often done in a degrading manner. And they almost always talk this way about race and gender. The concept of "White Man's Burden" is still alive and kicking. We've all heard someone say that Mexicans are lazy or that blacks are stupid so that's why they play sports, etc. Womyn are thought by some to have certain innate characteristics that make them unsuitable for various occupations. Being a wife and a mother are often thought to be the roles that womyn are best suited to. There are people who find the concept of genetic determinism to be so awful that they instead posit that each human being must be the exact opposite - a tabla rasa or blank slate. The minute you argue that a particular element of our disposition or psychology has a genetic component, these people accuse you of being a Nazi and sarcastically say something like, "Oh, so there's a gene for XXXXX - yeah, right."

What both of these positions show is extreme ignorance of genetics, among other things. Various people fail to take environment into account while others mistakenly see every case as one gene directing one trait. They fail to understand that it's not nature or nurture but rather nature via nurture. I probably reserve most of my ire for folks on the left as I am a lefty and most of my arguments relating to this topic have been with fellow lefties. One argument I had with a womyn from the East Coast a few years ago is rather typical. We were talking about gender. She subscribed to the blank slate whereas I do not. I made a comment about men generally being more aggressive than womyn and pointed out that this is a cross-cultural phenomenon and not one just of the West. Snidely she retorted, "So you think there's actually an aggressive gene - how stupid." There is problem #1. She assumed that it is a single gene that correlates to a single trait. She also assumed that I was pushing a position which insisted that genes were the sole explanation. Nowhere in my statement did I exclude environment and nowhere did I cite any evidence to say that aggressiveness is "caused" by a lone gene. She read so much in my statement that was not there. Problem #2. She also remarked something to the effect of "Wouldn't it be nice to not have discrimination based on gender and we could have unisex toilets?" (I fecal matter thee not.) It was obvious that she built her argument to support a personal preference. She wanted equality so thusly she turned to the blank slate as it was the only view, in her mind, that accommodated it. I tried to politely tell her that I wasn't trying to engage her in an argument about fairness or the worth of gender but rather about gender itself. This is a big problem with many of my fellow lefties. They abhor genetics and they do so because they believe the false premises that 1) If a trait has a genetic component, then the trait is immutable and they subscribe to the fallacy that A) Natural always equals good ergo, if a trait has a genetic component then it is "natural".

While I am certainly no geneticist, I do know better than the people I've described above. Still, my knowledge is far outweighed by my ignorance as reading Matt Ridley's Genome has proven. It's a fascinating book! He writes in a manner easily understood by the layman and he has a good sense of humor. In the book, he tackles genetics chromosome by chromosome and uses each one as a starting point to talk about our genes as well as to give brief history lessons and talk about science generally.

One of the more disturbing parts is when he talks about chromosome 4. There's a gene on it that has a very deterministic role. If you don't have this gene, you get Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome and die young. If you have it, you may be alright. It depends on how many sequences of cystosine-adenine-gunaine there are on the gene. If you have 35 or less of them, you're in the clear. But 39 or more means you're fucked as you will develop Huntington's chorea - that's what killed Woody Guthrie. (Not sure what happens if you have 36-38 of those.) There's no cure and you're doomed to a slow degradation of your mind and then your movement. An example of genetic determinism, to be sure. But wait! There's more!

Ridley looks at asthma in one chapter. It is certain that it has a genetic component as it runs in families. But he delves into the complexities of it all. For instance, multiple genes are involved and that the role of genes has changed over time along with the environment. For example, he says, "Back in the Stone Age, before feather pillows, an immune system that fired off at dust mites was no handicap, because dust mites were not a pressing problem in a temporary hunting camp on the savannah." And then as dust mites became more common as our lifestyle changed, the genes that gave rise to an immune system trying to fight them became more important. Multiple genes. The role of the environment in getting genes to express themselves. Asthma is a good example of "nature via nurture".

Then there's the section on intelligence in which he writes:

"The conclusion that all these studies converge upon is that about half of your IQ was inherited, and less than a fifth was due to the environment you shared with your siblings - the family. The rest came from the womb, the school and outside influences such as peer groups. But even this is misleading. Not only does your IQ change with age, but so does its heritability. As you grow up and accumulate experiences, the influence of your genes increases...As you grow up, you gradually express your own innate intelligence and leave behind the influences stamped on you by others. You select the environments that suit your innate tendencies, rather than adjusting your innate tendencies to the environments you find yourself in. This proves two vital things: that genetic influences are not frozen at conception and that environmental influences are not inexorably cumulative."

I haven't finished the book yet so there's a lot more where that came from. But the section on language was very interesting as well. We may have circuitry built-in to acquire language but we need our environment to actually do so. How about sexual attractiveness? Many genes go to determine how your body looks but the environment also has a say - clothes, hair style, etc. Blank slate adherents need to stop thinking of genetics as being about social Darwinism. To say that we have a human nature that doesn't always paint a rosy picture is not an argument for eugenics. There are some people on the right that need to stop projecting the less savory elements of our humanity onto non-white races and weakness onto womyn. The worst that humanity has to offer is present in people of every skin color and can be drawn out given the right circumstances just as the best can be. To be sure, there are many differences between men and womyn. But none of them indicate womyn are weak nor justify discrimination, rape, etc.

Did you know that 97% of our genome consists of "Junk DNA"? This Junk DNA is never transcribed into proteins. Ridley gives as an example the gene for the protein called "reverse transcriptase". This gene has absolutely no purpose whatsoever for human beings yet we have tons of them. Why? Well, reverse transcriptase is very handy for viruses such as AIDS. It allows the AIDS virus to take a copy of its genome and conceal it within ours. Thusly, various retroviruses have been depositing their genes in us for ages. As Ridley says, "If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self-esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses."