Matt Ridley
Matt Ridley; drawing by David Levine

1.

If, by magic, I could make a single interminable debate disappear, I’d probably pick “nature versus nurture.” The argument over the relative roles of genes and environment in human nature has been ceaselessly politicized, shows little sign of resolution, and has, in general, grown tiresome. This is perhaps most obvious in the bloodiest battle of the nature–nurture war, the debate over IQ: How much of the variation that we see in intelligence (at least as measured by standardized tests) is due to heredity and not upbringing? From Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) through Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981) to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994), the battle has raged one way and the other, with no clear victor emerging.

It’s good to learn, I suppose, that I’m not the only one who finds the argument annoyingly long-lived. The dust jacket of Matt Ridley’s new book, Nature via Nurture, features statements from a number of scientists and science writers admitting that they had thought it impossible to produce an interesting new book on the subject. In such a climate, if you’re going to attempt yet another work on nature– nurture, you’d better have something truly new, something really big, to say. Matt Ridley does.

Ridley, a science journalist whose previous books include The Red Queen (1993) and the best-selling Genome (1999), has produced a volume that ranges over a vast number of topics, from the genetics of mental illness to the mystery of free will. But at its core are Ridley’s ideas on how to break free of the conflict between nature and nurture. His way out is vaguely Wittgensteinian. We have, he suggests, been asking a meaningless question, making a meaningless distinction. For the question of nature versus nurture makes sense only if the two can be clearly separated. Ridley thinks they cannot. His reason is simple. Despite all the talk about the opposition between genes and environment, it is now clear that learning, intelligence, behavior, and culture—all the ingredients of nurture—involve genes.

At first it might seem that Ridley is making the banal claim that there’s no learning without brains and no brains without genes. All culture is therefore genetic but in the trivial sense that gray matter requires genetic matter. Though Ridley does slip into such platitudes now and then (“you need nature to be able to absorb nurture”), his real point is bigger and more sophisticated. It is this: study of the human genome has revealed that genes respond to experience.

Ridley’s claim depends on several facts from genetics. All of your cells, with rare exceptions, contain the same genes. These genes are made of DNA. It is this DNA, of course, that gets passed from one generation to the next, making children resemble their parents. But DNA’s main job is to make proteins: each of your genes directs the construction of one kind of protein. One of your genes, for instance, makes the protein insulin. You are, roughly speaking, made up of proteins and the products of proteins. If you are dark-skinned, it’s not because your DNA is dark, but because your DNA directed the construction of a protein that looks dark. The fact that some people are albinos means that their DNA is slightly different from your DNA and so directed the construction of a somewhat different protein.

Now you might sense an apparent problem here. If all your cells carry the same genes, why does your pancreas look different from your skin? The reason is that not all of your genes are “expressed”—that is, not all of them are actively making proteins—in all of your cells. Instead, one subset of genes is expressed in your pancreas and another subset is expressed in your skin. The gene that makes insulin, for example, does so only in your pancreas; it is “off” in your skin. This has been understood for a long time. Ridley is excited about a related, but more recent, finding. Some genes, it turns out, are not permanently on or off but can get switched on or off by experience. Genes in your brain cells, for instance, do not just sit there, doing the same thing day in and day out. Instead, some of them can switch on and off in response to what happens outside you. The proteins in your brain thus change somewhat depending on your experiences.

Vision provides a good example of this interplay between experience and genes. In many mammals the development of normal vision requires exposure to light during a critical period following birth. Mice reared in darkness during this period are blind when they become adults. As Ridley explains, there is now good evidence that exposure to light switches on a key gene called BDNF (for brain-derived neurotrophic factor) in the visual cortex of the mouse brain and, presumably, the human brain as well. (Closing a mouse’s eye causes a decrease in the expression of BDNF in the brain.) So development of the brain circuitry needed to see involves experience but, curiously, this experience acts through the genes. As Ridley concludes:

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Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life; they switch each other on and off; they respond to the environment. They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience.

Ridley’s chief claim is that the “startling new truth that has emerged from the human genome…has profound implications for the nature–nurture debate.” Indeed, it “is about to recast the debate entirely. No longer is it nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture.” The attempt to cleave into two distinct parts the fluid interaction of gene, brain, and experience is fundamentally misguided. We are one big interaction. At times Ridley sounds like a latter-day Augustine wrestling with the mystery of the Incarnation. Human nature does not result from genes alone or from experience alone. Nor is it even partly genetic and partly environmental. Instead human nature is wholly genetic and wholly environmental.

Ridley thinks the consequences of this new view are enormous. By recasting a century of confused talk about nature and nurture, the study of the genome will likely revolutionize our understanding of “what makes us human.” We will be forced “to abandon cherished notions” and biologists may even be obliged to redefine the gene. At one point Ridley even goes so far as to announce that he hopes to throw the whole notion of causation into confusion.

