It Ain’t in the Genes

By Codebuster

Recently a number of our favourite MRAs have voiced their support for Evolutionary Psychology (EP) as an explanation for human behaviour and how, for example, gender roles arise within cultures. While we applaud their analytical thinking and their efforts to place things within a rational, scientific context, there are problems with EP theory. To put it bluntly, the Neo-Darwinian premise upon which much of EP is founded – with its reliance on genes best described within the context of genetic determinism and genocentrism – is fundamentally flawed. Having said that, though, EP has some redeeming aspects in that it represents the first serious attempt by our contemporary life sciences to integrate biology with culture. Indeed, it was the high priest of genetic determinism, Richard Dawkins himself, who introduced the concept of memetics to explain how ideas spread throughout culture.

But Dawkins is also the progenitor of the bad idea that we’ve come to know as the selfish gene. Memetics good, selfish gene bad. I suppose that only a person from a selfish culture would project onto the behaviour of genes the selfish priorities that he observes in the people around him.

So what’s wrong with this mainstream paradigm that places so much importance on genetics? Some of us might be familiar with the term reductionism, as in “reductionist science”. I don’t like using this term, because I consider myself a reductionist of sorts. I am interested in the synthesis of ideas and their “reduction” to fundamental principles. Determinism, as in “genetic determinism” is a more appropriate term to describe the linear, simplistic notion of genes as the all-singing, all-dancing explanation for how life works.

Of course genes and DNA are very important. What is at stake is less their importance than how they work. And of course, how they work is way beyond topic here, but for the intellectually omnivorous, might I suggestbiophysics and quantum biology as good places to start. When we bring interpretations such as nonlocality into the equation, the metaphors borrowed from computer-speak just won’t do. The brain is less a computer than it is acolony. Personality is less a program than it is a thought. But I digress.

This discussion about genes, Neo-Darwinism and evolutionary psychology is central to the so-called nature/nurture debate.

So why is genetic determinism such a bad idea? Its most pernicious effect is on our understanding of culture. The reality is that culture’s power is all around us, we have to contend with it every day of our lives. And it is because of genetic determinism that we have failed to grasp this significance. We have little appreciation of the inextricable relationship between individual personality and culture.

Notice that my beef is less with EP than it is with genetic determinism. If we were able to extricate EP from its genocentric ball-and-chain, perhaps progress in the cognitive sciences would not be as hobbled as it is today. It’s pointless labouring over explanations of this stuff, trying to explain something that I’ve spent many years putting together. So let’s instead take a look at a brief list of simplified examples:

1. Accents, the habitual manner in which we implement our spoken language, is learned. When an adult who has lived in China comes to live in the Anglosphere, they learn to speak English with a distinctive Chinese accent. Is their accent in their genes? If it is, then why do their Anglo-raised children learn to speak English perfectly, virtually indistinguishable from the accent of everyone else from that part of the Anglosphere in which they are raised?
2. The fact that everyone in a culture shares the same accent suggests the broader reality that individual personality is at some basic level indistinguishable from cultural personality. Or, to put it another way, individual personality is a manifestation of cultural personality. Within any one culture there are different personalities, but each personality shares a common understanding as to the way the world works.
3. If you were born and raised in Italy or China or among a tribe of Kalahari bushmen or Trobriand Islanders, you would think, speak and act like an Italian, a Chinaman, a Kalahari bushman or a Trobriand Islander. Or do you really believe that you would still be you, with your same personality, your same motivations and your same accent? Very basic stuff really, and genes have nothing to do with it.
4. Do we know what happens when we raise a normally feral animal, such as a cat, among humans? It becomes domesticated. It acquires a sweet disposition that makes little girls want to lavish affection on it, rubbing their pretty little faces into the flee-infested furry bundle. The animal grows up to interpret our behaviour from the perspective of its own mind-body to behave with civility and companionship. It learns human culture. How could it not, given the affection lavished upon it? Of course our aspiring, furry bundle of proto-human can never be a fully functioning human, because it does not have the biology (such as hands or vocal chords) to acquire cultural sophistication. But one thing that our domesticated cat has left behind, at least in this one of its nine lives, is its feral wildness. Its sweet domestication is not programmed into the genes, and it bears no resemblance to the wildness of its feral counterpart.
5. Do we know what happens when we raise humans outside of culture, or among animals? Humans have their own feral counterpart to the domesticated animal.
6. The original US Constitution of the Founding Fathers, before it became the wreckage that it now stands for, asserted assumptions that were designed to impact on cultural evolution towards a higher purpose. In fact politics in general is a form of cultural engineering, whether their designers realize it or not. Cultural engineering has nothing whatsoever to do with genes. Nil, nada, zip. And yet it has a powerful impact on our personalities and what we become.
7. As Daniel Kahneman suggests, there are some recent developments in the cognitive sciences that allude to general principles, or “laws of mind”. Norman Doidge and Stefan Molyneux know that culture impacts on cognitive processes and how the brain is “wired”. They know, albeit from a rather clinical perspective, that our experiences and the choices we make shape our personalities.

