A large underlying part of the culture wars has to do with the nature vs. nurture debate. The “nature” camp wants everything about humanity to be explainable in mechanistic, biological terms. The “nurture” camp wants everything about humanity to be attributable to social construction and cultural influence. Probably most people understand that there is some interplay between these (i.e., nobody is purely in one camp or the other), but will tend to favor one over the other. But is anyone correct? And, more importantly, is it even possible for anyone to be correct (or to know whether they are correct)?
This post is inspired by the following video:
If you have read anything else of mine, you probably know that I lean more towards the “nature” camp on a lot of issues. I am biased in favor of mechanistic, scientific explanations. From intelligence to gender identity to morality, I tend to weigh biology as being a greater contributing factor to our human tendencies. Indeed, my oft-repeated mantra is that humans did not evolve to live in the world we’ve created for ourselves, implying that humans have an evolutionary niche we now fail to inhabit, resulting in many of the problems of our modern world.
But I am not an ideologue on the issue. I recognize that there is much about human behavior, culture, and society that is not biologically determined. The above video makes several valid criticisms of evolutionary psychology, one of which is that the field is lousy with “just so” stories (some of which contradict each other) about how certain propensities arose through natural selection and sexual selection. These stories are unscientific (even if testable hypotheses can be derived from them, the story itself can never be tested – they are little better than creation myths) and studies based on the stories often yield conflicting, inconclusive, unreplicable, or clearly biased results. Behavioral genetics, which is at least more scientific than evolutionary psychology, runs into the problem that many behaviors show only small amounts of heritability, and many genes only show tiny contributions toward some behavior or psychological trait, often due to things like polygenicity (one trait being influenced by multiple genes) and pleiotropy (one gene influencing multiple traits).
And when discussing, for instance, differences between the preferences and behaviors of the sexes, we can only speak in terms of averages and distributions. These averages are often not very significant, and contain large variances, which leaves a lot of room for potential contributions from uncontrolled variables, random error, systematic error, experimental bias, bias in data analysis (e.g., p-hacking), and of course, interpretation. This latter issue – that of interpretation – is where science gets mixed up with culture war issues, but here I am actually more concerned with everything else in the things I just listed.
On the other hand, nurture is not in a better position. For starters, discussions of culture and social interactions tend to be much more descriptive than predictive. For instance, if men being seen as dominant and women being seen as submissive is purely a cultural artefact, then why did almost every sedentary society independently settle on patriarchal hierarchies of some form or another? This is not meant as a normative statement – I do not think that patriarchal hierarchies are “good” just because it so happened that this social organization happened to have come about – but merely that it is an observation that a purely “nurture” description fails to explain, nor could it be predicted on the purely “nurture” model. If gender is purely performative and sex is a social construct, why did almost every society independently invent the same binary (even if manifestations of this binary differ, there was still the understanding that it is, in fact, a binary)? And why did the binary coalesce around regular anatomical (genitalia) and genetic (chromosomal) features?
The nurture side of things have their own “just so” stories. Indeed, perhaps the godfather of all nurture ideas, psychoanalysis, was riddled with “just so” stories about how human behaviors and personality traits came about due to parental behaviors and various childhood traumas. But other notions in vogue today suffer the same problem: is it true that white men exhibit racist and sexist tendencies because they fear losing their power? We of course cannot ask them about it because not knowing they fear this, or not wanting to admit it, is part of the “just so” story, rendering it unfalsifiable.
Other ideas in the humanities cannot even boast a “just so” story. For instance, if sex is a social construct, then who made it up and why? If we say that it was based on nothing, that ideas about “man” and “woman” were invented whole cloth for the sake of accumulating power among a select few, then what criteria did the members employ for initially making the distinction and then adjudicating one’s induction into this powerful elite? This notion faces a similar issue to that of the Christian doctrine of original sin: if Eve had no knowledge of good and evil before eating the fruit, then how would she know that eating the fruit was wrong? Similarly, if there was a time prior to the social construction of “man” and “woman” then how did anyone come up with who belonged in which category?
I want to stress here that I am not making any normative claims about who is “superior” or whether, if any biological explanation even is the right one, that this informs (or should inform) us about how we ought to organize society and gender roles. My point here is to show that a purely nurture explanation for what is observed is, at best, insufficient.
But we can make these questions even more general: why do humans have social behaviors in the first place? Why do humans, regardless of culture, have such predictable cognitive biases? Why do humans almost universally care what other humans think about them (e.g., why do we even bother with performing gender in the first place, regardless of how these performances manifest)? Why do nearly all humans come up with various mythologies about themselves and their in-group? In other words, why does culture exist in the first place? And why does it manifest in certain ways for humans but not for other animals? In this way, the nurture camp has an almost anti-just-so story when it comes to culture and biology: how could it possibly be that for humans, behavior and culture is completely separate from, and uninfluenced by, biology, genetics, and evolution?