For all his revolutionary rhetoric, Ridley sees himself as a calming influence, a mediator between the historical extremes of nativism and empiricism. And so he is. His approach is refreshingly free of the dogmatism and hubris that often characterize scientific pronouncements on human nature. Although he is, for example, fond of evolutionary psychology—indeed one of his previous books praised sociobiological theories of the origin of morality1—he seems to appreciate that its public champions have sometimes gone too far. Similarly, while he is eager to play up the role of culture he thinks empiricists must overcome their dread of DNA:

Somehow the adherents of the “nurture” side of the argument have scared themselves silly at the power and inevitability of genes and missed the greatest lesson of all: the genes are on their side.

Nature via Nurture has many strengths. For one, the book is packed with fascinating facts about biology. Ridley’s descriptions of how genes act in brains are a tour de force and are astonishingly free of oversimplification. Ridley also manages to tell us a good deal about the lives of scientists. (I, for one, did not know that a sex scandal brought down the behaviorist J.B. Watson’s academic career.) But most important Ridley preaches several sermons that are worth hearing. If, when you think of genes, you think of molecular martinets who bark orders but take none, you have the wrong idea. Genes do turn on and off in response to experience. Ridley also works hard to dispel the myth that environmental effects are reversible while genetic ones are not. In many cases the opposite is true (think of Chinese foot-binding as opposed to genes causing myopia).

Ridley guides us through all of this in prose that is generally both clear and entertaining. Now and then, though, the entertainment takes over and Ridley’s writing slips into silliness. Though his books are usually free of the cloying literary devices that often plague pop science—chief among them the too-cute metaphor that obscures more than clarifies—Nature via Nurture is an exception. Thus we get treated to Ridley’s pet name for the evolutionary force that he thinks shapes the contents of our genes: the Genome Organizing Device, or GOD. While several recent science popularizers have been accused of deifying natural selection, Ridley is, to my knowledge, the first to do so literally. Worse, this GOD barely reappears after His early debut and the reasons for His creation remain unclear.

Ridley’s discussion of weightier matters is also sometimes superficial. At two places in Nature via Nurture, for example, he tries to explain G.E. Moore’s naturalistic fallacy. In his first attempt he notes, “To base any moral position on a natural fact, whether that fact is derived from nature or from nurture, is asking for trouble,” which seems less than helpful. (It would be nice to know why it’s asking for trouble.) In his second try, we learn that an argument is bad because it “would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy…which the GOD forbid.” It’s hard to know what this could mean.

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But on the whole Nature via Nurture is an enjoyable book and it would be churlish to make too much of such slips. Ultimately, however, Ridley’s book must be judged on its scientific, not literary, merits. And here matters are more mixed.

2.

The problem is certainly not that Ridley is naive about molecules. His molecular tales are invariably informative and I would, without hesitation, recommend his book as a clear introduction to how genes work. The problem is that the facts Ridley surveys do not always have the larger implications he thinks they do. This problem appears at least twice before Ridley gets to the question of nature and nurture.

First, Ridley argues that not only do genes turn on and off but that this is why species differ. Human beings and chimps, for instance, do not differ because of old-fashioned changes in the genes themselves but, he says, because of changes in when and where the same genes get switched on and off in the two species. But Ridley’s leap from molecular fact to evolutionary implication is premature. Indeed he seems not to realize that he has stepped into a large evolutionary debate between those who suspect species differ in the genes themselves and those who suspect they differ in the “expression pattern” of the same genes. While Ridley’s guess might well turn out to be right, the only fair assessment of our current situation is that we don’t know.

The same problem arises in Ridley’s chapter on mental illness. Again his facts are right: schizophrenia is about equally common in all races and there is some evidence that it’s partly genetic. But Ridley leaps to big conclusions. First he suggests that the mutations causing schizophrenia are ancient, “having occurred before the ancestors of all non-Africans left Africa.” But the fact that a disease is as common in Eskimos as in bushmen tells us nothing about the age of the mutations involved. Worse, Ridley can’t resist reciting an adaptive tale to explain the persistence of these mutations. Maybe, he says, natural selection keeps them around because carrying a few mutations is good for you (making you a genius), while carrying many is bad (making you schizophrenic). While this idea might seem to explain the apparent association between genius and mental illness within families, it is demonstrably false. A well-known result in population genetics shows that the kind of natural selection Ridley invokes here cannot maintain genetic variation in populations.

