The Genetic Leash
by Steven Gussman
Our genes are ultimately responsible for the existence of our brains (to date, developmental biology is the only process capable of building this complex machine); but the genes clearly build it to be a somewhat (though by no means completely) plastic processing unit.i And yet this degree of plasticity is itself a heritable, genetically encoded trait— the product of natural selection (which would by definition never be able to produce a genetic leash of zero percent).ii How else would we have evolved from brainless cells, to our simple hardwired ancestors, to the complex behavioral great apes?iii Neurobiologist Leo M. Chalupa points out that, “what's special about brain plasticity... is that the changes are mediated by events that are in some sense adaptive,” (what a fantastic coincidence that would be, if plastic-learning were a genuinely arbitrary process victim to the whims of, “cultural constructs”).iv Let's look at an example which is sufficiently symbolic and arbitrary such that we can be relatively sure there is no adaptive learning bias involved. Imagine that I take identical twins, and teach one that the answer to, “2 + 2,” is, “3;” and the other, that it is, “5.” Sure enough, the, “what is 2 + 2,” stimulus elicits the, “3,” response in the former twin, and the, “5,” response in the latter. (In fact, this can be done with one person at different times, with a little, “re-education”). Do we consider the difference in response to be a difference in, “gene expression?” Hardly! We all consider this to be a classical-environmental learning (but few emphasize how it is only possible because the genes proscribed a partially-plastic brain). Think of moths, which, given their current genetic makeup, simply do not possess the nervous system ever to learn the difference between a candle-light and the moon—that is, not without selection of new genetic mutations (hard-wiring rather than learning).v The macroscopic environment that we walk about in by day actually doesn't matter as much to gene expression,vi outside of the fact that an adaptation may include conditional phenotype (and technically often does: your genes encode emotions as motivating reactions to environmental stimulus,vii which are only adaptive if they trigger at the right times and not at other times).viii What matters greatest of all in terms of, “environment,” is the molecular machinery internal to the body which carries out the developmental process inscribed in the genes (that is, which builds the appropriate phenotype and not some other one).ix This environment is itself complex biochemistry (each single cell cooperating in a multi-cellular organism is a living organism in its own right); that is, it is an, "environment," itself encoded in and arising as a result of the genes—a teeming, living, “environment.”x In fact, part of Richard Dawkins' extended phenotype is that the macroscopic, "environment," even external to the organism in question, are the (extended) phenotype of genesxi which will in turn play any, "environmental," role in the, "expression," of other genes in this and other organisms.xii
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck formalized the hypothesis that life evolved through the inheritance of acquired traits.xiii Here is how this model works: let us assume that bicep strength confers a fitness advantage in some way (that it leads a person to have more viable offspring). To improve my fitness, I then exercise my biceps by lifting weights (in the most naive model, I have exercised libertarian free will to decide to exercise; I have gained muscle mass through the environmental causation that is the lifting of weights, and my body has somehow encoded this information into my gametes).xiv Now, when I have children, they will inherit my environmentally-acquired trait-muscularity without having to strive in their own environment. This has been falsified in favor of Darwin's theory of unchanging (outside of random mutation) gametes whose genes are naturally selected (by causing its host to reproduce more, they thereby replicate more, and thereby reproduce the traits the gene gives rise to, more).xv The over-emphasis on, “environmental,” contributions to, “gene expression,” has something of a Lamarkian flavor, and indeed, some have exaggerated so-called, “epigenetics,” in just these terms.xvi When Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko attempted to manipulate environmental causation in a Lamarckian fashion to adapt wheat to the Russian cold, it was a deadly failure!xvii So much for, “epigenetic expression,” when ten million are starved to death.xviii
