Bad Neuenahr Evolution and Human Nature for Bad Neuenahr? Boundaries and (Constructivist)

The Nurturing of Natures Susan Oyama European Academy Conference: "On Human Nature” Symposium on Genes, Evolution and Human Nature March 17, 1999 Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany, March 15-18, 1999 In Armin Grunwald, Mathias Gutmann, & Eva M. Neumann-Held (Eds.) (2002). On Human Nature. Anthropological, Biological and Philosophical Foundations (pp. 163-170). Studienreihe der Europäischen Akademie. New York: Springer Verlag.

Any mention of human nature raises the question of determinism. When this occurs, it is customary to condemn the silly extremes and to recommend a nature-nurture continuum as the only reasonable option. Looking at my title, “The Nurturing of Natures”, some may think that I stand at the "environmental" end of that continuum, but although environments are important to my story, this needs explanation. Trying to resolve the dichotomy of nature and nurture by putting more weight on one or the other leaves the nature of both “nature” and “nurture” untouched. Instead, we must recast these terms, so that they are no longer seen as candidates for combination or compromise. The reconceptualization of development and evolution that is necessary for this recasting is what the developmental systems approach is about. I begin by saying what my title does and doesn’t mean, and by briefly introducing the constructivist interactionism of the developmental systems approach. Then I question two traditional meanings of human nature, and finally, I give another caveat, to head off a particular misconstrual of the interdependence of organisms and their environments. To a certain extent, then, this is a cautionary intervention, made with an eye to ethical and sociopolitical considerations as well as the theoretical ones from which they cannot be neatly separated. 1 Nature and Nurture in Constructivist Interactionism My approach to development and evolution is based on the idea of a developmental system. This is a changing complex of heterogeneous elements, including the organism itself, but also encompassing all those aspects of its surroundings--abiotic, biotic, social--that affect its development and survival. It varies over time and across individuals. I call such a complex a system because its constituents, or interactants, are causally interconnected. What counts as The Nurturing of Natures 2 an interactant, and how it interacts, as well as what effects it has, is contingent on the larger complex (and on the point of view of the investigator). This is a minimal notion of system, in the sense that it does not assume autonomy or homeostatically tight regulation, though some regularity is necessary for there to be an organism at all (Oyama 1985/2000, 2001). Traditional conceptions of nature and nurture have too often been used to prejudge the relative stability of particular outcomes. This is one of the sources of their political loading; it helps to explain why people so often deploy these notions in moral and policy arguments, and also why it is so unwise to do so. Consider the temptation to assume that some behavior will be easily altered because it is learned, or that it will be resistant to change because it has an evolutionary history. Causal interdependence in such a system hardly makes it unanalyzable. An interactant’s impact on an organism, or its importance as a source of variation among organisms, can be evaluated, depending on the kind of analysis one chooses. No interactant, however, is privileged a priori as the bearer of fundamental form or as the origin of ultimate causal control. A plant or animal isn’t explained, for instance, by encoded representations of it in its chromosomes. This means that an organism’s nature is just the organism itself, in whatever environments it finds itself. The phenotype, that is, should not be treated as an appearance--a manifestation of an underlying nature that it may to some extent misrepresent. Never static, a nature emerges in time and space, and can no more be attributed to genes than to any other aspect of the complex, though differences among organisms can be accounted for in a variety of ways. Nature thus has no existence prior to or separate from the concrete living organism in its concrete, often living, surroundings: no Platonic ideals here, no underlying reality more basic than the being itself, no instruction manuals or little engineers in the cell nucleus. The idea of nurture is similarly transformed. No longer associated with the arbitrary, the learned, the "acquired" or the malleable, nurture is nothing less than the ongoing processes of development that produce the organism: both the invariant and the variable aspects, the phylogenetically conserved and the novel. Instead of being restricted to the “transmission” of genes, evolution becomes, in one definition I have used, the derivational history of these organism-environment complexes. Abbreviated as it is, this introduction should show why the message of my title isn't the commonplace pronouncement that "even what is biologically natural requires the proper conditions and materials, like food and air, in order to flourish." Nor am I saying that "nature" can sometimes be moderated, channeled, altered, even overridden, by "nurture." Such formulations are attractive because by embracing them, people can reject “extreme” views without ever having to doubt that there is a preexisting genetic nature to be overridden, and that nurture is the means for this modification of nature's plan. I also disavow the idea that the genes define potential or propensities while the environment selects the outcome.1 For me, nurture is the totality of the developmental interactions that bring the phenotype into being, sustaining and changing it throughout its life. From the point of view of a developmental system, nature and nurture cannot be contrasted, even on a continuum, because they are not of the same logical type in the first place. They are related as product and process: organisms are the ever-changing products of continuous processes of