To summarize what’s going on here. The thing that happens to a human in a culture is the same thing that happens to a stem-cell in a body. It lives within a context, and it becomes what it has to be, in order to conform to that context and thus fulfil its role. A chef, a nurse, a tradesman, a housewife, a policeman, an engineer, all are different responses to a context that places demands, and each response has its part to play in the survival of the unity that is culture. A stem-cell that finds itself in the medulla oblongata, or the visual cortex, or the cerebellum, also becomes the neuron that it has to be in order to conform to its context and meet the needs of its colony.

I could go on, but I’m sure we get the picture. Once we get our theory right, a whole bunch of stuff falls into place. What are we waiting for? Does this dearth of paradigm for a compelling life science not provide us with an opportunity to make our own mark on history in the most compelling and forceful way possible? At the very least we should try, given that so much of what we are being fed is garbage.

BUT WHY SHOULD THIS MATTER TO US?

The idea that gender roles might be 100% learned supports our case, because it addresses the question of choice, and the habituation of being taken care of versus the habituation of providing. It is because of our natural predispositions, not genetic programming, that equality remains every bit the impossible dream that Manuel Dexter says it is. Genes have nothing to do with it. Saying that it’s programmed in the genes does not add anything to the debate, but rather obscures it. Here are some of the things that women choose that impact on the privileges that they are able to enjoy – it’s the relationship between options, choice, desire, and how these things impact on personality:

1. Women like being provided-for. Who wouldn’t? And men happily oblige them, because women believe that they have something that men believe that they want. Men also know that the material goodies they want, no-one is going to give them out of the goodness of their hearts. Men know that they have no choice but to work for them. Women as the provided-for sex are not made to suffer this inconvenience. No genes required.
2. Perhaps the only reason that women ever entertain the idea of “equality” in the workplace is because they’ve never had to work as a matter of survival, and so they grow up thinking that work is fun, a hobby, a choice, something you do if you like, something you do if your fancy takes you. In exactly the same way, little boys often want to grow up to be firemen – only to find that the reality is never what it seems, an inconvenience that most women need never face. And so women grow up imagining all sorts of fun and adventures taking place in a coal-mine or on a boat in a violent storm at sea. And then of course there are the women most likely to become feminists, too unattractive to enjoy the freebies that are routinely lavished upon their more attractive counterparts. Either way, the realities and demands of the workplace have always meant something quite different to men.
3. Women like and indulge in their rape fantasies. And when they throw caution to the wind to override their concern with being provided for, they are predisposed to selecting the types of men that conform to their fantasies. The women that choose brutes do not do so because selecting for brutes has a positive effect on the gene pool. Quite the opposite. If we left choice-making up to women, our next generation would be swinging from tree to tree, or gang-banging in Bonobo nirvana;
4. Women like taking the easy way out… and men happily indulge them. It’s inherent in the condition of all life to seek the easier way out, to minimize stress. Men would do it too, if only an easier option were available to them. The fact that men do not is a matter of necessity, not genetic programming. Men know that they won’t get the goodies and they won’t get pussy unless they fulfil their side of the bargain. It ain’t in the genes;
5. Women habituate irresponsibility, being provided for and allowing someone else to take the lead, because they can. They are simply fulfilling the first imperative that motivates all life, which is to minimize stress, maximize pleasure. Men would do it too… if only they could. But there is always a ready pool of men available to tote that barge, lift that bale. Saying that it’s all in the genes is misleading nonsense;
6. Women have an escape-hatch in their role as stay-at-home mom. Men do not enjoy any such culturally-sanctioned permission, and those men that take it learn very quickly that they are about as popular as a beauty pageant at a leper colony.
7. To grasp the extent of the madness that is affirmative action is to understand how absurd it is to push women, for whom being provided for is a birthright, into jobs that they don’t even care for, while denying men, for whom not providing is not an option, the work-rights and opportunities that are so important to self-respect and identity.
8. When applied properly, game can work because it enables a man to harness the immaturity of women for his own ends. The immaturity attributable to women not having to take responsibility for the choices they make is the immaturity that makes them predictable, predisposing them to the impulses of their rationality hamster. Game is important insofar as it enables a man to see through women’s flightiness/insecurity and cues the appropriate responses that enable him to harness it. Roissy’s compelling street-smarts are diminished when he invokes EP to try to explain it all.
9. Children first learn from their mommas what’s important. And children take that learnin into adulthood and into culture. That’s why child-abuse, that other dimension of domestic violence that everybody conveniently overlooks, is so important to us. Women are the primary abusers of children and so it follows that children first learn violence from their primary nurturer. You would think that this is a fairly important observation. But from MRAs? Nothing. Barely a peep. But the truth is that there is no need for MRAs to become defensive whenever the domestic violence fairytale (man as thug) is bandied about in the media. Whether or not women perpetrate domestic violence at the same rates that men do is irrelevant to the vastly simpler fact that adults get most of their learnin about the things that matter from their childhood, back when their primary nurturer laid down the rules of what is and is not permissible. That’s why the genes-as-cause fiction is so harmful to our cause. It ain’t in the fucking genes.
10. Ever heard of the schizophrenogenic mother? Or what about Thomas Szasz’s Myth of mental illness? There exists a confluence of compelling ideas that need to be re-examined with the debunking of political correctness. Political correctness has informed the contemporary debate on schizophrenogenic mothers, dismissing the phenomenon as having no basis in scientific fact. No surprises there. Heaven forbid, holding mothers accountable for anything at all, let alone the schizophrenia of their children. Here is a tongue-in-cheek site that provides 32 reasons why the schizophrenogenic mother concept is incorrect.
11. To understand the relationship between culture and personality is to understand the relationship between options and their impact on the choices that people make. It is to understand the ever-shifting laws of supply and demand, and how these relate to the motivations, conceptualizations and narratives that do the rounds within the context of culture and personality:
    • Our contraceptive technologies provided the spark for the sexual revolution, to lay the foundations for a new reality such that the purpose of sex with respect to procreation has been superseded by its purpose as a commodity or leisure activity, something that can be traded and marketed. And thus we can lay the blame for the latest gimmick doing the rounds, the slutwalks, at the feet of the contraceptive pill;
    • US Constitution, in its original form, provided the framework for options that made American freedoms possible and sustainable, to cultivate an American can-do attitude that inspired confidence;
    • Affirmative action and the other insidious revisions taking place in our zeitgeist represent a fundamental attack on the principles of the US Constitution and the options that Americans have enjoyed since the Founding Fathers. The new, starker reality is reflected in an increasing pessimism, men’s soaring suicide rates and an economy going down the gurgler;

Explaining everything in terms of genetics sheds no light whatsoever on how these dynamics play out. Genocentrism is a whitewash that asserts, “What’s there to explain? It’s all in the genes, you dummy.” Which of course, it isn’t.

Do we see where I’m taking this? It’s about choice, not genes. It’s about making choices from the environment that we find ourselves in, and defining reality according to these subjective terms. Genocentrism dismisses that idea, confining it to a straight-jacket of irrelevance. But the truth is that we provide a much more forceful, compelling argument by taking genes out of the equation, rather than deferring to the assumption that it’s all in the genes. Dexter’s argument dismissing “equality” as a pipedream is much more compelling without having to bring genes into it.