Everything from traditional Darwinism through kin selection and reciprocal altruism are explanations making reference to genetic causation. The major thesis of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene is that the natural selection of phenotype-causing genes gives rise to the adaptive complexity (including altruism) that we see as biodiversity (in particular, that the gene is the unit of selection).xix Epigenetic rules of thumbxx for carrying out the derivatives of natural selection—sexual, artificial, kin (William D. Hamilton), reciprocity (Robert Trivers), and extended selection (Dawkins)—far from being some kind of new, "epigenetic," alternative to Mendelian heredity (nor a Lamarckian alternative to Darwin's theory), are actually the naturally selected behaviors (read: behaviors caused by genes) that increased their owner's fitness because they led to what could be described as these other sub-theories of selection.xxi Whether a female is a more or less choosy mate, and what she does and doesn't find attractive, is not something that can simply be taken for granted, let alone treated as, “environmental.”xxii In fact, these instincts must be largely under genetic control, otherwise natural selection couldn't have selected for the complex adaptive systems (which are anything but random) we call mating strategies.xxiii Combining the terms Dawkins and E. O. Wilson have used, we can call these, “epigenetic rules of thumb;” such behaviors are not the product of the, "environment," of common sense, let alone of Freudian childhood upbringing—they are themselves the phenotype of selected genes.xxiv Such behaviors are selection pressures, themselves selected by the ultimate selection pressure: natural selection.xxv They are preferences and behaviors caused by naturally selected genes, and they produce offspring with, for example, sexually selected genes. Kin selection is actually an example of conditional adaptation: sense relatedness, act accordingly (the same could be said for sexual selection: sense fitness, mate).xxvi Evolution can also select for probabilistic differences in a population by selecting for a stochastic phenotype, likely taking advantage of probabilities inherent to the environment (as is well-known in the case of 50/50 sex-determination, by no means a foregone conclusion).xxvii Given the willful ignorance towards the ultimately genetic nature of, “environmental causation,” it is hard not to feel like a similar situation in physics would be the insistence that, even though it doesn't help us account for any phenomena, we really feel we need to constantly pay lip service to the causation of, “flib-flub” (as distinct from the four fundamental forces). “Flib-flub,” is somehow integrally important to the structure and orbits of stars, but no one can agree on how. There is something dualist about this state of affairs. In any event, Occam's razor (and basic logic) precludes over-determination.
Despite the fact that there exists no dualistic difference between the body and mind, even among emphasizers of the, “environment,” the concept is almost totally dead in the water when it comes to brute morphology, and even simple control units (as in ants' heads).xxviii Tellingly, for the, “environment,” fanatics, it is about the (truly, partially plastic) human brain which the debate rages.xxix The relative plasticity of our brains do allow that we learn (or acquire) even quite complex (though highly-specific) mental traits. But this does not mean there exists no genetic leash over what we learn (there are cases such as incest avoidance where the learning is the innate trait, and the target—who, in particular, is your kin—is, “environmental,” in some much reduced sense).xxx A simpler example is the duckling's imprinting period: when it hatches, it follows whatever is the first being it sees.xxxi This genetically-encoded developmental program evolved for the purpose of mother-identification, but can relatively easily be environmentally manipulated such that ducklings imprint on the wrong entity.
Whatever reduced role is left for the, "cultural environment," to play, “norms, mores, customs, and preferences,” will be understood in light of an ordinary, explanatory science, such as evolutionary memetics is attempting.xxxii We currently have no model or theory of culture at all, and treat the whole business as a permanently mysterious set of historical accidents (in light of this, it is ironic that the proponents of this view somehow find hope that it will admit of a simple educational mechanism to change people's values—we will simply teach young girls not to compete with each other, and young boys never to enact violence, the story goes).xxxiii (Ironically, in many cases, the social traits we see—such as male violence—are actually occurring despite our naive environmental interventions to diminish them).xxxiv By contrast, Dawkins has proposed the, “meme,” as the unit of cultural selection (the correlate of a, “gene,” in ordinary evolutionary theory), sparking interest in new ways to think about the formation of ideas, their replication, and selection to form the, “species,” we call, “philosophies,” in the, “diverse animal kingdom,” we call, “culture.” Those hell-bent on our escaping, "genetic determinism," will not be happy when they are subsequently met with, “memetic determinism.” The, “environmentalists,” real goal is to prevent C. P. Snow's and E. O. Wilson's third culture project to understand the subjects of the humanities as natural phenomena, through use of the scientific method.xxxv Similarly, those interested in mapping all of the partially-plastic learning and conditioning of an individual's neural network—their connectomexxxvi—can provide little comfort for the, “environmentalists.” If the connectome is at the epicenter of your idea of the, “environment,” well, there are simply no connectomes without genes (yet plenty of genomes without connectomes). Bottom line: no one can define what, "epigenetics," "environment," or, "culture," even mean without recourse to genetic determinism (and for that matter, few agree about what these terms precisely entail at all).xxxvii
When it comes to other species, including non-human primates, the situation is inverted: "cultural environment," is the last kind of causation researchers propose (and to great skepticism from their peers). Instead, if different populations of the same (or similar) species have different traits, biologists approach the problem in terms of their different environments naturally selecting different genes due to the different traits they give rise to being adaptive in said different environments (a subject known as ecology). Given all of the variance in environmental niches homo sapiens have managed to inhabit, despite our consistent human nature, it perhaps stands to reason that the majority of traits are genetic in origin. Some have even argued for gene-culture co-evolution. In this model, culture (whatever caused it) acts as a selection pressure on the genes and vice versa.xxxviii While this appears to split the baby, which explanation terminates: genes or culture? Hardly anyone can even properly define culture. This is not a chicken-or-the-egg problem: genes necessarily kicked off any gene-culture co-evolution process which may be in play. Should we proceed as though your mother wore cherry flavored lip gloss on the morning of February 7th, 1983 because she was genetically hard-coded to do exactly that? No (and no one does). Should we proceed as though your mother did so for no reason at all, "because" of the vagaries of historical accident, and that there were limitless things she could have done instead (such as sprout a third arm and finger paint her belly)? No (but everyone does).
So what is this thing we call, “culture?” Clearly, there is a social-psychological world of ideas mediated by our biological minds, including ideas that not all human societies (let alone individuals) share. Evolutionary psychologists have taken on this challenge from the start. In fact, the subtitle to the field's foundational text, The Adapted Mind, is, “Evolutionary Psychology And The Generation Of Culture,” (emphasis mine).xxxix The late evolutionary psychologist John Tooby argued that the terms, “learning,” and, “culture,” were mere black boxes obfuscating a world of adaptive mental modules interacting with perceived information at the level of the individual mind.xl Darwinnian historian Laura Betzig has seconded this notion in arguing that the historical artifacts we think of as, “culture,” were created in the pursuit (rather than the transcendence) of biological fitness, and that the standard view is a superzoological religion.xli As a specific example, one of the most common adages which smuggles cultural relativism into common belief is, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder;” but as evolutionary psychologist David Buss points out, attractiveness is actually governed by mate-choice, something keenly naturally selected.xlii Perhaps patient zero in the modern epidemic of relativism is morality; yet many naturalists have made the case that there does exist a science of moral realism for us to discoverxliii (and that one reason to think so is that there are human universals in moral sentiment,xliv including in the minds of babies).xlv