1 My arguments against these common “solutions” to the nature-nurture problem can be found elsewhere (see, for instance my 1985/2000 and 2000b). The Nurturing of Natures 3 development. They contribute to those processes by their form and function, even as form and function are being developmentally transformed. 2 Incidence, Essence, and Killer Questions Most discussions of human nature deal with matters of frequency, probability, or inevitability: roughly put, with incidence. But as I have suggested, there is ano ther meaning of the concept: underlying reality or truth. Nature in this sense may sometimes be hidden, but it is always there, inside us, present whether or not it is evident. This meaning of nature is more subtle and elusive, and thus more troublesome, scientifically and otherwise--more difficult to combat. Genetic determinism involves both essence and incidence; the two are different, though often associated. Often the idea of inherent limits is involved in both. The continuing conflation of the two questions (relative probability/frequency and essential nature) allows workers to deny one error while committing the other: to admit that "genetically influenced" traits may be open to environmental influence, for instance, but to maintain their faith in underlying biological truth. A refined connection between incidence and essence is detectable in the idea that genetic factors define the realm of the possible. Here we have a complicated mix of statistical thinking (about norms of reaction, for instance) with an elusive something else. Few people find it difficult to believe a person might keep his or her "true nature" in check much or all of the time; indeed, according to popular psy chology, all too many of us do just that. In this case what is true is exactly what is not habitually, or even easily, expressed, but it is thought to define us none the less. Think of the overlapping languages of genetics and psychology: Genes are or are not expressed in the body; emotions and impulses are or are not expressed in behavior. This is not a simple case of synonymy. According to widely shared conviction, it is genes that define and create the very passions and instincts that lend themselves so neatly to notions of preexisting energies or desires that are inside us, ready to be let loose, whether by choice, inattention, or the pressure of the moment. It is not incidental that a variety of evolutionary approaches to the mind, such as Lorenzian ethology, sociobiology, and the less scholarly tradition of writings on "naked apes" and "the beasts within" have been natural (!) allies with psychodynamic theories of emotion and motivation. Indeed, Freud's evolutionary speculations are well known. I said that what I have been calling the incidence and essence meanings of nature are often closely entwined. If the latter is merely taken to mean “that which always appears,” for example, then the one sense is assimilated to the other. (I won't even try to deal here with human nature as the desirable or good, but such notions typically involve the same ambiguity: Sometimes nature is what is everywhere and always found, and sometimes it is that which will appear if allowed to unfold unhindered.) If critics have not been notably The Nurturing of Natures 4 successful at forestalling unwarranted conclusions about human nature from science, say from the findings of genetics or molecular or evolutionary biology, it is partly because their cautionary treatments have tended to focus on issues of frequency or malleability--in short, on incidence, and have neglected the scientifically more slippery idea of essence. After a talk I gave recently, a man in the audience argued that we still need to distinguish between biology and experience. He felt it was important to mark the difference, for instance, between characteristics of the descendants of slaves that were due to inheritance and those that were due to culture. When I replied that this was the very distinction that I was reworking, he indicated that he realized this, but nevertheless thought we should keep them separate. The exchange ended inconclusively, as such things often do. Although I had said that in order to see whether we really disagreed, we would need to discuss just what senses of biology and culture were intended, because they were both ambiguous terms, the gathering dispersed before we could talk. They are common enough, these frustrations of the unfinished colloquy, the wish to have clarified matters, to have given a satisfying response, but this one merits a bit more reflection. After the session, a colleague remarked on the exchange, referring to the listener's query about biology and culture as the “killer question.” By using this phrase, my colleague seemed to imply that the question presented special conceptual problems. Now, it was true that it had raised the level of vigilance in the room by several degrees, but what made it different was not anything that could be cast in terms of evolution, genes, learning mechanisms, or the rest of the apparatus with which scholars attempt to deal with such things. It was that the question was about race, asked in a hall full of professors and students, at a time when the publication of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994) had revived the race-IQ debate in a nation with an inordinate interest in intelligence quotients, a nation whose troubled racial history looms over public and private transactions alike. In addition, the questioner had been black. Richard Dawkins (1982, p. 11) tells of another question from the floor, this time about "genetic" sex differences, at a symposium on sociobiology. The young woman in the audience was near tears, Dawkins reports. He claims that her emotional intensity surprised him until he realized that she was confused about what such differences mean. She thought genetic meant inevitable. He goes on to explain that the determination of differences is a local, statistical matter that does not predict outcomes in a different situation. Such clarifications can be useful, of course, and the point about genetic differences has been made many times (by Lehrman, 1970, for one). Insofar as they focus on incidence, however, and leave essence more or less undisturbed, these clarifications miss part of the point (see Kitcher, 2001, for example). Surely some of the emotional charge of "killer questions” derives from this notion of a hidden but potently present essence, an essence that informs our sense of identity, meaning, even value. Consider the The Nurturing of Natures 5