Men can never enjoy women’s babying privileges. These are forever denied to most men. The pussy-pass is slapped on pretty much every woman, whether she likes it or not, from the moment of her birth and most are likely to carry it with them, flashing it at every opportunity, to the day they die. That’s why women have moral imperatives that are very different to those of men. No such pussy-pass is granted to men, and that’s why men develop the skills and abilities that make men more competitive. Men are constantly being tested in the competition for survival. If you baby a human throughout his/her life, male or female, then he/she never stops being a baby. It ain’t in the genes. If you mother a boy throughout his childhood and teens, then he becomes a momma’s boy. It ain’t in the fucking genes. Get it?

YOU WILL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT

Isaac Newton provided the world with a brilliant yet simple paradigm to which our technologies bear testament. We see it and we know it. No such thing exists in the mainstream life sciences. In the mainstream life sciences, there is no equivalent to Isaac Newton’s mechanics that we can look to and say, “yup, I get it.”

A scientist devoting six years of his life to studying locust legs needs to get a life. He needs to get out more, lest he become a hospitalized autistic. He needs to seek a broader picture that synthesizes ideas from across different disciplines into a single framework of axioms that hang together. The answers to life’s purpose are to be found neither in a locust’s leg, nor in any genetic blueprint that might account for it.

Feminists and liberals have already had a go at this systemic stuff. But when they began to suspect that these ideas were detrimental to their cause because no other theory was available that could so compellingly hold women to account, they began to abandon it. Or so it seems to me, anyways. Beyond autistic academics discussing the merits of these theories, the lefties have become silent for the most part. We may notice in my list of examples an absence of references to the leftist culture-gurus in fields such as linguistics (e.g., Ralph Nader, Margaret Mead). There is no reason whatsoever why fields such as linguistics or anthropology should remain the preserve of liberals.

The defensive knee-jerk reaction of MRAs to criticism of EP is misplaced. I used to be a proponent of EP, and I recognize that there is some good stuff there. But it’s got too much baggage invested in genocentrism. Either divest that baggage or formulate a new paradigm. Let us take up where the liberals have left off.

In his very recent post, Was Jesus a mangina?, Paul Elam unwittingly enters into this very culture debate, because the question of what Jesus was strikes at the heart of the nature/nurture debate and the importance of culture. Paul is right. Jesus was not a mangina. He couldn’t have been, because everything about his attitude and personality suggests a man who has risen beyond his culture. In all his narratives, Jesus was alluding to culture, in the sense of a collective good, except that in his time, the notion of culture was not properly articulated.

Jesus represented something that was from beyond the unquestioning complicity of earthly culture and its dumb, materialistic values. Jesus had as little to do with trumpet-blowing cherubs, Satan in fire and brimstone, or harp-strumming angels on fluffy white clouds as feminism has to do with justice, reason, or commonsense.

CONCLUSION

By focusing on this idea of genes as cause, we lose sight of how our lives are shaped by events. We lose sight of the fact that our lives and our identities are about learning and making choices from culture. We lose sight of the relationship between individual personality and cultural personality, individual personality and cultural heaven and hell, individual personality and cultural karma and nirvana. The reality is that we take our cues from our environment – every organism does – and for humans, that environment is culture. And every organism changes in accordance with what it learns through experience. These are not complex ideas and they are not new, though they represent a radical departure from the established contemporary paradigm ordained within the Church of Scientism.

It is impossible to appreciate how dumb our cultures are until we accept this shift in perspective.

Cultures are wholes. What is happening in one section of a culture reflects what is happening in another. Can we really trust the science of a culture that not only entertains a phenomenon as comprehensively idiotic as feminism, but also allows it to infect our politics and the legal system? Would you trust a thief with your wallet? Would you trust a pedophile with your child? There is no reason why we should place our trust in anything emanating from the Idiotsphere. Indeed, we have a duty to question every last thing about it.