So what about science? Is science a cultural phenomenon or a biological one? This is of course a false dichotomy; science is the perfect example of a cultural phenomenon where, “culture,” is properly understood to be a thoroughly biological concept (after all, there is no culture without brains, and no brains without genes).xlvi While primitive peoples were probably more impressive thinkers than they often get credit for, I also wrote a book bemoaning how even working scientists in the 21st century don't appreciate the philosophy underlying their specific scientific fields!xlvii Thus, we ponder the natural origins of epistemology. Organisms, let alone brains, could only have evolved in an ordered cosmos, and the sense organs generally evolved to accurately perceive that world, because this allows stimulus-response which exploits reality; we (and many other lineages, independently by convergent evolution as opposed to inheritance) have eyes because the environment really is rich in informative photons.xlviii (We evolved to maximize fitness, so in those cases in which inaccuracy leads to greater fitness than accuracy, so much the worse for accuracy—but I do believe this is a minority force when it comes to senses, and a special case when it comes to cognition).xlix Science writer Anne Druyan frames too much instinct as though it were agency when it comes to bees, and yet the bees' means of finding and deciding on a hive is shocking (including rudimentary versions of empirical measurement, precise communication, replication, and voting).l In blind, naturally selected instinct, we see the foundations for empiricism, skepticism, statistics, and democracy.li Prior to these discoveries, no one would have told you that you would or even could observe such behaviors in organisms so simple, and without cultural means.lii We simultaneously underestimate what can be naturally selected in animals, and overestimate how much of our own behavior we should chalk up to culture alone.liii More to the present point, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker reports tracking scientist Louis Liebenberg's findings that the San hunter-gatherers are quite elaborate in their thinking (including rudimentary statistics and Bayesian reasoning).liv If you or I were to be trained by a San hunter in all of what goes into their animal-tracking, it would certainly feel an awful lot like we were engaging in our ability to think critically (even as a sizable role for experience, trial and error, and so forth remained)!lv On the other hand, Tooby has argued that moral (as opposed to epistemological), “coalitional instincts,” can at times dominate a supposedly scientific field.lvi This criticism of humanity is highly distinct from the postmodernists' blanket denial of the sciences as helplessly biased (and actually flips the script on them; the difference between evolutionary psychologists' and postmodernists' respect for rigor when it comes to the formation of their beliefs is night and day).lvii
At the end of the day, if you think human behavior is mostly adaptive (or rather, if this can be shown to be the case), then you think human behavior is mostly genetically caused, as genes are what are naturally selected to produce adaptations. A common argument of evolutionary psychologists are that adaptations (say, a particular sex difference) is extant—not just across cultures—but across species (and that the genetic adaptation argument is already accepted in these other animals): what are the odds that the random vagaries of a perfectly malleable history recreates the same adaptations in humans as natural selection did in our cousins?lviii Whatever variance is left over , behavioral genetics implies that at least half of that is also genetic in origin.lix Therefore, if you think humans are more alike than different—that is, that most behavior stems from human nature—you must conclude that the vast majority of human behavior is genetic in casual origin.
Most generally, we should not make too much of the fact that one can break a casual chain into smaller and smaller steps. A little education in philosophy goes a long way here, as this point stretches back to antiquity: one can almost always, "go deeper.”lx My teacher approached this with the example of a car: what makes it go? Answer: my pressing my foot on the accelerator. Any normal person would accept this answer, but the philosopher delves deeper in illustration. We now have two questions: what makes your foot press the pedal; and how does pressing the pedal cause the car to accelerate? Traditional philosophy focuses on the latter. Answer: some mechanism attached to the pedal causes fuel to be injected into the combustion engine at a faster rate.lxi Can we go further? The faster the pistons are moving in the engine, the more work it can do on the the axle, the more torque it can apply to the wheels, the faster the wheels can roll you across the terrain (as we near the end of my ability to play this game, pause to recognize that this exercise also serves to demonstrate how much of the world is a black-box to most of us!). Of course, we could in principle break every portion of this