ease with which evolutionary theorists’ accounts of selfish genes and selfish organisms, which ostensibly pertain only to the dynamics of natural selection, get translated into pronouncements about the real selfishness behind acts of apparent generosity or altruism, the true meaning of parental love. Sometimes the theorists themselves make the translation from genetic advantage to true meaning, sometimes not. Sometimes they inadvertently encourage it even as they warn against it. My point is that concepts of nature are psychologically and ethically resonant in ways that extend far beyond the question of incidence.2 Ask yourself how you would

feel about a class of people (to which you yourself might belong) that was by its "biological nature" less intelligent than a comparison group, or more aggres sive, sexually licentious, or otherwise different in a socially significant way, even if the differences could be eradicated by “proper” upbringing, therapy, or other manipulation of the conditions of life.3 Is there a residual sense of the differentness of this group? In what does it consist? I invite you to meditate on this at your leisure. 3 Organism-Environment Complexes, Harmony, and Environmental Essentialism In the developmental systems approach there are no underlying or preex isting essences, no nature apart from a living being in its world. A class of developmental influences among many, the genes are no more formative or basic to a

2 See Oyama (1989, 2000b, chaps. 9, 10). The psychological assumptions sometimes become clearer and more explicit in evolutionary psychology and philosophy of mind, particularly in writings on innate ideas. Consider the language of genetic representations, or the prevalence in the field of genetics of textual metaphors like transcription, translation, coding, and reading frames (Godfrey-Smith, 1999; Oyama 1985/2000, 2000a, 2000b).

3 Of course there is a great deal to be said about what standard is used for such comparisons. The Nurturing of Natures 6

person’s identity than any other, including the many environments that are also among his or her developmental resources. In speaking of organisms and their environments developing and evolving together, however, I want to block several misconstruals. One has to do with the notion of harmonious cooperation, and the other has to do with what we might call environmental essentialism. Interconnectedness is linked in some writings with an emphasis on harmony and ccoperation (see bioregionalist Kirkpatrick Sale, 1985, pp. 81, 82). Although one can see why people might want to counteract a tendency to define life exclusively in terms of competition and conflict, I think this is one of those places where one should beware of simply affirming the opposite. The point is not that nature is basically nice, harmonious or "balanced," but that the whole desire for such global quasi-moral characterizations deserves scrutiny. We do not require them in order to speak reasonably and responsibly about ecological degradation, regional diversity, or the politics and economics of scale, any more than we need them in order to study developmental processes and their outcomes. Our notions of harmony in these cases are tied as much to our expectations of repetition and recognizable or desirable outcomes as to the intricacy of the actual interconnections. It is important to note that such "harmony" at one level can be produced by processes that at another level are easily viewed as fraught with conflict and competition (see, for instance, Buss, 1987).

I view with similar skepticism attempts to ground human essence in relations to the land. Political and ethical worries are usually associated with the genetic side of the gene- environment pair, and environmental essentialism is less well articulated and salient than its biological counterparts (though the cultural essentialism so influential in some circles can be thought of as a variation on this theme). Nevertheless, the environments involved in a life cycle, or in a sequence of such cycles, should no more be used to essentialize than the genes. A habitat or cultural tradition is hardly more capable of carrying the true nature of the organism than is any other interactant.4

4 Particular distinctions can still be made, depending on the project. Many configurations of interactants will, for instance, result in viable organisms and many others will not, many will result in reproductively able organisms and many others will not. Some will result in phenotypes whose gross morphology resembles that of most other members of the species, and this can occur even if certain of the interactants are themselves wildly atypical. (Some differences in developmental resources, that is, do not make a difference.) Conversely, a system whose interactants are unremarkable except for a minute difference in one can The Nurturing of Natures 7

