There’s a good piece in the New York Times today by David Brooks. He’s discussing the issue of genetics and pointing out very clearly and sensibly that the early claims about the possibilities which genetic discoveries might bring to understanding human behaviour were way off. As he says, first of all, we’ve seen there is no simple single mapping of particular genes to particular behaviours. There is no aggression gene for example. Instead behaviours seem to be related to multiples of genes, with there being literally trillions of possible combinations of interaction between the genes within the gene sets. Secondly, he points out that it’s now clear that genes only express their potential in the presence of particular environmental factors. And thirdly there is a total lack of clarity about the terms we use to describe our inner experiences. How do you know that what you can anxiety is what I’d call anxiety?
In conclusion, I think that what he highlights is that reality is messy and complex and those who are still enmeshed in the old logical positivist scientism just haven’t caught up!
Our lives are not determined by uniform processes. Instead, human behavior is complex, nonlinear and unpredictable. The Brave New World is far away. Novels and history can still produce insights into human behavior that science can’t match.
We can strive to eliminate that multivariate thing we call poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we’re not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be.
This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know