down to the practically intractable particle physics involved in a driving car. If we summed up the knowledge of every individual who contributed to the creation of the car, we would still not be in possession of the full explanation for it in terms of fundamental physics (not least because we aren't even in possession of a final theory, always making due with partial knowledge). The critic of those who say, “a gene for a behavior,"lxii typically focuses on the other question: how does the human press the pedal with their foot? This is among the most complex processes in the known universe, involving the brain processing information from the sense organs and deciding to accelerate the vehicle; the sending of signals down to the ankle to push; and all of the vagaries of microbiology (to say nothing of particle physics) in-between.lxiii It is astonishing that any of this works, and it only does so because of the long-term winnowing of genes via evolution by natural selection. Even (read: most especially of all) the brain which appears capable of executive agency on the fly, required almost five billion years of genetic selection to exist. Ironically, the most popular examples of, "environmental," causation all involve the most complex, naturally selected object in the universelxiv (we human-brains still have not come close to engineering a human brain—it is firmly the creation of biology). By contrast, some of the simplest adaptations (say, the shape of the pinky finger—something children roughly role out of clay on a daily basis) are thought by even the most radical, "environmentalists," to be an entirely genetic expression. In short, all causation is susceptible to the red-herring that it is mediated by innumerable steps in-between, with no clear terminating first-cause (though my view is that modern science gives rise to the world-view that the big bang encodes the initial conditions for everything that has happened, deterministically, since; and that there exists some fundamental interaction, be it of the particles of The Standard Model or of the strings of string theory, which cannot be further broken down into sub-chains of causation). If I tell someone at gunpoint to, "put the money in the bag;" to say that this causes the cashier to, indeed, put the money in the bag, is banal. Yet the full causal account of this event is actually as-or-more complex, than, for example, to say that the presence of an allele in the genome causes a person to be more agreeable than another person. Behavioral genetics is subject to an entirely different standard of causal inference than any other field, to say nothing of the standards of causal inference we afford ourselves in everyday life.
The furor over, “biological determinism,” is even more bizarre when you recognize that every plausible (read: natural, rather than supernatural) kind of, “environmental,” causation would be no less, “biologically determinant,” than genes are.lxv Science is all about figuring out what makes the natural world tick—which causes determine which effects; thus, biology is all about carrying out this project with respect to life.lxvi This is not a semantic debate, but it is a sleight of hand on the part of those who harp against, “biological determinism,” (or, “genetic determinism,”) as they are not actually content with life being understood as being somehow determined by, “environmental,” causes, either. The, “environmentalists,” are demanding we accept the idea that either causation in the realm of human life is too complex to bother trying to understand, or otherwise that we really are free-willed agents making decisions entirely divorced from any kind of physical law (their particular flavor of divine intervention might be anything from a god to the sheer will of radical politics).lxvii They detest, “determinism,” (read: scientific explanation) itself, because it limits them and the assumed efficacy of their social engineering goals.lxviii
There are two facts that the, "environmentalists," don't like: 1. that living organisms are machines, governed by natural law; and 2. that such complex machines are developed through genetic blueprints. Taken together, we get Dawkins', "gene machine," (which even he is loathe to take too far).
The situation is something like insisting that, in physics, as powerful as Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is, there is still something else somehow more comforting at work when it comes to gravitation, something that perhaps theory will never explain, precisely. This wishful thinking (political, religious, or otherwise) we call the, “environment,” has already led to the proliferation (among academics and laypeople alike) of unscientific ideaslxix such as arbitrary free will,lxx the denial of a genetic basis for racelxxi (this from a class of people who pore over their 23 & Me results at cocktail parties), and the denial of chromosomal sex determination and the assertion of a, "gender identity spectrum.”lxxii Biology is an ordinary science. Nature will not care either way, but academic institutions have to make a choice as to whether they want their understanding of life to be based in the descriptive science, or a collection of normative fictions.
