There is a gene, Rs4680, that SNPedia identifies as a “warrior/worrier” gene (http://snpedia.com/index.php/Rs4680). “Val158 alleles may be associated with an advantage in the processing of aversive stimuli (warrior strategy), while Met158 alleles may be associated with an advantage in memory and attention tasks (worrier strategy).”
“Now,” I ask my mother, “Which of these do you think I should have? I should have the worrier gene, right?”
I am the shy child. I am the bookworm. I am the sailor who lets the sail luff enough to keep the boat stable, when racing in a high wind, rather than letting the boat heel till it’s practically taking in water. I am the teenager who did every bit of her classroom reading in high school, and the woman who started saving for retirement literally from her first full time job. I am the woman who, all her life, has been convinced that my greatest temptation is cowardice. And I am the peaceful, unwarlike Quaker.
“But what about all of your college activism?” says my mother, “What about the time you went off by yourself to visit that commune? What about the time you knocked on the door of the Moonies, and the time you went by yourself, in high school, to see your friend Lily in Washington, DC? I think you’d have the warrior gene.”
I am the little girl who hit back as hard as she could, every time a bully hit her on the playground. I am the girl who insisted that she belonged in the metal working class, when no girls were allowed to apply, and showed up for the metal working class rather than the cooking class she had been assigned to (but I am also the girl who, in the end, gave in and took the cooking class). I am the sometimes contentious Quaker activist. I am the woman who, at one demonstration, jumped into a fountain to talk some people out of burning a flag, and later, while still trying to talk them out of the flag burning, linked arms to protect them should they go ahead with it. I am the college student who drove a stick shift across the country, in three days, with a woman she’d never met as a co-driver, and only a learner’s permit. I am the woman who saved money from her first job to travel as soon as she could to Kenya, the woman who went out in a small rowboat in Hurricane Hugo, and the woman who sent her husband into a war zone for three months and joined him for the last three weeks.
In fact, I am Val/Val. For this gene, I have the warrior version.
I’m not sure what the Met/Met version of Lynn would have been like. Would she have stayed close to home for college, hesitant to travel 3000 miles away? Or would any Lynn raised in my environment, regardless of her genes, have found that 3000 mile trip normal? I’ve met people since my college days who needed to stay close to home for college, but the thought never occurred to me or anyone in my family.
I’ve been thinking lately about genes and environment, and their relative influence on our mental abilities and personality traits. And so now I’m pulling my thoughts together, partly as a way of gathering what I know, but also as a way of exploring what I expect, what my intuitions are.
I am going to be blogging a series of posts in which I look at the interaction between nature and nurture, as applied to different topics, and also explore my own recent experience looking at my DNA. This series is going to be crossposted between my blog and Alexandria. On some points, I’ll be particularly interested in Hector’s view, since, though he and I are likely to have very different perspectives at the point in this series when I get to nature, nurture, and gender issues, he does have both a background in biology and share with me the experience of reading Razib Khan (and reaction to Razib Khan, for better or worse, is part of the inspiration for the series). So Hector is encouraged to look at the Alexandria version of these posts and chime in there as he sees fit.
Thanks for the wonderful post–not only is your subject intriguing(the interaction of nature/nurture, and how we get to be who we are), but I love your writing style: from “I am the shy child. I am the bookworm…” through “I am Val/Val” reads like a powerful prose poem. I see from your bio that your many interests include Dorothy Day and Gnosticism–I’m also an admirer of the possibly-to-be-canonized (though I doubt she’d approve) Ms. Day, and I’ve long been fascinated by Gnosticism: so anything you care to post on those topics will find at least one attentive reader here.
I sort of think our society would be better off if more people did go to school near their homes. I particularly dislike the system of Ivy League schools and their imitators (I went to one for undergrad, full disclosure), and my economic leftism and cultural conservatism sort of lead me in the same direction here. I think the state school model is a better one, all things considered. But that’s another story for another time.
I’m looking forward to your posts on nature/nurture issues, the influence of genetics on behaviour, and your responses to Razib Khan. For full disclosure, I’m much more on the ‘nature’ side of things than the ‘nurture’ side. To be clear, I’m not a believer in genetic determinism. I believe in a strong form of the doctrine of free will (what the philosophers call ‘libertarian free will’ or ‘incompatibilist free will’ or something like that). I believe that we have a soul, that it the power to affect our thoughts and actions, and that such an influence (what we call free will) is something outside of, and irreducible to, biophysics and biochemistry. That said, free will operates upon a substrate of natural tendencies which are predictable to some degree. Free will explains how our behaviour deviates from the predictable, and how we act given the tendencies and propensities we have. Our natural tendencies and propensities explain the slope, free will explains the residuals. And my belief is that of those natural, predictable behavioural tendencies, (under conditions of modern societies), for a great many traits, the biggest component is usually genetic (or in some cases like intelligence, obesity and homosexuality, affected by prenatal environment). So that explains the extent to which I both reject genetic determinism (along with all other forms of determinism), but accept that genetics seems to be, increasingly, a bigger influence than environment on a great many things.
The extent to which behavioural, physical and psychological traits vary between ethnic groups or genders is a separate question, and a more controversial one. I would definitely call myself a ‘gender realist’, and I reject the claim of many modern feminists and cultural liberals that gender is mostly a social construction. I think gender differences are basic, natural, and shaped by selection. ‘Race realism’ or alternatively ‘Human Biodiversity’ is a trickier question, and given our history is a dangerous topic to even raise. I would say I think the race realists have an interesting body of work, that deserves to be looked at and taken seriously, but that I’m agnostic about race realism as applied to many hot button issues of the day. It’s also worth saying, of course, that neither gender realism nor (the much weaker) race realism should really affect how we treat individual people of a particular gender or ethnic group. It maybe true that there are fewer women capable of being top flight physicists, fewer women inclined to become politicians, and fewer women with the physical skills to be a firefighter than men. But any particular woman, if she is interested and qualified to be a physicist, firefighter or politician, should be free to do so.
Re: gender realism–how are we ever going to find out what men and women “really” would be in the absence of social pressures? Where’s the lab? Many of the differences between nature and nurture are almost irrelevant, so long as they are phrased in terms of “most” Asians/women/twins do X. Likewise the distinction between genetic traits and those congenital traits influenced by the prenatal environment are socially irrelevant–once the kid is born with a trait, that’s it. (Medically, of course, it’s a highly important distinction.) And the distinction between a congenital trait and one created by the early childhood environment isn’t much more relevant, for most purposes. We deal with the behavior and habits of our fellow human beings, mostly, after they have become at least school-age and, usually, after adulthood, where all such traits have become permanent.