Similar problems appear as Ridley turns to the debate over nature and nurture. To understand these, we need to define more clearly what the debate is about, since the controversy has meant rather different things to different people. To some, the question has been whether genes have a part in determining human capacities, such as language or the ability to act morally. To others, it has been whether differences between groups—most notoriously, human races—are in the genes. But the traditional question at the heart of the debate—the one that has consumed everyone from Galton to Gould and that has inspired a century of heated debate over twin studies, genetic determinism, IQ, and race—concerns differences between individuals. It is this: Given the differences that we see among individuals in a trait such as intelligence, how much is due to genes and how much to environment? Biologists and psychologists express the answer to this question in terms of “heritability,” the percentage of variation in a trait caused by genes. If none of the differences that we see in IQ were genetic, its heritability would be zero percent; if all of the differences were genetic, its heritability would be 100 percent; and if half of the differences were genetic, its heritability would be 50 percent, and so on. Heritability is measured by assessing the similarity of individuals who have a known degree of genetic relatedness, e.g., by asking how similar twins are or how closely children resemble their parents. Measurement of heritability does not, therefore, require that we know anything about which genes affect a trait. (Indeed it doesn’t even require that we know that genes are made of DNA.)

Though Ridley devotes much attention to heritability, he doesn’t seem completely clear about it. He claims, for instance, that “heritability is usually highest for those features of human nature caused by many genes rather than by the action of single genes.” But since we have no idea how many genes underlie virtually any aspect of human nature, it’s hard to see how we could possibly know this. Also, while a trait that’s affected by many genes might sound “more genetic,” there is no known relationship between the number of genes affecting a trait and heritability in any species.

Despite all this, it could still be true that recent discoveries about the genome have blurred the distinction between nature and nurture. If so, we might happily overlook the above sorts of slips. Who cares, after all, that Darwin got his physical theory of inheritance wrong (basing it on a nonexistent entity called the “gemmule”)? He got the big theory—natural selection—right. And in science getting the big question right more than makes up for getting the small ones wrong. It seems to me, though, that Ridley’s attempt to recast the nature–nurture debate doesn’t succeed. Much as I wish that he’d laid the controversy to rest, I don’t think he has. There are at least two problems. The first is that he seems to have the right answer to the wrong question.

It should be clear that the traditional question “How heritable is a trait?” is different from Ridley’s question “Do genes respond to experience?” The first question is statistical. It asks about the percentage of variation in, say, IQ, that arises from inherited differences among individuals (do some parents pass on smart genes to their kids?) versus the percentage that arises from environmental differences (do some parents pass on books to their children?). The second question is mechanistic. It asks about how genes behave within individuals. But knowing that my DNA switches on and off during my lifetime tells me nothing about whether you and I were born with different DNA, much less how much these differences affect our IQs. Nor does it render this question meaningless. The fact that genes respond to experience is certainly interesting and important. It’s the sort of fact we pay neurobiologists to find out. But it’s the wrong kind of fact to settle the nature–nurture debate.

This is an important point and we need to look at it more carefully. To do so, consider a trait that’s less controversial than IQ and a species that’s less politically sensitive than Homo sapiens—the height of a plant. Imagine a population of sunflowers in which all plants are genetically identical: all carry exactly the same DNA. Imagine further that none of the genes in these plants responds to experience. Though different sunflowers will inevitably grow to different heights (some may get more water than others), the heritability of height in this population is zero. None of the differences in height is caused by differences in the genes inherited among individuals (since there were no genetic differences).

Now imagine that all individuals are again genetically identical but that all genes respond to experience, switching on and off in response to subtle differences in water and light, among other factors. Ridley would claim that nurture acts via nature here. But the heritability of height hasn’t changed one bit. It is still precisely zero. It’s still true that none of the differences in height arise from differences in the genes inherited among plants. (Since it’s still true that there were no differences in the genes inherited among plants.) In the more complicated case where genetic differences among individuals do exist, the lesson stays the same: the switching on and off of genes has no necessary effect on heritability. It might go up, down, or remain unchanged.2

What’s going on here? The problem is that the question of nature versus nurture asks about the effects of inherited differences among individuals, while Ridley’s answer talks about the behavior of genes within individuals. Because the question of nature versus nurture concerns the quantitative effects of inherited differences among individuals, it is statistical; because Ridley’s answer concerns the molecular behavior of genes within individuals, it is mechanistic. There is, then, a mismatch between the levels at which the traditional question and Ridley’s answer are posed. And, unfortunately, a statistical question cannot have a molecular answer.

This is not to say that molecules don’t physically underlie traits, genes, and even environments. Of course they do. In any given person, IQ or height or anything else you can point to reflects the physical arrangement of molecules. But it is to say that molecules don’t provide the right level of abstraction at which to talk about the statistical contributions of nature and nurture. If I ask about the gross national product and you answer in terms of the molecular makeup of money, something has gone wrong. The findings that Ridley surveys might, I suppose, force us to abandon some particularly simple ways of talking about nature and nurture (heritability isn’t the only way of talking), but I don’t think they touch the hard problem at the historical heart of the controversy.