Footnotes:
i. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology by John Alcock (Oxford University Press) (2001) (pp. 134), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (Penguin Books) (2002 / 2016) (pp. 44-45, 49, 73, 83, 87, 89, 93, 97-98, 455), and "Brain Plasticity" by Leo M. Chalupa in This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress edited by John Brockman (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2014 / 2015) (pp. 18-19) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25447).
ii. See Consilience: The Unity Of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson (Vintage Books) (1998) (pp. 181-182) and The Blank Slate (pp. 1-73).
iii. See The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach Of The Gene by Richard Dawkins (Oxford University Press) (1982 / 1999 / 2008 / 2016) (pp. 28, 39-40).
iv. See "Brain Plasticity" in This Idea Must Die (pp. 18).
v. See The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Bantam) (2006) (pp. 201-202).
vi. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 50-51).
vii. See “What Explains The Resistance To Evolutionary Psychology?” by Alex Mackiel (Quillette) (2019) (https://quillette.com/2019/04/08/what-explains-the-resistance-to-evolutionary-psychology/) and The Blank Slate (pp. 38-39, 315-316).
viii. See The Blank Slate (pp. 315-316).
ix. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 48-49, 52, 127, 344-345) and The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 43).
x. See The Extended Phenotype by (pp. 52, 297, 343-346, 350, 383).
xi. See The Selfish Gene (pp. 307-327) and The Extended Phenotype.
xii. See Consilience (pp. 180).
xiii. See The Selfish Gene (pp. 367) and The Extended Phenotype (pp. 143, 270-271).
xiv. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 143, 264-265).
xv. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 143, 264-265).
xvi. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 143, 153). Peter Ward entitled his book on epigenetics, “Lamarck's Revenge.”
xvii. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 88) and Cosmos: Possible Worlds by Ann Druyan (National Geographic) (2020) (pp. 114-144).
xviii. See The Blank Slate (pp. 155).
xix. See The Selfish Gene.
xx. See The Selfish Gene (pp. 131, 296, 376), Science In The Soul: Selected Writings Of A Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins (Random House) (2017) by Dawkins (pp. 59, 167, 171, 175, 176, 259-260), The Extended Phenotype (pp. 199, 220-221), and Consilience (pp. 163-199, 210, 232-233, 249-253, 269-270, 278, 281-282, 338, 340).
xxi. See for example The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 140) and Consilience (pp. 139).
xxii. See the chapter entitled, “The Peacock's Tale,” in The Red Queen: Sex And The Evolution Of Human Nature by Matt Ridley (Harper Perennial) (1993) (pp. 129-169), and The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 63).
xxiii. See The Red Queen (pp. 186-93) and The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 104-109).
xxiv. See The Selfish Gene (pp. 296-297, 376-377), Science In The Soul (pp. 59, 167, 171, 175, 176, 259-260), The Extended Phenotype (pp. 199, 220-221), and Consilience (pp. 163-199, 210, 232-233, 249-253, 269-270, 278, 281-282, 338, 340).
xxv. See Consilience (pp. 138, 171).
xxvi. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 233-237).
xxvii. See “Behavior = Genes + Environment” by Steven Pinker in This Idea Must Die (pp. 188-191) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25337), The Selfish Gene (pp. 90-110, 186-190), The Extended Phenotype (pp. 182-183), and The Red Queen (pp. 108-109, 114-125).
xxviii. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 129-131) and Gad Saad's June 27th, 2013 tweet: https://x.com/GadSaad/status/350298812243382272?s=20.
xxix. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 129-131) and Saad's June 27th, 2013 tweet: https://x.com/GadSaad/status/350298812243382272?s=20.
xxx. See “Michael Shermer With Dr. Debra Lieberman — Objection: Disgust, Morality And The Law” by Michael Shermer and Debra Lieberman (Skeptic) (2018) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyBksb89d70) (27:24-30:03), The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 146), Consilience (pp. 237), and The Ape That Understood The Universe: How The Mind And Culture Evolved by Steve Stewart-Williams (Cambridge University Press) (2018 / 2019) (pp. 241).
xxxi. See “Michael Shermer With Dr. Debra Lieberman — Objection: Disgust, Morality And The Law”.
xxxii. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 80) and "Francis Crick's Dangerous Idea" by V. S. Ramachandran in What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers On The Unthinkable edited by John Brockman (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2006 / 2007) (pp. 22-26) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11940).
xxxiii. See The Blank Slate (pp. 26-32, 67, 108, 134, 284-5, 309), The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 82, 129-131), and "Culture" by Pascal Boyer in This Idea Must Die (pp. 426) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25388).
xxxiv. See The Ape That Understood The Universe (pp. 52, 81, 88, 96, 108, 114-115, 134, 146, 167) and The Blank Slate (pp. 307, 346, 359-370).
xxxv. See Consilience (pp. 43, 136-137, 329) and Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress by Steven Pinker (Viking) (2018) (pp. 17, 333-334, 92-93, 390, 395-396).
xxxvi. See Cosmos: Possible Worlds (pp. 144-145, 171) and "Francis Crick's Dangerous Idea" in What Is Your Dangerous Idea? (pp. 22-26).
xxxvii. See “Behavior = Genes + Environment”.
xxxviii. See Consilience (pp. 138-139, 171, 179-182, 238, 335) and "Culture Is Natural" by Dan Sperber in What Is Your Dangerous Idea? (pp. 248) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10384).
xxxix. See The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology And The Generation Of Culture edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (Oxford University Press) (1992) (note that I have not yet read this book).
xl. See “Learning And Culture” by John Tooby from This Idea Must Die (pp. 432-436) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25343) and “Culture” by Boyer in This Idea Must Die (pp. 426-428).
xli. See “Culture” by Laura Betzig in This Idea Must Die (pp. 429, 431) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25463).
xlii. See “Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder” by David Buss in This Idea Must Die (pp. 413-415) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25481).
xliii. See The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris (Free Press) (2010 / 2011) and Enlightenment Now (pp. 412-415, 417-419, 421-422, 428-429, 432).
xliv. See The Moral Landscape, Enlightenment Now (pp. 412-415, 417-419, 421-422, 428-429, 432), and “Our Universal Moral Grammar's Immunity To Religion" by Marc D. Hauser in What Is Your Dangerous Idea? (pp. 59-61).
xlv. See “Moral Blank Slate-ism” by Kiley Hamlin in This Idea Must Die (pp. 196-198) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25515).
xlvi. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 130, 149), "Modern Science Is A Product Of Biology" by Arnold Trehub in What Is Your Dangerous Idea? (pp. 234) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10481), and The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature by Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault (The New Press) (1971-1984 / 2006) (pp. 23-25, 27-28, 32-35, 119-120).
xlvii. See The Philosophy Of Science: Volume I: Epistemology by Steven Gussman (Footnote Physicist) (2021-2023) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).
xlviii. See the “In Touch With Reality” chapter in The Blank Slate (pp. 197-218), “Evolutionary Convergence” by Simon Conway Morris (CellPress Current Biology) (1998) (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(06)02143-9.pdf), and “Mother Nature Can't Stop Evolving Eyes” by Troy Farah (Salon) (2023) (https://www.salon.com/2023/04/16/mother-nature-cant-stop-evolving-eyes/).
xlix. See The Philosophy Of Science (pp. 369, 463, 467) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2023/01/chapter-xxxi-sociology-of-scientists.html#FNXXXXIIIA) which further cites "Truer Perceptions Are Fitter Perceptions" by Donald Hoffman in This Idea Must Die (pp 467-468) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25450).
l. See Cosmos: Possible Worlds (pp. 211-212, 214-222), The Selfish Gene (pp. 82), and The Extended Phenotype (pp. 47, 66, 312-314, 418, 424) which further cites A Biologist Remembers by Karl von Frisch (Pergamon Press) (1967), Animal Architecture by Karl von Frisch (Butterworths) (1975), Communication Among Social Bees by Martin Lindauer (Harvard University Press) (1961), and “The Functional Significance Of The Honeybee Waggle Dance by Martin Lindauer (American Naturalist) (1971) (though I have not read these works Dawkins cited).
li. See Cosmos: Possible Worlds (pp. 211-212, 214-222) and The Extended Phenotype (pp. 47, 66, 312-314, 418, 424).