Again, I’m not saying evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics give the definitive answers to any of these questions. In fact, what I would argue is that not only does neither camp – the nature nor the nurture – have the full story, but that neither of them (nor any combination of them as they currently exist) are even capable of discovering the full story. At least not with any current theoretical or experimental tools at our disposal.
The problem is the fact that there is a complex, dynamic, nonlinear, recursive interplay between biology and culture. For instance, we can show that there are neuroanatomical and neurophysiological differences between men and women. But how much of that causation goes from brain differences causing differences in the preferences and behaviors of men and women? And how much can be attributed to neuroplasticity, where various social and cultural pressures mold the brain to reflect these cultural differences? And is it even meaningful to ask such a question? I don’t actually know the answer to this, but I can be fairly confident in saying that nobody else does, either.
In many instances, trying to tease these two things apart is a fools errand. Not only is it impossible to do, but it really would not be all that informative, since neither one offers much explanatory power absent the context of the other. Human behavior, culture, and society are all aspects of one big hyperobject – something so (spatially and temporally) vast, complex, and exerting influence on so many important aspects of our lives, that we are not really equipped to address the problem.
The reductionist techniques of modern science – things like breaking systems down into their simplest components and isolating variables – are insufficient for the task. Without actual data (or even a suitable methodology), we are inundated with wildly underdetermined and therefore untestable theories (or, quite often, “just so” stories) that are proposed or adopted based on ideological or financial commitments. Meanwhile, purely cultural analysis, even when not bogged down in critiquing itself, really only works descriptively (and, all too frequently, prescriptively), and absent any falsificationist criteria can only accommodate, assimilate, or reject the new concepts being engineered by philosophers and social scientists, again often based on ideological preferences or financial interests.
This would be the part of most articles of this sort where I offer some glimmer of hope. Perhaps if we could just do this or that or the other thing, we might at least nudge things in the right direction. But unfortunately, as is often the case, I bring only pessimism. As I said from the outset, my bias tends to lean more toward the mechanistic “nature” explanations offered by the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, genetics, neuroscience, etc.). While there is almost certainly a plethora of cognitive biases, genetic predispositions, and cultural influences at play in giving me this inclination, my justification (or perhaps rationalization) is pragmatic: physical sciences have a better (though far from perfect) track record than social sciences (where here I use this term social sciences to encompass the “soft” sciences, such as psychology and sociology, but also the humanities, such as philosophy, history, economics, political science, gender studies, etc.). Indeed, I would contend that many of the problems that arise in the physical sciences sprout from the seeds planted by the social sciences. For instance, the “science” of eugenics was a social science, not a physical science – nothing in the theory of evolution by natural selection entails eugenics.
The problem, as I see it, boils down to this: at least ideally, the physical sciences attempts to look at the world and come up with theories that describe or explain it, and then test those theories by proposing hypotheses and running experiments. We can be confident that there is something at least bordering on the truth with these theories because of their tangible effects, such as modern medicine and digital technology.
Meanwhile, the social sciences have a track record of coming up with theories and then trying to make the world fit those theories (e.g., Marxism, socialism, fascism, libertarianism). These theories of the social sciences view humans as malleable and able to be molded and educated so as to fit with their theories. And then when such social engineering projects fail, this is not viewed as a reason to reject the theory, but to change implementation strategies. For instance, if we could just use the sort of “good eugenics” the video that prompted this post criticizes, rather than those bad Nazi eugenics, then surely it will work out this time – in other words, the thinking seems to be, eugenics itself isn’t flawed, it was just the implementation. Likewise, with something like Marxism, the data show that it has been a disaster wherever it has been tried, but this is only seen by proponents as botched implementation, or not enough emphasis on controlling the means of cultural production, or due to foreign meddling, or whatever other excuse, but it couldn’t just be that Marxism is flawed at its very foundations (indeed, if it cannot grapple with the complexities of human society in a way that requires that it can only succeed under a very particular implementation, then it will always be doomed to failure). But don’t think I’m just picking on the Marxists, because the same could be said for something like libertarianism (which I discuss in this post).
While the physical sciences is slow and imperfect and might only progress one funeral at a time, theories that spring from the social sciences tend to be resilient beyond what their explanatory or predictive power merits, getting passed along like so many other myths.
But again, that is my own bias in favor the physical sciences. I am, however, under no illusion that the physical sciences does now or ever will explain everything that is to be explained or solve every problem. I just have even less confidence in the social sciences for doing the same. In reality, we would need something that combines the strengths of both, but I have the least confidence of all that this will ever occur while humans continue to be human. And we’ll probably destroy ourselves before that ever stops being the case.