Ridley’s apparent failure to see this leads him to partly mislocate the source of our troubles with nature and nurture. The IQ debate hasn’t proved interminable because of any philosophical problem with heritability3 ; and it certainly hasn’t proved interminable because we lacked a key piece of data about how genes act in brains. It has dragged on forever because we cannot perform the required critical experiment with humans. For ethical and practical reasons, we cannot force a large set of parents and children to live in a common environment, allowing us to compare the IQs of parent and child, thereby computing a percentage of heritability.4 We can, however, do the analogous kind of experiment in other species. This is why there’s a nature–nurture debate for IQ in human beings and not for milk yield in dairy cows.

The second problem with Ridley’s view is even more important and has nothing to do with heritability. If all you care about is that organisms respond to experience, it doesn’t matter if this response involves the switching on and off of DNA or not. Any molecular mechanism will do. Organisms might, for instance, respond to experience by folding their proteins into different three-dimensional shapes in different environments—a process that has nothing to do with DNA but that could still change the way an organism looks or acts. The fact that DNA is sometimes involved in response to experience is interesting but it doesn’t accomplish anything that a non-DNA mechanism doesn’t accomplish. Either way, organisms still “absorb experience,” reshaping themselves in response to the environment. Indeed so far as I can tell, the only real difference between the DNA and non-DNA mechanisms is that one—because it happens to involve the genetic material—tempts us into talk about recasting the nature–nurture debate while the other doesn’t.

Despite these problems, you might argue that Ridley has at least shown that we are not slaves to our genes. An understanding of how genes respond to experience might even open the door to novel medical and other interventions that could, say, boost a child’s intelligence. (Knowing about Johnny’s genes, I might also know that reading to him at age six months turns on gene G in neuron N.) This may well be true. But there is nothing fundamentally new here. We have long been able to intervene between genes and traits. (Do you have genes for skinny arms? Lift weights.) As Ridley himself emphasizes, genetic endowment has rarely meant a fixed fate and this was never the locus of the nature–nurture debate.

3.

One of the most interesting questions about Nature via Nurture is: Why does Ridley reach for the wrong level of analysis, confounding statistics and mechanisms? Why does he exaggerate the significance of certain discoveries about how genes work? Though this requires some speculation, the answer seems plain. Ridley, a self-styled champion of “techno-optimism,”5 seems to have succumbed to genome hype. Nature via Nurture is riddled with breathless claims about the wonders of the genome. We are assured that “the genome has indeed changed everything,” are promised “bizarre stories from the deepest recesses of the genome,” and are alerted to a “startling new truth” that has just emerged “from the human genome.” Ridley’s enthusiasm even leads him into subtly revisionist history. Despite the hype, the fact is that almost none of the findings he discusses has anything to do with the much-publicized Human Genome Project. I doubt the lay reader of Ridley’s book would figure this out.6

The point is that Ridley, like the rest of us, is immersed in a scientific culture, both popular and professional, that encourages the facile assumption that all questions about organisms will emerge from Big Science working on small molecules. But there is no principled reason why the answers to all questions about biology, much less human nature, will be explained by the genome or molecular mechanism. This should be neither surprising nor controversial. There are many questions in all fields of science that have little to do with underlying physical detail. The entire discipline of cognitive science, including much of linguistics, is built on the premise that, though minds are made of brains, we can learn a good deal about the mind—e.g., how we go about making new sentences—without worrying over the details of neurobiology. Software, not hardware, provides the right level of abstraction. It follows, of course, that the answers to such higher-level questions do not change when the underlying mechanisms are discovered. The answer to “How hot is Mars?” did not change when statistical mechanics showed that heat is molecular motion. And the answers to “How heritable are plant height, milk yield, Huntington’s chorea, and IQ?” do not change once we know that genes switch on and off inside organisms.

It is probably true, however, that it is harder to resist this kind of reflexive reductionism in biology than in any other science today. Much of the reason is momentum. Biology has made extraordinary progress over the last century by following a relentlessly reductionist road. Furthermore biology, unlike physics, possesses little mathematical theory of the sort that floats defiantly above physical detail and that inevitably inspires respect for autonomous principles or laws. While physics has enjoyed a long tradition that reveres the abstract and disdains the mechanistic,7 this attitude is almost unimaginable in biology. Ridley’s book, with its alluring mix of undeniable good intention and deft description, will surely add to the fascination with genome and mechanism. And to some extent this is fine. But it’s important not to lose sight of a subtler message—facts can sometimes be both fascinating and irrelevant.

This Issue

August 14, 2003