Nature or nurture?

She conceived at nineteen.  In love but unmarried she was the shame of the family.  The community was one of those intolerant little rural towns awash in self-righteous Protestantism.  Sex was a four letter word, unless it occurred with suitable decorum and restraint inside marriage. 

Abortion^[1] was not an option.  Even if it had been legal, she would not have availed herself of it.  Keeping the child was unthinkable. Ostracised, she would have had no means of support.  None would have been forthcoming either from family or from the State which at that time provided no assistance to single parents. 

She was bundled off to a far-away city.  Friends and relatives were told she was attending an institute.  The baby was born and passed up for adoption with much pain and grief - but it was the only "right" thing to do. 

Back home she did something unusual.  She eventually married the father of her first child and went on to raise a family of five children. 

Thirty years went by.  The society in which they all lived had begun to shake off its Victorian yoke.  Taboo subjects were increasingly discussed out in the open.  The State took up the cause of the single mother and provided limited financial support.  Living in sin became commonplace.  Homosexuality was decriminalised.  The prevalence of child sexual abuse by trusted males was dragged into the open - sanctimonious upstanding male citizens, particularly in those self-righteous little rural communities, could feel the cold winds of revelation blowing around their dark and shrivelled man-hoods. 

The taboo against making contact with your birth mother was also significantly diluted.  Contact was facilitated by the State where both parties agreed. 

And so it happened.  Thirty years later.  After a lifetime of conditioning in another environment, the baby met the birth mother, the birth father, and the five biological brothers and sisters. 

It was an amazing thing.  Amazing because environment proved to be largely incidental to the shaping of the baby into the adult.  On all levels, not just the physical, the similarities were striking, particularly between the birth mother and her first child.  Temperament, intellect, attitudes, values, interests, energy levels, annoying little habits, all virtually identical. 

That the first child was perhaps more like her birth mother than the other biological siblings can be explained by the baby having escaped the very strong and domineering personality of the birth father.  It is also a reflection on the supportive environment the baby was given by her adoptive parents, an environment that allowed her to develop as fully as she wished in whatever direction she was inclined. 

This extraordinary series of revelations by no means eliminates the role of environment in determining the adults we become and the lives we lead.  In this particular case the environments provided by the birth and adoptive families were not strikingly different - they were both extremely supportive, of modest financial means, and in the same overall cultural context.  Had their home environments been significantly different the results might also have been quite different. 

Nevertheless, it is anecdotes like this that cause you to fundamentally reassess the balance between heredity and environment. Unscientific and statistically invalid though it is, the evidence is compelling.  The influence of heredity could well be over seventy percent. 

This imbalance between nature and nurture, so heavily skewed towards nature, has profound implications for the manner in which we need to manage society towards its indefinite and civilised survival^[2].  It has implications for how we deal with intractably and seriously antisocial individuals^[3].  It has implications for education.  Most importantly, it is central to the role genetic engineering will play in the future of the human species. 

One taboo that remains deeply entrenched in contemporary Western values relates to the selective breeding of human beings. The mere suggestion raises the ire of all those who fought against the Third Reich.  Hitler's perverse ideology was founded on notions of a Master Race and the need to purge the human gene pool of alleged pollutants such as Jews, Gypsies, and Communists. 

It is time that we looked this taboo in the face.  With heredity as important as it is, we need to begin thinking much more seriously and systematically about whether current social practices and belief systems^[4] are inadvertently degrading the human gene pool.  If so, what impact will that have in the long term on our survival as a species?  And, if we conclude that it is necessary to actively screen out of future generations not only hereditary illnesses but also some behavioural predispositions, how do we do that humanely and without significantly compromising the overriding need for diversity^[5]?  How, where, and by whom will the line be drawn? 

In no way does the pre-eminence attributed  here to nature over nurture set any one race of humans above another.  The intrinsic differences between races are insignificant.  Differences between individuals within races are far greater than differences between races, as are the inherent differences between the two sexes^[6].  The path from our common ancestors has been far too short and inter-breeding has been far too common to have allowed material inter-racial differences to develop.