To invoke some romantic notion of a blood tie to the land, then, to privilege a group’s history with a particular locale or tradition in defining its one true nature or its unique claim to that locale, is to take the wrong lesson from the developmental systems perspective. Given our recent pasts, the explosion of ethnic and border conflicts around the world, and the mine field of identity politics some of us must traverse every day, it is a misconstrual I want to block as emphatically as I can. Again, this is not to deny the possibility, indeed, the necessity of adjudicating conflicting claims, or the importance of acknowledging the impact of our own histories on our perceptions, priorities, and judgments. It is to deny that some notion of a special ecological relationship is the place to look for a definitive criterion. Our everyday world of shifting national boundaries, ethnic loyalties and animosities, migration and conquest, already give us more criteria than we can handle. Judgments can and must be made about the suitability of environments for humans or for other beings, and about their political and moral claims on each other. There are many such judgments, and a multitude of considerations that must be taken into account in making them. That is part of my point. "Nature" embraces a riotous variety of issues, and it’s hard to fit a riot on a continuum, at least without picking out some dimension to sort by. There are numerous dimensions, and we must employ them knowing full well that the various sortings may not line up with each other, and that there is no way to avoid conflict among the values any one of us holds dear, let alone conflict with others. Though I would hardly claim that my own concerns and values are absent from my work, therefore, I do not offer that work as a ready-made guide to resolving the often painful moral and political issues that face us. I do think that blocking illegitimate (incoherent, inconsistent, empirically or conceptually indefensible, etc.) proposals is a necessary and important part of the debates in which we must engage. The organism-environment relations in a developmental system are indissoluble, not in the sense of being unalterable or more fundamental than other relations--indeed, both relations and constituents are changing all the time, and many developmentally and evolutionarily important phenomena depend on organisms selecting and changing their environments. The ties are indissoluble in the following senses: that no organism can exist or even be characterized independently from a richly elaborated world on many scales of magnitude, that causal responsibility for the whole or for a trait cannot be partitioned among the parts of the system, and everything that organism does and is rises out of this interactive complex, even as it affects that very complex.5 4 Conclusion produce an organism--a “nature”--that is morphologically or behaviorally extremely unusual.

Threshold effects are often found in such cases. Over evolutionary time, of course, the anomalous can become typical, and vice versa. Inquiry into all these questions, and myriad others, are not just eminently possible within a developmental systems framework. I would argue that this conceptual frame makes it easier to articulate them clearly and to pursue them without confusing them with each other. The Nurturing of Natures 8

Our natures are nurtured because each of us, like any other being, develops, and we develop as wholes, not by sprouting acquired bits from a prepackaged innate core. We develop in many environments, and are constituted by our interactions with these environments. Once nurturing--that is, development--is accepted as an ineliminable and integral part of “biological” nature, it can no longer be contrasted with nature. It cannot represent, for instance, an environmental "outside" to an inherited "inside," or the psychological as opposed to the physical. Over evolutionary time some aspects of nurturing (that is, developmental interactions, at levels from the genetic to the social/ecological) become integrated into the successive life cycles6 by which generations of organisms and their worlds create and transform each other. Only some will become transgenerationally stable parts of these cycles; some will be stable for a while and then change or disappear, but this does not make them any more or less significant to the unique life in which they play a part. Once we relinquish the conviction that there is an essence hidden in our chromosomes, a unitary truth we can glimpse from different angles with our scientific techniques, it should be easier to see the differences among the diverse scientific questions we might want to ask, as well as the difference between questions that merit our attention and ones that don’t. Acknowledgments In preparing this paper I was aided by valuable comments by Paul Griffiths, Eva Neumann- Held, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter and Cor van der Weele. My thanks also to colleagues who were willing to communicate with me about bioregionalism: Lori Gruen, Paul Mankiewicz, William I. Thompson, and John Todd.

5 See also the interpenetration of organism and environment of Richard Lewontin (1982) and Levins and Lewontin (1985) and the treatments of Hendriks-Jansen (1996), Maturana and Varela (1987) and Varela et al. (1991).

6 Elsewhere (1999) I have discussed the inadvisability of conceiving of this progressive integration (which, of course, can also be dis-integrated) as the internalization of environments. I do not think it any more helpful to think in terms of outsides being brought inside than of insides (genetic or otherwise) simply being “expressed” or externalized. The Nurturing of Natures 9

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some extent misrepresent. ' Only 'appearance' is in italics. )