lii. See Cosmos: Possible Worlds (pp. 214, 216-217).
liii. Scientists such as Zoologist Donald Griffin argue that we should look for the deeper roots of epistemology in non-human animals, see "Cognitive Ethology" by Irene Pepperberg in This Idea Is Brilliant (pp. 245-248) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27062).
liv. See Enlightenment Now (pp. 353-354, 483, 508) and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker (Viking) (2021) (pp. 1-6, 341, 374) which further cites The Art Of Tracking: The Origin Of Science by Louis Liebenberg (David Philip) (1990), The Origins Of Science: The Evolutionary Roots Of Scientific Reasoning And Its Implications For Tracking Science by Louis Liebenberg (Cyber-Trackers), “Notes On Tracking And Trapping: Examples Of Hunter-Gatherer Ingenuity by Louis Liebenberg (StevenPinker.com) (2020), and “Tracking Science: An Alternative To Those Excluded By Citizen Science” by Louis Liebenberg et al. (Citizen Science: Theory And Practice) (2021) (though I have not yet read these Liebenberg pieces).
lv. See Enlightenment Now (pp. 353-354, 483, 508) and Rationality (pp. 1-6, 341, 374).
lvi. See “Learning And Culture” from This Idea Must Die (pp. 432-433) and The Philosophy Of Science (pp. 369) which further cites "#119 — Hidden Motives: A Conversation With Robin Hanson" by Sam Harris and Robin Hanson (Making Sense) (2018) (https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/119-hidden-motives) (31:52-39:47).
lvii. The resistance Noam Chomsky met among the linguists when it came to his theory of universal grammar is an experience postmodernists almost always find themselves on the other side of (though Michel Foucault can be found feigning kinship), see The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature (pp. 21-36, 154-155).
lviii. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 140) and The Ape That Understood The Universe (pp. 96, 109, 129).
lix. See The Blank Slate (pp. 374).
lx. See The Dream Of Reason: A History Of Western Philosophy From The Greeks To The Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb (Norton) (2000 / 2016) (pp. 354).
lxi. See “Throttle” (Wikipedia) (accessed 12/27/2023) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throttle) (though I have not read this full entry).
lxii. See The Extended Phenotype (pp. 29, 32-35, 42-43) and The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 72).
lxiii. See James Watson's “Foreword” to Discovering The Brain by Sandra Ackerman (National Academies Press) (1992) (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234155/) (note that I have read this foreword, but not the book).
lxiv. See How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil (Penguin Books) (2012) (pp. 8-9, 285) which further cites Watson's “Foreword” to Discovering The Brain.
lxv. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 129-30).
lxvi. See the “Determinism” chapter in The Philosophy Of Science (pp. 197-203) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/11/chapter-xiv-determinism-philosophy-of.html).
lxvii. See The Blank Slate (pp. 26-32, 67, 103-120, 134, 284-285, 309), The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 129-133), and “2013 Boyarsky Lecture by Jonathan Haidt, PhD” (Duke University) (55:15-57:56) (https://youtu.be/b86dzTFJbkc?t=3316).
lxviii. See The Triumph Of Sociobiology (pp. 20-21, 129-131) and The Blank Slate (at least pp. xvi-xvii, 169-173).
lxix. See The Blank Slate (pp. xvi-xvii, 27, 169-173).
lxx. See Free Will by Sam Harris (Free Press) (2012) and “The Consciousness Conundrum” by Steven Gussman (Areo) (2023) (https://areomagazine.com/2023/05/30/the-consciousness-conundrum/).
lxxi. See for example “Note And Correction On The 'Lewontin Fallacy'” by Jerry Coyne (Why Evolution Is True) (2020) (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/04/23/note-and-correction-on-the-lewontin-fallacy/).
lxxii. See my November 15th, 2022 tweet: https://x.com/Sophistructure/status/1592421350211485697?s=20.
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