Determinism has reemerged heavily in evolutionary psychology. It is nothing new, but it seems to be the “go to” theory as of late. Bio-Edge has this interesting story o recent story in regards to this:
Can an imaginary gene keep you behind bars?
Nearly every day, it seems, you read about the discovery of a gene for genius, for obesity, for voting conservative, for cancer, for chocaholism, for alcoholism, whatever. Scientists’ bombastic press releases are taken reasonably seriously by glossy women’s magazines and hucksters selling genetic testing kits, if not by their colleagues.
But has it ever happened that an undiscovered gene is taken seriously? This would turn genetics into a quasi-religious faith based on nothing more serious than the glossy women’s magazines. But it did happen and it nearly meant a longer jail sentence for a man convicted of possessing child pornography.
The New York Times reports that a Federal District Court judge in Albany, NY, spurned reports that a man was “at a low to moderate risk to reoffend” because, in his opinion, he had a yet-undiscovered child-porn-viewing gene. He handed down a severe 6 and a half year sentence plus a life term of supervision thereafter. The expected sentence was about 5 years.
The judge, Gary L. Sharpe told the defendant, “It is a gene you were born with. And it’s not a gene you can get rid of”. Nor did Judge Sharpe need evidence for his genetic theory — because he was sure that it would be discovered within 50 years. The “opinions of the psychologists and the psychiatrists as to what harm you may pose to those children in the future is virtually worthless here”.
“You are what you’re born with. And that’s the only explanation for what I see here,” the judge said.
However, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has quashed the sentence. “It would be impermissible for the court to base its decision of recidivism on its unsupported theory of genetics.” They declared that a sentence relying on findings not supported in the record “seriously affects the fairness, integrity and public reputation of judicial proceedings.”
If a Federal Court judge believes so strongly in the power of imaginary genes that he is willing to throw people in the slammer, what about the man in the street? It looks as though genetic determinism has a bright future. ~ Biopolitical Times, Feb 2; New York Times, Jan 28
I wrapped up one paper with this point on determinism:
The point is that our actions, thoughts, decisions and the like, cannot be reduced to just chemical reactions in our brain. Some headline examples:
“Infidelity – It May Be In Our Genes”;
“20th Century Blues” – Stress, anxiety, depression: the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes;
“Born Happy (Or Not)” – Happiness is more than just a state of mind… It is in the genes too;
“Born To Be Gay?”;
“What Makes Them Do It?” – People who crave thrills, new evidence indicates, may be prompted at least partly by their genes;
“Your Genes May Be Forcing You To Eat Too Much”.
And as I have already shown with the examples I made to you last post, this “determining” factor undermines all rational thought and expression, and thus, morals.
Mikey Refutes determinism (wind noise accepted only because she does a decent job in answering the main issues at hand):
Jim Manzi dealt with this growing problem a bit in his article, “Escaping the Tyranny of Genes: The Fallacy of genetic Determinism,” from the June 2nd (2008) National Review:
OLD THOUGHTS, NEW ERRORS
Now, the idea that the vast majority of people share a set of stable, inherent characteristics—that is, the idea that there is such a thing as human nature—is not new. Nor are the subsidiary ideas that individuals have somewhat varying inborn natures; that this variation is partially heritable; and that individuals who share a lineage will demonstrate common traits and tendencies. All of these beliefs are at least several thousand years old, and probably predate written records.
What’s new is that—because we believe that we have uncovered at least a component of the physical manifestation of human nature, in the form of the genome—many now believe that we can operationalize these old ideas: that we can explain the causes of the behaviors of individuals and groups sufficiently to predict these behaviors scientifically. Those who believe this believe that we can remove the mind-body problem from the purview of philosophy by reducing the mind to a scientifically explained physical phenomenon. When pushed, such theorists will generally admit that we cannot yet do much of this, but will then state confidently that we “are starting to understand” or “are on the verge of explaining” various human behaviors.
Media outlets will often speak loosely of things such as a “happiness gene,” a “gay gene,” or a “smart gene.”
[….]
SOUND THE WARNING
The fallacy of what might be called “geneticism” is particularly tempting to conservatives, because it appears to provide scientific support for the idea of an innate human nature—an idea that has long been assaulted from the left. But this temptation should be resisted. If the pretense to scientific knowledge is always dangerous, it is doubly so when wedded to state power, because it leads to pseudo-rational interventions that unduly extend authority and restrict freedom. That the linkage of race and IQ is provocative to contemporary audiences is not surprising: It is almost a direct restatement, in the language of genetics, of the key premise of Social Darwinism. That prior attempt to apply beliefs about human nature to public policy should be a cautionary tale for our era.
Just as Newtonian physics formed part of the backdrop for the thought of the Founders, Darwinian biology—from its beginnings, even before being synthesized with genetic theory—has found expression in both descriptions of physical evolution and conceptions of human society as similarly evolving. In the decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species, evolution became the dominant scientific metaphor for understanding human society. Woodrow Wilson was clear about this when he said in The New Freedom (1913):
Now, it came to me … that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory… Politics in [the Founders’] thought was a variety of mechanics.
The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.”
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. . . . There will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.
Many thinkers at that time believed that Darwinian evolution represented not just a metaphor, but a physical explanation of the material superiority of European civilization. The application of evolutionary ideas supported the eugenics movement in the U.S. and Europe, in which policymakers gave natural selection a helping hand by encouraging differential breeding rates for “fit” and “unfit” persons.
This idea was the basis of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Supreme Court opinion upholding the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize the feeble-minded, which ends with the immortal statement that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Let’s be clear about the results of this decision. A specific 18-year-old girl named Carrie Buck, who had been accused of no crime, was placed on a table, whereupon an agent of the state sliced open her abdomen and cut her Fallopian tubes against her will. She lived from that moment until her death with no chance of having children. All of this was done because Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was pretty sure that her children would not have been smart enough. The ironic denouement is that, just prior to this operation, Carrie Buck had actually had a daughter—whose subsequent performance in school was average at worst and often better.
This was not an aberrant case; over 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in the 20th century. The Laughlin Model Law, which was the basis for most state statutes that regularized this practice, chillingly permitted the forcible sterilization of any “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring,” and provided tactical inspiration for relevant statutes in Nazi Germany.
It was, in fact, the conflagration of the Holocaust that made human eugenics a more or less forbidden research topic for decades. But this halt has proved temporary. As the Holocaust passes from living memory, and biology makes enormous advances, the human inclination to intellectual vanity is reasserting itself. This seems almost inevitable. The sense of seeing beneath the surface of things, provided by the greatest scientific insights, is intoxicating. Genetic maximalists are just a modern version of the Pythagorean cultists or the Newton-inspired Enlightenment philosopher.
Despite their confidence in predicting future discoveries, however, our ignorance about humanity runs deep, and the complexities of mind and society continue to escape reduction to scientific explanation. This ignorance is one of the most powerful arguments for free-market economics, subsidiarity, and many of the other elements of the conservative worldview. Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably, so that we can live in Woodrow Wilson’s “perfected, coordinated beehive.” Until then, however, we need to keep stumbling forward in freedom as best we can. NR
Below is a paper that refutes the deterministic paradigm, see especially pp. 12-15: