The Language of Heritability

“The Minnesota twin study raised questions about the depth and pervasiveness of qualities specified by genes: Where in the genome, exactly, might one find the locus of recurrent nightmares or of fake sneezes? Yet it provoked an equally puzzling converse question: Why are identical twins different? Because, you might answer, fate impinges differently on their bodies. One twin falls down the crumbling stairs of her Calcutta house and breaks her ankle; the other scalds her thigh on a tipped cup of coffee in a European station. Each acquires the wounds, calluses, and memories of chance and fate. But how are these changes recorded, so that they persist over the years? We know that the genome can manufacture identity; the trickier question is how it gives rise to difference.”
~Siddhartha Mukherjee, Same But Different

If genetics are the words in a dictionary, then epigenetics is the creative force that forms those words into a library of books. Even using the same exact words in the genomic code from identical twins, they can be expressed in starkly different ways. Each gene’s expression is dependent on it’s relationship to numerous other genes, potentially thousands, and all of those genes together are moderated according to epigenetics.

The epigenome itself can be altered by individual and environmental factors (type of work, exercise, and injuries; traumatic abuse, chronic stress, and prejudice; smoking, drinking, and malnutrition; clean or polluted air, water and soil; availability of green spaces, socioeconomic class, and level of inequality; etc). Then those changes can be passed on across multiple generations (e.g., the grandchildren of famine victims having higher obesity rates). This applies even to complex behaviors being inherited (e.g., the grandchildren of shocked mice, when exposed to cherry blossom scent, still jumping in response to the shock their grandparents experienced when exposed to the same scent).

What is rarely understood is that heritability rates don’t refer directly to genetics alone. It simply speaks to the entire package of influences. We don’t only inherit genes for we also inherit epigenetic markers and environmental conditions, all of the confounders that make twin studies next to useless. Heritability is only meaningful at a population level and can say nothing directly about individual people or individual factors such as a specific gene. And at a population level, research has shown that behavioral and cultural traits can persist over centuries, and they seem to have been originally caused by distant historical events of which the living memory has long since disappeared, but the memory lingers in some combination of heritable factors.

Even if epigenetics could only last several generations, though at least in some species much longer, the social conditions could continually reinforce those epigenetic changes so that they effectively become permanently set. And the epigenetics, in predisposing social behaviors, would create a vicious cycle of feeding back into the conditions that maintain the epigenetics. Or think of the centuries-long history of racism in the United States where evidence shows racism remains pervasive, systemic, and institutional, in which case the heritability is partly being enforced upon an oppressed underclass by those with wealth, privilege, and power. That wealth, power, and privilege is likewise heritable, as is the entire social order. No one part can be disentangled from the rest for none of us are separate from the world that we are born into.

Now consider any given disease, behavior, personality trait, etc might be determined by thousands of genes, thousands of epigenetic markers, and thousands of external factors. Change any single part of that puzzle might mean to rearrange the the entire result, even leading to a complete opposite expression. The epigenome determines not only if a gene is expressed but how it is expressed because it determines how which words are used in the genomic dictionary and how those words are linked into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. So, one gene might be correlated as heritable with something in a particular society while correlated to something entirely else in a different society. The same gene could potentially have immense possible outcomes, in how the same word could be found in hundreds of thousands of books. Many of the same words are found in both Harry Potter and Hamlet, but that doesn’t help us to understand what makes one book different from the other. This is a useful metaphor, although an aspect of it might be quite literal considering what has been proven in the research on linguistic relativity.

There is no part of our lives not touched by language in shaping thought and affect, perception and behavior. Rather than a Chomskyan language organ that we inherit, maybe language is partly passed on through the way epigenetics ties together genes and environment. Even our scientific way of thinking about such issues probably leaves epigenetic markers that might predispose our children and grandchildren to think scientifically as well. What I’m describing in this post is a linguistically-filtered narrative upheld by a specific Jaynesian voice of authorization in our society. Our way of speaking and understanding changes us, even at a biological level. We are unable of standing back from the very thing about which we speak. In fact, it has been the language of scientific reductionism that has made it so difficult coming to this new insight into human nature, that we are complex beings in a complex world. And that scientific reduction has been a central component to the entire ruling paradigm, which continues to resist this challenging view.

Epigenetics can last across generations, but it can also be changed in a single lifetime. For centuries, we enforced upon the world, often violently and through language, an ideology of genetic determinism and race realism. The irony is that the creation of this illusion of an inevitable and unalterable social order was only possible through the elite’s control of environmental conditions and hence epigenetic factors. Yet as soon as this enforcement ends, the illusion drifts away like a fog dissipated by a strong wind and now through clear vision the actual landscape is revealed, a patchwork of possible pathways. We constantly are re-created by our inheritance, biological and environmental, and in turn we re-create the social order we find. But with new ways of speaking will come new ways of perceiving and acting in the world, and from that a different kind of society could form.

[This post is based on what is emerging in this area of research. But some of it remains speculative. Epigenetics, specifically, is still a young field. It’s difficult to detect and follow such changes across multiple generations. If and when someone proves that linguistic relativity can even reach to the level of the epigenome, a seeming inevitability (considering it’s already proven language alters behavior and behavior alters epigenetics), that could be the death blow to the already ailing essentialist paradigm (Essentialism On the Decline). According to the status quo, epigenetics is almost too radical to be believed, as is linguistic relativity. Yet we know each is true to a larger extent than present thought allows for. Combine the two and we might have a revolution of the mind.]

* * *

The Ending of the Nature vs Nurture Debate
Heritability & Inheritance, Genetics & Epigenetics, Etc
Identically Different: A Scientist Changes His Mind
Epigenetic Memory and the Mind
Inherited Learned Behavior
Epigenetics, the Good and the Bad
Trauma, Embodied and Extended
Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope
Society: Precarious or Persistent?
Plowing the Furrows of the Mind

What If (Almost) Every Gene Affects (Almost) Everything?
by Ed Yong

But Evan Boyle, Yang Li, and Jonathan Pritchard from Stanford University think that this framework doesn’t go far enough.

They note that researchers often assume that those thousands of weakly-acting genetic variants will all cluster together in relevant genes. For example, you might expect that height-associated variants will affect genes that control the growth of bones. Similarly, schizophrenia-associated variants might affect genes that are involved in the nervous system. “There’s been this notion that for every gene that’s involved in a trait, there’d be a story connecting that gene to the trait,” says Pritchard. And he thinks that’s only partly true.

Yes, he says, there will be “core genes” that follow this pattern. They will affect traits in ways that make biological sense. But genes don’t work in isolation. They influence each other in large networks, so that “if a variant changes any one gene, it could change an entire gene network,” says Boyle. He believes that these networks are so thoroughly interconnected that every gene is just a few degrees of separation away from every other. Which means that changes in basically any gene will ripple inwards to affect the core genes for a particular trait.

The Stanford trio call this the “omnigenic model.” In the simplest terms, they’re saying that most genes matter for most things.

More specifically, it means that all the genes that are switched on in a particular type of cell—say, a neuron or a heart muscle cell—are probably involved in almost every complex trait that involves those cells. So, for example, nearly every gene that’s switched on in neurons would play some role in defining a person’s intelligence, or risk of dementia, or propensity to learn. Some of these roles may be starring parts. Others might be mere cameos. But few genes would be left out of the production altogether.

This might explain why the search for genetic variants behind complex traits has been so arduous. For example, a giant study called… er… GIANT looked at the genomes of 250,000 people and identified 700 variants that affect our height. As predicted, each has a tiny effect, raising a person’s stature by just a millimeter. And collectively, they explain just 16 percent of the variation in heights that you see in people of European ancestry.

An Enormous Study of the Genes Related to Staying in School
by Ed Yong

Over the past five years, Benjamin has been part of an international team of researchers identifying variations in the human genome that are associated with how many years of education people get. In 2013, after analyzing the DNA of 101,000 people, the team found just three of these genetic variants. In 2016, they identified 71 more after tripling the size of their study.

Now, after scanning the genomes of 1,100,000 people of European descent—one of the largest studies of this kind—they have a much bigger list of 1,271 education-associated genetic variants. The team—which includes Peter Visscher, David Cesarini, James Lee, Robbee Wedow, and Aysu Okbay—also identified hundreds of variants that are associated with math skills and performance on tests of mental abilities.

The team hasn’t discovered “genes for education.” Instead, many of these variants affect genes that are active in the brains of fetuses and newborns. These genes influence the creation of neurons and other brain cells, the chemicals these cells secrete, the way they react to new information, and the way they connect with each other. This biology affects our psychology, which in turn affects how we move through the education system.

This isn’t to say that staying in school is “in the genes.” Each genetic variant has a tiny effect on its own, and even together, they don’t control people’s fates. The team showed this by creating a “polygenic score”—a tool that accounts for variants across a person’s entire genome to predict how much formal education they’re likely to receive. It does a lousy job of predicting the outcome for any specific individual, but it can explain 11 percent of the population-wide variation in years of schooling.

That’s terrible when compared with, say, weather forecasts, which can correctly predict about 95 percent of the variation in day-to-day temperatures.

Complex grammar of the genomic language
from Science Daily

Each gene has a regulatory region that contains the instructions controlling when and where the gene is expressed. This gene regulatory code is read by proteins called transcription factors that bind to specific ‘DNA words’ and either increase or decrease the expression of the associated gene.

Under the supervision of Professor Jussi Taipale, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have previously identified most of the DNA words recognised by individual transcription factors. However, much like in a natural human language, the DNA words can be joined to form compound words that are read by multiple transcription factors. However, the mechanism by which such compound words are read has not previously been examined. Therefore, in their recent study in Nature, the Taipale team examines the binding preferences of pairs of transcription factors, and systematically maps the compound DNA words they bind to.

Their analysis reveals that the grammar of the genetic code is much more complex than that of even the most complex human languages. Instead of simply joining two words together by deleting a space, the individual words that are joined together in compound DNA words are altered, leading to a large number of completely new words.

“Our study identified many such words, increasing the understanding of how genes are regulated both in normal development and cancer,” says Arttu Jolma. “The results pave the way for cracking the genetic code that controls the expression of genes. “

Inherited Learned Behavior

There is what we inherit from our parents and there is what we learn from our own experience. The two are distinct, right? Well, actually no they are not separate. This was further demonstrated by a Princeton study (Danger avoidance can be genetically encoded for four generations, biologists say):

“Moore and her colleagues investigated whether C. elegans can convey this learned avoidance behavior to their progeny. They found that when mother worms learned to avoid pathogenic P. aeruginosa, their progeny also knew to avoid the bacteria. The natural attraction of offspring to Pseudomonas was overridden even though they had never previously encountered the pathogen. Remarkably, this inherited aversive behavior lasted for four generations, but in the fifth generation the worms were once again attracted to Pseudomonas.”

This is not an entirely new understanding. Earlier research has found similar results in other species. The study that always fascinates me had to do with rodents. The scent of cherry blossoms was emitted in their cage and immediately following that the bottom of the cage was electrified. Unsurprisingly, the rodents jumped around trying to avoid the pain. The rodents learned to begin jumping merely at the presence of the scent, whether or not any electric shock followed. The interesting part is that their rodent descendants, even though never shocked, would also jump when they smelled cherry blossoms. And this lasted for multiple generations. A very specific learned behavior was passed on.

Of course, this isn’t limited to worms and rodents. Humans are harder to study, partly because of our longer lives. But researchers have been able to observe multiple living generations to discover patterns. I’m not sure if this exactly fits into learned behavior, except in how the body learns to respond to the environment. It’s similar enough. This other research found that the children and grandchildren of famine survivors had higher rates of obesity that had nothing to do wasn’t caused by genetics or diet. It is what is called epigenetics, how the genes get set for expression. The same genes can be switched on or off in numerous ways in relation to other genes.

I find that fascinating. It also makes for much complication. Almost no research ever controls for multigenerational confounding factors. Epigenetics has been largely a black box, until quite recently. To be certain that a particular behavior was directly related to specific genetics in a population, you would have to be able to follow that population for many generations. To fully control for confounders, that would require a study that lasted more than a century. It might turn out that much of what we call ‘culture’ might more correctly be explained as population-wide epigenetics.

* * *

As a side note, this would have immense significance to dietary and nutritional research. Many of the dietary changes that have happened in modern society are well within the range of epigenetic involvement. And the epigenetic effects likely would be cumulative.

We have an ongoing and uncontrolled experiment going on. No one knows the long-term consequences of the modern industrial diet of refined carbohydrates, added sugars, highly processed vegetable oils, food additives, farm chemicals, microplastic, etc. It’s a mass experiment and the subjects never chose to participate.

Definitely, we have reasons to be concerned. Francis M. Pottenger Jr. studied the dietary impact on feline health. He fed some cats a raw food diet, others a cooked food diet, and a third group with a diet mixed of raw and cooked. The cats on the cooked food diet became sickly in the first generation and were entirely infertile after a number of generations.

This is not exactly similar to the human diet of industrial foods. But it points to how results play out across generations. The worst effects aren’t necessarily seen in the immediate generation(s). It’s future generations that have to deal with what those before them caused, as true for epigenetics as it is for national debt and environmental destruction.

Another Example of the Replication Crisis

A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers
by Ed Yong

Between them, these 18 genes have been the subject of more than 1,000 research papers, on depression alone. And for what? If the new study is right, these genes have nothing to do with depression. “This should be a real cautionary tale,” Keller adds. “How on Earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?”

“What bothers me isn’t just that people said [the gene] mattered and it didn’t,” wrote the psychiatrist Scott Alexander in a widely shared blog post. “It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices on top of this idea of [it] mattering.” Researchers studied how SLC6A4 affects emotion centers in the brain, how its influence varies in different countries and demographics, and how it interacts with other genes. It’s as if they’d been “describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot,” Alexander wrote. […]

“We’re told that science self-corrects, but what the candidate gene literature demonstrates is that it often self-corrects very slowly, and very wastefully, even when the writing has been on the wall for a very long time,” Munafo adds.

Many fields of science, from psychology to cancer biology, have been dealing with similar problems: Entire lines of research may be based on faulty results. The reasons for this so-called “reproducibility crisis” are manifold. Sometimes, researchers futz with their data until they get something interesting, or retrofit their questions to match their answers. Other times, they selectively publish positive results while sweeping negative ones under the rug, creating a false impression of building evidence.

Beyond a few cases of outright misconduct, these practices are rarely done to deceive. They’re an almost inevitable product of an academic world that rewards scientists, above all else, for publishing papers in high-profile journals—journals that prefer flashy studies that make new discoveries over duller ones that check existing work. People are rewarded for being productive rather than being right, for building ever upward instead of checking the foundations. These incentives allow weak studies to be published. And once enough have amassed, they create a collective perception of strength that can be hard to pierce. […]

Similar debates have played out in other fields. When one group of psychologists started trying to reproduce classic results in much larger studies, their peers argued that any failures might simply be due to differences between the new groups of volunteers and the originals. This excuse has eroded with time, but to Border, it feels familiar. “There’s an unwillingness to part with a previous hypothesis,” he says. “It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that maybe you were on a wild goose chase for years.”

Keller worries that these problems will be used as ammunition to distrust science as a whole. “People ask, ‘Well, if scientists are publishing crap, why should we believe global warming and evolution,’” he says. “But there’s a real difference: Some people were skeptical about candidate genes even back in the 1990s. There was never unanimity or consensus in the way there is for human-made global warming and the theory of evolution.”

(Credit to Nina Teicholz for bringing my attention to this article.)

What is a gene?

Now: The Rest of the Genome
by Carl Zimmer

In this jungle of invading viruses, undead pseudogenes, shuffled exons and epigenetic marks, can the classical concept of the gene survive? It is an open question, one that Dr. Prohaska hopes to address at a meeting she is organizing at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico next March.

In the current issue of American Scientist, Dr. Gerstein and his former graduate student Michael Seringhaus argue that in order to define a gene, scientists must start with the RNA transcript and trace it back to the DNA. Whatever exons are used to make that transcript would constitute a gene. Dr. Prohaska argues that a gene should be the smallest unit underlying inherited traits. It may include not just a collection of exons, but the epigenetic marks on them that are inherited as well.

These new concepts are moving the gene away from a physical snippet of DNA and back to a more abstract definition. “It’s almost a recapture of what the term was originally meant to convey,” Dr. Gingeras said.

A hundred years after it was born, the gene is coming home.

Genome 2.0: Mountains Of New Data Are Challenging Old Views
by Patrick Barry

This complex interweaving of genes, transcripts, and regulation makes the net effect of a single mutation on an organism much more difficult to predict, Gingeras says.

More fundamentally, it muddies scientists’ conception of just what constitutes a gene. In the established definition, a gene is a discrete region of DNA that produces a single, identifiable protein in a cell. But the functioning of a protein often depends on a host of RNAs that control its activity. If a stretch of DNA known to be a protein-coding gene also produces regulatory RNAs essential for several other genes, is it somehow a part of all those other genes as well?

To make things even messier, the genetic code for a protein can be scattered far and wide around the genome. The ENCODE project revealed that about 90 percent of protein-coding genes possessed previously unknown coding fragments that were located far from the main gene, sometimes on other chromosomes. Many scientists now argue that this overlapping and dispersal of genes, along with the swelling ranks of functional RNAs, renders the standard gene concept of the central dogma obsolete.

Long Live The Gene

Offering a radical new conception of the genome, Gingeras proposes shifting the focus away from protein-coding genes. Instead, he suggests that the fundamental units of the genome could be defined as functional RNA transcripts.

Since some of these transcripts ferry code for proteins as dutiful mRNAs, this new perspective would encompass traditional genes. But it would also accommodate new classes of functional RNAs as they’re discovered, while avoiding the confusion caused by several overlapping genes laying claim to a single stretch of DNA. The emerging picture of the genome “definitely shifts the emphasis from genes to transcripts,” agrees Mark B. Gerstein, a bioinformaticist at Yale University.

Scientists’ definition of a gene has evolved several times since Gregor Mendel first deduced the idea in the 1860s from his work with pea plants. Now, about 50 years after its last major revision, the gene concept is once again being called into question.

Theory Suggests That All Genes Affect Every Complex Trait
by Veronique Greenwood

Over the years, however, what scientists might consider “a lot” in this context has quietly inflated. Last June, Pritchard and his Stanford colleagues Evan Boyle and Yang Li (now at the University of Chicago) published a paper about this in Cell that immediately sparked controversy, although it also had many people nodding in cautious agreement. The authors described what they called the “omnigenic” model of complex traits. Drawing on GWAS analyses of three diseases, they concluded that in the cell types that are relevant to a disease, it appears that not 15, not 100, but essentially all genes contribute to the condition. The authors suggested that for some traits, “multiple” loci could mean more than 100,000. […]

For most complex conditions and diseases, however, she thinks that the idea of a tiny coterie of identifiable core genes is a red herring because the effects might truly stem from disturbances at innumerable loci — and from the environment — working in concert. In a new paper out in Cell this week, Wray and her colleagues argue that the core gene idea amounts to an unwarranted assumption, and that researchers should simply let the experimental data about particular traits or conditions lead their thinking. (In their paper proposing omnigenics, Pritchard and his co-authors also asked whether the distinction between core and peripheral genes was useful and acknowledged that some diseases might not have them.)

Epigenetic Memory and the Mind

Epigenetics is fascinating, even bizarre by conventional thought. Some worry that it’s another variety of determinism, just not located in the genes. I have other worries, if not that particular one.

How epigenetics work is that a gene gets switched on or off. The key point is that it’s not permanently set. Some later incident, conditions, behavior, or whatever can switch it back the other way again. Genes in your body are switched on and off throughout your lifetime. But presumably if no significant changes occur in one’s life some epigenetic expressions remain permanently set for your entire life.

Where it gets fascinating is that it’s been proven that epigenetics gets passed on across multiple generations and no one is certain how many generations. In mice, it can extend at least upwards of 7 generations or so, as I recall. Humans, of course, haven’t been studied for that many generations. But present evidence indicates it operates similarly in humans.

Potentially, all of the major tragedies in modern history (violence of colonialism all around the world, major famines in places like Ireland and China, genocides in places like the United States and Rwanda, international conflicts like the world wars, etc), all of that is within the range of epigenetis. It’s been shown that famine, for example, switches genes for a few generations that causes increased fat retention and in the modern world that means higher obesity rates.

I’m not sure what is the precise mechanism that causes genes to switch on and off (e.g., precisely how does starvation get imprinted on biology and become set that way for multiple generations). All I know is it has to do with the proteins that encase the DNA. The main interest is that, once we do understand the mechanism, we will be able to control the process. This might be a way of preventing or managing numerous physical and psychiatric health conditions. So, it really will mean the opposite of determinism.

This research reminds me of other scientific and anecdotal evidence. Consider the recipients of organ transplants, blood and bone marrow transfusions, and microbiome transference. This involves the exchange of cells from one body to another. The results have shown changes in mood, behavior, biological functioning, etc

For example, introducing a new microbiome can make a skinny rodent fat or a fat rodent skinny. But also observed are shifts in fairly specific memories, such as an organ transplant recipient craving something the organ donor craved. Furthermore, research has shown that genetics can jump from the introduced cells to the already present cells, which is how a baby can potentially end up with the cells of two fathers if a previous pregnancy was by a different father, and actually it’s rather common for people to have multiple DNAs in their body.

It intuitively makes sense that epigenetics would be behind memory. It’s easy to argue that there is no other function in the body that has this kind and degree of capacity. And that possibility would blow up our ideas of the human mind. In that case, some element of memories would get passed on multiple generations, explaining certain similarities seen in families and larger populations with shared epigenetic backgrounds.

This gives new meaning to the theories of both the embodied mind and the extended mind. There might also having some interesting implications for the bundle theory of mind. I wonder too about something like enactivism which is about the human mind’s relation to the world. Of course, there are obvious connections of this specific research with neurological plasticity and of epigenetics more generally with intergenerational trauma.

So, it wouldn’t only be the symptoms of trauma or else the benefits of privilege (or whatever other conditions that shape individuals, generational cohorts, and sub-populations) being inherited but some of the memory itself. This puts bodily memory in a much larger context, maybe even something along the lines of Jungian thought, in terms of collective memory and archetypes (depending on how long-lasting some epigenetic effects might be). Also, much of what people think of as cultural, ethnic, and racial differences might simply be epigenetics. This would puncture an even larger hole in genetic determinism and race realism. Unlike genetics, epigenetics can be changed.

Our understanding of so much is going to be completely altered. What once seemed crazy or unthinkable will become the new dominant paradigm. This is both promising and scary. Imagine what authoritarian governments could do with this scientific knowledge. The Nazis could only dream of creating a superman. But between genetic engineering and epigenetic manipulations, the possibilities are wide open. And right now, we have no clue what we are doing. The early experimentation, specifically research done covertly, is going to be of the mad scientist variety.

These interesting times are going to get way more interesting.

* * *

Could Memory Traces Exist in Cell Bodies?
by Susan Cosier

The finding is surprising because it suggests that a nerve cell body “knows” how many synapses it is supposed to form, meaning it is encoding a crucial part of memory. The researchers also ran a similar experiment on live sea slugs, in which they found that a long-term memory could be totally erased (as gauged by its synapses being destroyed) and then re-formed with only a small reminder stimulus—again suggesting that some information was being stored in a neuron’s body.

Synapses may be like a concert pianist’s fingers, explains principal investigator David Glanzman, a neurologist at U.C.L.A. Even if Chopin did not have his fingers, he would still know how to play his sonatas. “This is a radical idea, and I don’t deny it: memory really isn’t stored in synapses,” Glanzman says.

Other memory experts are intrigued by the findings but cautious about interpreting the results. Even if neurons retain information about how many synapses to form, it is unclear how the cells could know where to put the synapses or how strong they should be—which are crucial components of memory storage. Yet the work indeed suggests that synapses might not be set in stone as they encode memory: they may wither and re-form as a memory waxes and wanes. “The results are really just kind of surprising,” says Todd Sacktor, a neurologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. “It has always been this assumption that it’s the same synapses that are storing the memory,” he says. “And the essence of what [Glanzman] is saying is that it’s far more dynamic.”

Memory Transferred Between Snails, Challenging Standard Theory of How the Brain Remembers
by Usha Lee McFarling

Glanzman’s experiments—funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—involved giving mild electrical shocks to the marine snail Aplysia californica. Shocked snails learn to withdraw their delicate siphons and gills for nearly a minute as a defense when they subsequently receive a weak touch; snails that have not been shocked withdraw only briefly.

The researchers extracted RNA from the nervous systems of snails that had been shocked and injected the material into unshocked snails. RNA’s primary role is to serve as a messenger inside cells, carrying protein-making instructions from its cousin DNA. But when this RNA was injected, these naive snails withdrew their siphons for extended periods of time after a soft touch. Control snails that received injections of RNA from snails that had not received shocks did not withdraw their siphons for as long.

“It’s as if we transferred a memory,” Glanzman said.

Glanzman’s group went further, showing that Aplysia sensory neurons in Petri dishes were more excitable, as they tend to be after being shocked, if they were exposed to RNA from shocked snails. Exposure to RNA from snails that had never been shocked did not cause the cells to become more excitable.

The results, said Glanzman, suggest that memories may be stored within the nucleus of neurons, where RNA is synthesized and can act on DNA to turn genes on and off. He said he thought memory storage involved these epigenetic changes—changes in the activity of genes and not in the DNA sequences that make up those genes—that are mediated by RNA.

This view challenges the widely held notion that memories are stored by enhancing synaptic connections between neurons. Rather, Glanzman sees synaptic changes that occur during memory formation as flowing from the information that the RNA is carrying.

Cultural Body-Mind

Daniel Everett is an expert on the Piraha, although he has studied other tribal cultures. It’s unsurprising then to find him make the same observations in different books. One particular example (seen below) is about bodily form. I bring it up becomes it contradicts much of the right-wing and reactionary ideology found in genetic determinism, race realism, evolutionary psychology, and present HBD (as opposed to the earlier human biodiversity theory originated by Jonathan Marks).

From the second book below, the excerpt is part of a larger section where Everett responded to the evolutionary psychologist John Tooby, the latter arguing that there is no such thing as ‘culture’ and hence everything is genetic or otherwise biological. Everett’s use of dark matter of the mind is his way of attempting to get at more deeply complex view. This dark matter is of the mind but also of the body. But he isn’t the only person to make such physiological observations.

The same point was emphasized in reading Ron Schmid’s Primal Nutrition. On page 57, there are some photographs showing healthy individuals from traditional communities. In one set of photographs, four Melanesian boys are shown who look remarkably similar. “These four boys lived on four different islands and were not related. Each had nutrition adequate for the development of the physical pattern typical of Melanesian males; thus their similar appearance.” This demonstrates non-determinism and non-essentialism.

* * *

How Language Began:
The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention
by Daniel L. Everett
pp. 220-221

Culture, patterns of being – such as eating, sleeping, thinking and posture – have been cultivated. A Dutch individual will be unlike the Belgian, the British, the Japanese, or the Navajo, because of the way that their minds have been cultivated – because of the roles they play in a particular set of values and because of how they define, live out and prioritise these values, the roles of individuals in a society and the knowledge they have acquired.

It would be worth exploring further just how understanding language and culture together can enable us better to understand each. Such an understanding would also help to clarify how new languages or dialects or any other variants of speech come about. I think that this principle ‘you talk like who you talk with’ represents all human behaviour. We also eat like who we eat with, think like those we think with, etc. We take on a wide range of shared attributes – our associations shape how we live and behave and appear – our phenotype. Culture affects our gestures and our talk. It can even affect our bodies. Early American anthropologist Franz Boas studied in detail the relationship between environment, culture and bodily form. Boas made a solid case that human body types are highly plastic and change to adapt to local environmental forces, both ecological and cultural.

Less industrialised cultures show biology-culture connections. Among the Pirahã, facial features range impressionistically from slightly Negroid to East Asian, to Native American. Differences between villages or families may have a biological basis, originating in different tribes merging over the last 200 years. One sizeable group of Pirahãs (perhaps thirty to forty) – usually found occupying a single village – are descendants of the Torá, a Chapakuran-speaking group that emigrated to the Maici-Marmelos rivers as long as two centuries ago. Even today Brazilians refer to this group as Torá, though the Pirahãs refer to them as Pirahãs. They are culturally and linguistically fully integrated into the Pirahãs. Their facial features are somewhat different – broader noses, some with epicanthic folds, large foreheads – giving an overall impression of similarity to East Asian features. ‡ Yet body dimensions across all Pirahãs are constant. Men’s waists are, or were when I worked with them, uniformly 27 inches (68 cm), their average height 5 feet 2 inches (157.5 cm) and their average weight 55 kilos (121 pounds). The Pirahã phenotypes are similar not because all Pirahãs necessarily share a single genotype, but because they share a culture, including values, knowledge of what to eat and values about how much to eat, when to eat and the like.

These examples show that even the body does not escape our earlier observation that studies of culture and human social behaviour can be summed up in the slogan that ‘you talk like who you talk with’ or ‘grow like who you grow with’. And the same would have held for all our ancestors, even erectus .

Dark Matter of the Mind:
The Culturally Articulated Unconscious
by Daniel L. Everett
Kindle Locations 1499-1576

Thus while Tooby may be absolutely right that to have meaning, “culture” must be implemented in individual minds, this is no indictment of the concept. In fact, this requirement has long been insisted on by careful students of culture, such as Sapir. Yet unlike, say, Sapir, Tooby has no account of how individual minds— like ants in a colony or neurons in a brain or cells in a body— can form a larger entity emerging from multi-individual sets of knowledge, values, and roles. His own nativist views offer little insight into the unique “unconscious patterning of society” (to paraphrase Sapir) that establishes the “social set” to which individuals belong.

The idea of culture, after all, is just that certain patterns of being— eating, sleeping, thinking, posture, and so forth— have been cultivated and that minds arising from one such “field” will not be like minds cultivated in another “field.” The Dutch individual will be unlike the Belgian, the British, the Japanese, or the Navajo, because of the way that his or her mind has been cultivated— because of the roles he or she plays in a particular value grouping, because of the ranking of values that her or she has come to share, and so on.

We must be clear, of course, that the idea of “cultivation” we are speaking of here is not merely of minds, but of entire individuals— their minds a way of talking about their bodies. From the earliest work on ethnography in the US, for example, Boas showed how cultures affect even body shape. And body shape is a good indication that it is not merely cognition that is effected and affected by culture. The uses, experiences, emotions, senses, and social engagements of our bodies forget the patterns of thought we call mind. […]

Exploring this idea that understanding language can help us understand culture, consider how linguists account for the rise of languages, dialects, and all other local variants of speech. Part of their account is captured in linguistic truism that “you talk like who you talk with.” And, I argue, this principle actually impinges upon all human behavior. We not only talk like who we talk with, but we also eat like who we eat with, think like those we think with, and so on. We take on a wide range of shared attributes; our associations shape how we live and behave and appear— our phenotype. Culture can affect our gestures and many other aspects of our talk. Boas (1912a, 1912b) takes up the issue of environment, culture, and bodily form. He provides extensive evidence that human body phenotypes are highly plastic and subject to nongenetic local environmental forces (whether dietary, climatological, or social). Had Boas lived later, he might have studied a very clear and dramatic case; namely, the body height of Dutch citizens before and after World War II. This example is worth a close look because it shows that bodies— like behaviors and beliefs— are cultural products and shapers simultaneously.

The curious case of the Netherlanders fascinates me. The Dutch went from among the shortest peoples of Europe to the tallest in the world in just over one century. One account simplistically links the growth in Dutch height with the change in political system (Olson 2014): “The Dutch growth spurt of the mid-19th century coincided with the establishment of the first liberal democracy. Before this time, the Netherlands had grown rich off its colonies but the wealth had stayed in the hands of the elite. After this time, the wealth began to trickle down to all levels of society, the average income went up and so did the height.” Tempting as this single account may be, there were undoubtedly other factors involved, including gene flow and sexual selection between Dutch and other (mainly European) populations, that contribute to explain European body shape relative to the Dutch. But democracy, a new political change from strengthened and enforced cultural values, is a crucial component of the change in the average height of the Dutch, even though the Dutch genotype has not changed significantly in the past two hundred years. For example, consider figures 2.1 and 2.2. In 1825, US male median height was roughly ten centimeters (roughly four inches) taller than the average Dutch. In the 1850s, the median heights of most males in Europe and the USA were lowered. But then around 1900, they begin to rise again. Dutch male median height lagged behind that of most of the world until the late ’50s and early ’60s, when it began to rise at a faster rate than all other nations represented in the chart. By 1975 the Dutch were taller than Americans. Today, the median Dutch male height (183 cm, or roughly just above six feet) is approximately three inches more than the median American male height (177 cm, or roughly five ten). Thus an apparent biological change turns out to be largely a cultural phenomenon.

To see this culture-body connection even more clearly, consider figure 2.2. In this chart, the correlation between wealth and height emerges clearly (not forgetting that the primary determiner of height is the genome). As wealth grew, so did men (and women). This wasn’t matched in the US, however, even though wealth also grew in the US (precise figures are unnecessary). What emerges from this is that Dutch genes are implicated in the Dutch height transformation, from below average to the tallest people in the world. And yet the genes had to await the right cultural conditions before they could be so dramatically expressed. Other cultural differences that contribute to height increases are: (i) economic (e.g., “white collar”) background; (ii) size of family (more children, shorter children); (iii) literacy of the child’s mother (literate mothers provide better diets); (iv) place of residence (residents of agricultural areas tend to be taller than those in industrial environments— better and more plentiful food); and so on (Khazan 2014). Obviously, these factors all have to do with food access. But looked at from a broader angle, food access is clearly a function of values, knowledge, and social roles— that is, culture.

Just as with the Dutch, less-industrialized cultures show culture-body connections. For example, Pirahã phenotype is also subject to change. Facial features among the Pirahãs range impressionistically from slightly Negroid to East Asian to American Indian (to use terms from physical anthropology). Phenotypical differences between villages or families seem to have a biological basis (though no genetic tests have been conducted). This would be due in part to the fact Pirahã women have trysts with various non-Pirahã visitors (mainly river traders and their crews, but also government workers and contract employees on health assistance assignments, demarcating the Pirahã reservation, etc.). The genetic differences are also partly historical. One sizeable group of Pirahãs (perhaps thirty to forty)— usually found occupying a single village— are descendants of the Torá, a Chapakuran-speaking group that emigrated to the Maici-Marmelos rivers as long as two hundred years ago. Even today Brazilians refer to this group as Torá, though the Pirahãs refer to them as Pirahãs. They are culturally and linguistically fully integrated into the Pirahãs. Their facial features are somewhat different— broader noses; some with epicanthic folds; large foreheads— giving an overall impression of similarity to Cambodian features. This and other evidence show us that the Pirahã gene pool is not closed. 4 Yet body dimensions across all Pirahãs are constant. Men’s waists are or were uniformly 83 centimeters (about 32.5 inches), their average height 157.5 centimeters (five two), and their average weight 55 kilos (about 121 pounds).

I learned about the uniformity in these measurements over the past several decades as I have taken Pirahã men, women, and children to stores in nearby towns to purchase Western clothes, when they came out of their villages for medical help. (The Pirahãs always asked that I purchase Brazilian clothes for them so that they would not attract unnecessary stares and comments.) Thus I learned that the measurements for men were nearly identical. Biology alone cannot account for this homogeneity of body form; culture is implicated as well. For example, Pirahãs raised since infancy outside the village are somewhat taller and much heavier than Pirahãs raised in their culture and communities. Even the body does not escape our earlier observation that studies of culture and human social behavior can be summed up in the slogan that “you talk like who you talk with” or “grow like who you grow with.”

Black Global Ruling Elite

One of my favorite activities is reversing arguments, in order to make a point. It is using the structure of an argument to contradict someone’s claim or to demonstrate the fundamental irrationality of their worldview. Also, sometimes it can just be an act of playful silliness, a game of rhetoric. Either way, it requires imagination to take an argument in an unexpected direction.

To be able to reverse an argument, you have to first understand the argument. This requires getting into someone else’s head and seeing the world from their perspective. You need to know your enemy. I’ve long made it a habit to explore other ideologies and interact with those advocating them. It usually ends in frustration, but I come out the other side with an intimate knowledge of what makes others tick.

The opposing group I spent the most time with was HBD crowd (human biodiversity). HBDers are filled with many reactionaries, specifically race realists and genetic determinists. The thing about reactionaries is that they love to co-opt rhetoric and tactics from the political left. HBD theory was originated by someone, Jonathan Marks, making arguments against race realism and genetic determinism. The brilliance of the reactionaries was to do exactly what I’m talking about — they reversed the arguments.

But as chamelion-like faceless men, reactionaries use this strategy to hide their intentions behind deceptive rhetoric. No HBDer is ever going to admit the anti-reactionary origins of human biodiversity ( just like right-libertarians won’t acknowledge the origins of libertarianism as a left-wing ideology in the European workers movement). The talent of reactionaries is in pretending that what they stole was always theirs. They take their games of deception quite seriously. Their trolling is a way of life.

“There’s only one thing we can do to thwart the plot of these albino shape-shifting lizard BITCHES!” Their arguments need to be turned back the other way again. Or else turn them inside out to the point of absurdity. Let us call it introducing novelty. I’ve done this with previous posts about slavery and eugenics. The point I made is that, by using HBD-style arguments, we should actually expect American blacks to be a superior race.

This is for a couple of reasons. For centuries in America, the most violent, rebellious, and criminal blacks were eugenically removed from the breeding population, by way of being killed or imprisoned — and so, according to HBD, the genetics of violence, rebelliousness, criminality, etc should have decreased along with all of the related genetically-determined behavior. Also, since the colonial era, successful and supposedly superior upper class whites were impregnating their slaves, servants, and any other blacks they desired which should have infused their superior genetics into the American black population. Yet, contradicting these obvious conclusions, HBDers argue the exact opposite.

Let me clarify one point. African-Americans are a genetically constrained demographic, their ancestors having mostly come from one area of Africa. And the centuries of semi-eugenics theoretically would have narrowed those genetics down further, even in terms of the narrow selection of white genetics that was introduced. But these population pressures didn’t exist among other African descendants. Particularly in Africa itself, the complete opposite is the case.

Africa has more genetic and phenotypic diversity than the rest of the world combined. Former slave populations that came from more various regions of Africa should also embody this greater genetic diversity. The global black population in general, in and outside Africa, is even more diverse than the African population alone. As such we should expect that the global black population will show the greatest variance of all traits.

This came to mind because of the following comment:

“Having a less oppressive environment increases variance in many phenotypes. The IQ variance of (less-oppressed) whites is greater than (more-oppressed) blacks despite less genetic diversity. Since women are on average more oppressed (i.e. outcasted more for a given deviance from the norms and given norms that take more effort to conform to) their traits would be narrower.”

The data doesn’t perfectly follow this pattern, in that there are exceptions. Among certain sub-population in oppressed populations, there sometimes is greater IQ variance. There are explanations for why this is the case, specifically the theory that females have a greater biological capacity for dealing with stressful conditions (e.g., oppression). But for the moment, let’s ignore that complication.

The point is that, according to genetic determinism, the low genetic diversity of whites should express as low IQ gaps, no matter the environmental differences. It shouldn’t matter that, for example, in the US the white population is split between socioeconomic extremes — as the majority of poor Americans are white and the majority of rich Americans are white. But if genetic determinism is false (i.e., more powerful influences being involved: environment, epigenetics, microbiome, etc), the expected result would be lower average IQ with lower class whites and higher average IQ with higher class whites — the actual pattern that is found.

Going by the data, we are forced to conclude that genetic determinism isn’t a compelling theory, at least according to broad racial explanations. Some HBDers would counter that the different socioeconomic populations of whites are also different genetic sub-populations. But the problem is that this isn’t supported by the lack of genetic variance found across white populations.

That isn’t what mainly interested me, though. I was more thinking about what this means for the global black population, far beyond a single trait. Let us assume that genetic determinism and race realism is true, for the sake of argument.

Since the African continent has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined, the global black population (or rather populations) that originated in Africa should have the greatest variation of all traits, not just IQ. They should have the greatest variance of athleticism to lethargy, pacifism to violence, law-abiding to criminality, wealth to poverty, global superpowers to failed states, etc.

We should disproportionately find those of African ancestry at every extreme across the world. Compared to all other populations, they would have the largest numbers of individuals in both the elite and the underclass. That means that a disproportionate number of political and corporate leaders would be black, if there was a functioning meritocracy of the Social Darwinian variety.

The greater genetic variance would lead to the genetically superior blacks disproportionately rising to the upper echelons of global wealth and power. The transnational plutocracy, therefore, should be dominated by blacks. We should see the largest gaps within the global black population and not between blacks and whites, since the genetic distance between black populations is greater than the genetic difference between particular black populations and non-black populations.

Based on the principles of human biodiversity, that means principled HBDers should support greater representation of blacks at all levels of global society. I can’t wait to hear this new insight spread throughout the HBD blogosphere. Then HBDers will become the strongest social justice warriors in the civil rights movement. Based on the evidence, how could HBDers do anything less?

Well, maybe there is one other possible conclusion. As good reactionaries, the paranoid worldview could be recruited. Accordingly, it could be assumed that the genetically superior sub-population of black ruling elite is so advanced that they’ve hidden their wealth and power, pulling the strings behind the scenes. Maybe there is Black cabal working in secret with the Jewish cabal in controlling the world. It’s this Black-Jewish covert power structure that has promoted the idea of an inferior black race to hide the true source of power. We could take this argument even further. The black sub-population might be the ultimate master race with Jews acting as their minions in running the Jew-owned banks and media as front groups.

It’s starting to make sense. I think there might be something to all of this genetic determinism and race realism. It really does explain everything. And it is so amazingly scientific.

Is the Tide Starting to Turn on Genetics and Culture?

Here is an alt-righter struggling with scientific understanding:

When I first came upon the argument that “culture is a racial construct” last year, I was pretty horrified. I saw this as a re-gurgitated Nazi talking point that was clearly unfactual.

But like other longtime taboo topics such as HBD, eugenics, and White identity, I’ve seen this theory pop up over the past year in some shocking places. First, a scientific magazine revealed that orcas genetics’ are affected by culture and vice versa. Then, I started seeing normies discuss this talking point in comment sections in the Wall Street Journal and even NY Times.

Finally, a liberal academic has thrown himself into the discussion. Bret Weinsten, a Jewish Leftist who most people here know as the targeted professor of the Marxist insanity at Evergreen University, posted this tweet yesterday: “Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. Culture is biological,” and then this one today: “Culture is as adaptive, evolutionary and biological as genes. You’re unlikely to accept it. But if you did you’d see people with 10X clarity.”

This is a pretty remarkable assertion coming from someone like Bret Weinstein. I wonder if the dam will eventually break and rather than being seen as incredibly taboo, this theory will be commonly accepted. If so, it’s probably the best talking point you have for America to prioritize its demographics.

What is so shocking?

This line of thought, taken broadly, has been developing and taking hold in the mainstream for more than a century. Social constructionism was popularized and spread by the anthropologist Franz Boaz. I don’t think this guy grasps what this theory means nor its implications. That “culture is a racial construct” goes hand in hand with race being a cultural construct, which is to say we understand the world and our own humanity through the lens of ideology, in the sense used by Louis Althusser. As applied to the ideology of pseudo-scientific race realism and gender realism, claims of linear determinism of singular and isolated causal factors are meaningless because research has shown that all aspects are intertwined factors in how we develop and who we become.

Bret Weinstein makes three assertions: “Sex is biological. Gender is cultural. Culture is biological.” I don’t know what is his ideological position. But he sounds like a genetic determinist, although this is not clear since he also claims that his assertions have nothing to do with group selection (a standard reductionist approach). Anyway, to make these statements accurate, other statements would need to be added — such as that, biology is epigenetics, epigenetics is environment, and environment is culture. We’d have to throw in other things as well, from biome to linguistic relativism. To interpret Weinstein generously and not taking his use of ‘is’ too literally: Many things are many other things or rather closely related, if by that we mean that multiple factors can’t be reduced to one another in that they influence each other in multiple directions and through multiple pathways.

Recent research has taken this even further in showing that neither sex nor gender is binary *, as genetics and its relationship to environment, epigenetics, and culture is more complex than was previously realized. It’s far from uncommon for people to carry genetics of both sexes, even multiple DNA. It has to do with diverse interlinking and overlapping causal relationships. We aren’t all that certain at this point what ultimately determines the precise process of conditions, factors, and influences in how and why any given gene expresses or not and how and why it expresses in a particular way. Most of the genetics in human DNA is entirely unknown in its purpose or maybe lack of purpose, although the Junk DNA theory has become highly contested. And most genetics in the human body is non-human: bacteria, viruses, symbiotes, and parasites. The point is that, scientifically speaking, causation is a lot harder to prove than many would like to admit.

The second claim by Weinstein is even more interesting: “Culture is as adaptive, evolutionary and biological as genes.” That easily could be interpreted in alignment with Richard Dawkins theory of memetics. That argument is that there are cultural elements that act and spread similarly to genes, like a virus replicating. With the growing research on epigenetics, microbiome, parasites, and such, the mechanisms for such a thing become more plausible. We are treading in unexplored territory when we combine memetics not just with culture but also with extended mind and extended phenotype. Linguistic relativism, for example, has proven that cultural influences can operate through non-biological causes — in that bilingual individuals with the same genetics will think, perceive, and act differently depending on which language they are using. Yes, culture is adaptive, whether or not in the way Weinstein believes.

The problems in this area only occur when one demands a reductionist conclusion. The simplistic thinking of reductionism appeals to the limits of the human mind. But reality has no compulsion to comform to the human mind. Reality is irreducible. And so we need a scientific understanding that deals with, rather than dismisses, complexity. Indeed, the tide is turning.

* * *

Intersex in history (Wikipedia)

Intersex people have been treated in different ways by different cultures. Whether or not they were socially tolerated or accepted by any particular culture, the existence of intersex people was known to many ancient and pre-modern cultures and legal systems, and numerous historical accounts exist.

Third gender (Wikipedia)

In different cultures, a third or fourth gender may represent very different things. To Native Hawaiians and Tahitians, Māhū is an intermediate state between man and woman, or a “person of indeterminate gender”.[9] The traditional Diné of the Southwestern US acknowledge four genders: feminine woman, masculine woman, feminine man, masculine man.[10] The term “third gender” has also been used to describe hijras of India[11] who have gained legal identity, fa’afafine of Polynesia, and sworn virgins of Albania.[12]

Intersex (Wikipedia)

History

Whether or not they were socially tolerated or accepted by any particular culture, the existence of intersex people was known to many ancient and pre-modern cultures. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote of “hermaphroditus” in the first century BCE that Hermaphroditus “is born with a physical body which is a combination of that of a man and that of a woman”, and with supernatural properties.[32]

In European societies, Roman law, post-classical canon law, and later common law, referred to a person’s sex as male, female or hermaphrodite, with legal rights as male or female depending on the characteristics that appeared most dominant.[33] The 12th-century Decretum Gratiani states that “Whether an hermaphrodite may witness a testament, depends on which sex prevails”.[34][35][36] The foundation of common law, the 17th Century Institutes of the Lawes of England described how a hermaphrodite could inherit “either as male or female, according to that kind of sexe which doth prevaile.”[37][38] Legal cases have been described in canon law and elsewhere over the centuries.

In some non-European societies, sex or gender systems with more than two categories may have allowed for other forms of inclusion of both intersex and transgender people. Such societies have been characterized as “primitive”, while Morgan Holmes states that subsequent analysis has been simplistic or romanticized, failing to take account of the ways that subjects of all categories are treated.[39]

During the Victorian era, medical authors introduced the terms “true hermaphrodite” for an individual who has both ovarian and testicular tissue, “male pseudo-hermaphrodite” for a person with testicular tissue, but either female or ambiguous sexual anatomy, and “female pseudo-hermaphrodite” for a person with ovarian tissue, but either male or ambiguous sexual anatomy. Some later shifts in terminology have reflected advances in genetics, while other shifts are suggested to be due to pejorative associations.[40]

The Gender Binary Is a Dumb, but Relatively New Concept
by Bethy Squires

So when and why did doctors move from one sex to two? Many scholars set the change during a time known as the “long 18th century”: 1688-1815. This time period covers the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and the period of political revolution that followed. It was during this time that many ideas about man’s inalienable rights were conceived.

Before the long 18th century, Western societies operated under feudalism, which presupposes that people are born unequal. Kings were better than lords who were better than peasants, and this sense of betterness extended to their physical bodies. “Aristocrats have better bodies, bodies are racialized,” says Laqueur, summing up the idea. “The body is open and fluid and the consequence of a hierarchy in heaven.” Specifics of this corruptible flesh are of less consequence than our souls. We were all servants in the Kingdom of Heaven, which set the hierarchy on earth.

This idea of a natural hierarchy was challenged by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. We see it in the Declaration of Independence: All men are created equal. But it was also understood that women and people of color couldn’t possibly have been created equal. Therefore, it became necessary to conceive of innate biological differences between men and women, white and black. “As political theorists were increasingly invoking a potentially egalitarian language of natural rights in the 18th century, ‘woman’ had to be defined as qualitatively different from men in order that political power would be kept out of women’s reach,” writes Karen Harvey in Cambridge University Press’s Historical Journal.

Sexual difference becomes much more explicit in medical texts once women’s anatomy gets its own words. […] What follows in the long 18th century and into the Victorian era is a solidifying of masculine and feminine as diametrically opposed. When doctors followed humoral system, it was understood that everyone was a little hot, a little cold, a little country, a little rock and roll. Women were frequently represented as hornier than men. But once everyone has to be shunted into a binary, women are rendered passive and disinclined to sex. “Historically, women had been perceived as lascivious and lustful creatures,” writes Ruth Perry in the amazingly titled academic paper “Colonizing the Breast.” “[B]y the middle of the eighteenth century they were increasingly reimagined as belonging to another order of being: loving but without sexual needs.” Men are horny, therefore women must be the opposite of horny.

Nonbinary and genderfluid people of the 21st century can gain some comfort from the notion that sex and gender divisions weren’t always so rigid. But that understanding is nevertheless tinged with the knowledge that the sexes, fluid though they were, were still ranked. Someone was still coming out a winner, and yet again it was whoever was most masculine.

Gender Role (Wikipedia)

Biological factors

Several studies have been conducted looking at the gender roles of intersex children.

One such study looked at female infants with adrenal hyperplasia, and who had excess male hormone levels, but were thought to be females and raised as such by their parents. These girls were more likely to express masculine traits.[50][51]

Another study looked at 18 infants with the intersex condition 5-alpha reductase deficiency, and XY chromosomes, assigned female at birth. At adult age only one individual maintained a female role, all the others being stereotypically male.[52]

In a third study, 14 male children born with cloacal exstrophy and assigned female at birth, including through intersex medical interventions. Upon follow-up between the ages of 5 to 12, eight of them identified as boys, and all of the subjects had at least moderately male-typical attitudes and interests.[53]

Dr. Sandra Lipsitz Bem is a psychologist who developed the gender schema theory, based on the combination of aspects of the social learning theory and the cognitive-development theory of sex role acquisition, to explain how individuals come to use gender as an organizing category in all aspects of their life. In 1971, she created the Bem Sex-Role Inventory to measure how well an individual conformed to a traditional gender role, characterizing those tested as having masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated personality. She believed that through gender-schematic processing, a person spontaneously sorts attributes and behaviors into masculine and feminine categories, and that therefore individuals processes information and regulate their behavior based on whatever definitions of femininity and masculinity their culture provides.[54]

While there are differences in average capabilities of various kinds (E.g. better average balance in females or greater average physical size and endurance in males) between the sexes[citation needed] the capabilities of some members of one sex will fall within the range of capabilities needed for tasks conventionally assigned to the other sex. Eve Shapiro, author of Gender Circuits, explains that “gender, like other social categories, is both a personal identity and a culture set of behaviors, beliefs and values.”[55] […]

Culture

Ideas of appropriate behavior according to gender vary among cultures and era, although some aspects receive more widespread attention than others. R.W. Connell in Men, Masculinities and Feminism[58] claims:

There are cultures where it has been normal, not exceptional, for men to have homosexual relations. There have been periods in ‘Western’ history when the modern convention that men suppress displays of emotion did not apply at all, when men were demonstrative about their feeling for their friends. Mateship in the Australian outback last century is a case in point.

There are huge areal differences in attitudes towards appropriate gender roles. In the World Values Survey, responders were asked if they thought that wage work should be restricted to only men in the case of shortage in jobs: in Iceland the proportion that agreed with the proposition was 3.6%; while in Egypt it was 94.9%.[59]

Attitudes have also varied historically, for example, in Europe, during the Middle Ages, women were commonly associated with roles related to medicine and healing.[60] Because of the rise of witch-hunts across Europe and the institutionalization of medicine, these roles became exclusively associated with men[60] but in the last few decades these roles have become largely gender-neutral in Western society.[61]

The myth that gender is binary is perpetuated by a flawed education system
by Jeremy Colangelo

Sex and gender are much more complex and nuanced than people have long believed. Defining sex as a binary treats it like a light switch: on or off. But it’s actually more similar to a dimmer switch, with many people sitting somewhere in between male and female genetically, physiologically, and/or mentally. To reflect this, scientists now describe sex as a spectrum.

The more we have learned about human genetics, the more complicated it has revealed itself to be. Because of this, the idea of binary gender has become less and less tenable. As Claire Ainsworth summarizes in an article for Nature, recent discoveries “have pointed to a complex process of sex determination, in which the identity of the gonad emerges from a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Changes in the activity … can tip the balance towards or away from the sex seemingly spelled out by the chromosomes.”

Sex redefined
by Claire Ainsworth

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2.

When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there’s much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can’t easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London’s Institute of Child Health.

These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person’s legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

“The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” says Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies biological sex differences. “And that’s often a very difficult problem, because sex can be defined a number of ways.”

How science is helping us understand gender
by Robin Marantz Henig

Many of us learned in high school biology that sex chromosomes determine a baby’s sex, full stop: XX means it’s a girl; XY means it’s a boy. But on occasion, XX and XY don’t tell the whole story.

Today we know that the various elements of what we consider “male” and “female” don’t always line up neatly, with all the XXs—complete with ovaries, vagina, estrogen, female gender identity, and feminine behavior—on one side and all the XYs—testes, penis, testosterone, male gender identity, and masculine behavior—on the other. It’s possible to be XX and mostly male in terms of anatomy, physiology, and psychology, just as it’s possible to be XY and mostly female.

Each embryo starts out with a pair of primitive organs, the proto-gonads, that develop into male or female gonads at about six to eight weeks. Sex differentiation is usually set in motion by a gene on the Y chromosome, the SRY gene, that makes the proto-gonads turn into testes. The testes then secrete testosterone and other male hormones (collectively called androgens), and the fetus develops a prostate, scrotum, and penis. Without the SRY gene, the proto-gonads become ovaries that secrete estrogen, and the fetus develops female anatomy (uterus, vagina, and clitoris).

But the SRY gene’s function isn’t always straightforward. The gene might be missing or dysfunctional, leading to an XY embryo that fails to develop male anatomy and is identified at birth as a girl. Or it might show up on the X chromosome, leading to an XX embryo that does develop male anatomy and is identified at birth as a boy.

Genetic variations can occur that are unrelated to the SRY gene, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), in which an XY embryo’s cells respond minimally, if at all, to the signals of male hormones. Even though the proto-gonads become testes and the fetus produces androgens, male genitals don’t develop. The baby looks female, with a clitoris and vagina, and in most cases will grow up feeling herself to be a girl.

Which is this baby, then? Is she the girl she believes herself to be? Or, because of her XY chromosomes—not to mention the testes in her abdomen—is she “really” male? […]

In terms of biology, some scientists think it might be traced to the syncopated pacing of fetal development. “Sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy,” wrote Dick Swaab, a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam, “and sexual differentiation of the brain starts during the second half of pregnancy.” Genitals and brains are thus subjected to different environments of “hormones, nutrients, medication, and other chemical substances,” several weeks apart in the womb, that affect sexual differentiation.

This doesn’t mean there’s such a thing as a “male” or “female” brain, exactly. But at least a few brain characteristics, such as density of the gray matter or size of the hypothalamus, do tend to differ between genders. It turns out transgender people’s brains may more closely resemble brains of their self-identified gender than those of the gender assigned at birth. In one study, for example, Swaab and his colleagues found that in one region of the brain, transgender women, like other women, have fewer cells associated with the regulator hormone somatostatin than men. In another study scientists from Spain conducted brain scans on transgender men and found that their white matter was neither typically male nor typically female, but somewhere in between.

These studies have several problems. They are often small, involving as few as half a dozen transgender individuals. And they sometimes include people who already have started taking hormones to transition to the opposite gender, meaning that observed brain differences might be the result of, rather than the explanation for, a subject’s transgender identity.

Still, one finding in transgender research has been robust: a connection between gender nonconformity and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). According to John Strang, a pediatric neuropsychologist with the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders and the Gender and Sexuality Development Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., children and adolescents on the autism spectrum are seven times more likely than other young people to be gender nonconforming. And, conversely, children and adolescents at gender clinics are six to 15 times more likely than other young people to have ASD.

* * *

Transgender history: Ancient History (Wikipedia)

Transgender History: Trans Expression in Ancient Times
by Mercedes Allen

52 Queer Gods Who Ruled Ancient History
by Jacob Ogles

Ancient Civilization in Iran Recognized Transgender People 3,000 Years Ago, Study Suggests
by Ariel David

A Womb by Magic – Transcending Gender, Transcending Realities
by Maria Kvilhaug

A Brief Biography of Elagabalus: the transgender ruler of Rome
by Alexis Mijatovic

A trans soldier in the ancient Roman army?
by Tom Sapsford

Were there Transgender People in the Middle Ages?
by Gabrielle Bychowski

Intersex in the Middle Ages
by Sandra Alvarez

Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America, 1620–1960
by Elizabeth Reis

Transgender Acceptance in Indigenous Cultures Worldwide

A Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures (PBS)

A Third Gender Identity Has Existed for Centuries
by Katie Moritz

The Third Gender in Native American Tribes (UCSB SexInfo)

A Third Gender Among Indigenous Peoples
by Doug George-Kanentiio

Two Spirits, One Heart, Five Genders
by Duane Brayboy

The ‘two-spirit’ people of indigenous North Americans
by Walter L. Williams

Native American tribes recognized a gender separate from male and female it was called – “Two-Spirits”. They weren’t seen as homosexual among their tribe
by Goran Blazeski

The Disappearance of the Two-Spirit Traditions in Canada
by Hamish Copley

Gender roles among the indigenous peoples of North America (Wikipedia)

Two-spirit (Wikipedia)

Koekchuch (Wikipedia)

Māhū (Wikipedia)

Mapuche (Wikipedia)

Muxe (Wikipedia)

Osh-Tisch (Wikipedia)

Hombres Mujeres: An Indigenous Third Gender
by Alfredo Mirandé

Colombia’s indigenous transgender women live freer lives working on coffee farms
by Kenneth Dickerman

The transcendent bissu
by Sharyn Graham Davies

A Brief History Of Hijra, India’s Third Gender
by Sridevi Nambiar

Why terms like ‘transgender’ don’t work for India’s ‘third-gender’ communities
by Max Bearak

The Splendor of Gender Non-Conformity In Africa
by Shanna Collins

Unspoken facts: a history of homosexualities in Africa
by Keletso Makofane

What is inheritance?

The original meaning of a gene was simply a heritable unit. This was long before the discovery of DNA. The theory was based on phenotype, i.e., observable characteristics. What they didn’t know and what still doesn’t often get acknowledged is that much gets inherited from parents, especially from the mother. This includes everything from epigenetics to microbiome, the former determining which genes express and how they express while the latter consists of the majority of genetics in the human body. The fetus will also inherit health conditions from the mother, such as malnutrition and stress, viruses and parasites — all of those surely having epigenetic effects and microbiome changes that could get passed on for generations.

Even more interestingly, DNA itself gets passed on in diverse ways. Viruses will snip out sections of DNA and then put them into the DNA of new hosts. Mothers, including surrogate mothers, can gain DNA from the fetuses they carry. And then those mothers can pass that DNA to any fetus she carries after that, which could cause a fetus to have DNA from two fathers. Fetuses can also absorb the DNA from fraternal twins or even entirely absorb the other fetus, forming what is called a chimera. Bone marrow transplantees also become chimeras because they inherit the stem cells for blood cells from the donor, along with inheriting epigentics from the donor. These chimeras could pass this on during a transplantee’s pregnancy.

We hardly know what all that might mean. There is no single heritable unit that by itself does anything. That is not the direct source of causation. A gene only acts as part of DNA within a specific cell and all of that within the entire biological system existing within specific environmental conditions. The most important causal factors are various. What is in DNA only matters to the degree it is expressed, but what determines its expression will also determine how it expresses. Evelyn Keller Fox writes that, “the causal interactions between DNA, proteins, and trait development are so entangled, so dynamic, and so dependent on context that the very question of what genes do no longer makes much sense. Indeed, biologists are no longer confident that it is possible to provide an unambiguous answer to the question of what a gene is. The particulate gene is a concept that has become increasingly ambiguous and unstable, and some scientists have begun to argue that the concept has outlived its productive prime” (The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture, p. 50). Gene expression as seen in phenotype is determined by a complex system of overlapping factors. Talk of genes doesn’t help us much, if at all. And heritability rates tells us absolutely nothing about the details, such as distinguishing what exactly is a gene as a heritable unit and causal factor, much less differentiating that from everything else. As Fox further explains:

“It is true that many authors continue to refer to genes, but I suspect that this is largely due to the lack of a better terminology. In any case, continuing reference to “genes” does not obscure the fact that the early notion of clearly identifiable, particulate units of inheritance— which not only can be associated with particular traits, but also serve as agents whose actions produce those traits— has become hopelessly confounded by what we have learned about the intricacies of genetic processes. Furthermore, recent experimental focus has shifted away from the structural composition of DNA to the variety of sequences on DNA that can be made available for (or blocked from) transcription— in other words, the focus is now on gene expression. Finally, and relatedly, it has become evident that nucleotide sequences are used not only to provide transcripts for protein synthesis, but also for multilevel systems of regulation at the level of transcription, translation, and posttranslational dynamics. None of this need impede our ability to correlate differences in sequence with phenotypic differences, but it does give us a picture of such an immensely complex causal dynamic between DNA, RNA, and protein molecules as to definitely put to rest all hopes of a simple parsing of causal factors. Because of this, today’s biologists are far less likely than their predecessors were to attribute causal agency either to genes or to DNA itself— recognizing that, however crucial the role of DNA in development and evolution, by itself, DNA doesn’t do anything. It does not make a trait; it does not even encode a program for development. Rather, it is more accurate to think of DNA as a standing resource on which a cell can draw for survival and reproduction, a resource it can deploy in many different ways, a resource so rich as to enable the cell to respond to its changing environment with immense subtlety and variety. As a resource, DNA is indispensable; it can even be said to be a primary resource. But a cell’s DNA is always and necessarily embedded in an immensely complex and entangled system of interacting resources that are, collectively, what give rise to the development of traits. Not surprisingly, the causal dynamics of the process by which development unfolds are also complex and entangled, involving causal influences that extend upward, downward, and sideways.” (pp. 50-52)

Even something seemingly as simple as gender is far from simple. Claire Ainsworth has a fascinating piece, Sex redefined (nature.com), where she describes the new understanding that has developed. She writes that, “Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl.”

This isn’t all that rare considering that, “Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD.” And, “What’s more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. Gender should be one of the most obvious areas to prove genetic determinism, if it could be proven. But clearly there is more going on here. The inheritance and expression of traits is a messy process. And we are barely scratching the surface. I haven’t seen any research that explores how epigenetics, microbiome, etc could influence gender or similar developmental results.

Clusters and Confluences

A favorite topic in my family is the personality differences, psychological issues, behavioral traits, and other idiosyncracies among family members. In the immediate family and on both sides of the extended family, there are patterns that can be seen. Some of this might be genetic in origin, but no doubt there is much involving epigenetics, shared environmental conditions, parenting style, learned behavior, etc. Besides, nature and nurture are inseparable, in terms of actual people in the real world.

One example of a familial pattern is learning disabilities. I was diagnosed with learning disabilities when younger, but before my generation such diagnoses weren’t common. There appears to be some learning disabilities or rather learning style differences among some of my mother’s family. Another example is a dislike of physicality that was passed down from my paternal grandmother to my father and then to my older brother.

That latter one is interesting. My older brother has always been physically sensitive, like my dad. This to some extent goes along with an emotional sensitivity and, at least in the case of my brother, the physical sensitivity of allergies. His daughter has also taken on these psychological and physiological traits. All of these family members also have a hypersensitivity to social conditions, specifically in seeking positive responses from others.

I, on the other hand, have had an opposite cluster of factors. I was socially oblivious as a child and still maintain some degree of social indifference as an adult. My psychological and social insensitivity, although compensated for in other ways, goes hand in hand with a physical hardiness.

Unlike my paternal grandmother, father, brother, and niece, I am big-boned and more physical like my mother’s family. I even look more like my mother’s family with thicker hair, big feet, a bump on my nose, an underbite, and hazel eyes. About my physicality, it goes beyond just my body type, features, and activity level. I have such a high pain tolerance that I commonly don’t notice when I get a cut. I also don’t worry about cuts when I get them because I’m not prone to infections. I’ve always had a strong immune system and rarely get sick, but neither do I have an over-active immune system that leads to allergies.

All of this is the opposite of my older brother. He and his family are constantly getting sick, even as they constantly worry about germs and try to protect themselves. I played in filthy creeks as a child with exposed cuts and was far healthier than my cleanliness-obsessed brother who, when younger, panicked if his new shoes got scuffed.

It’s strange how these kinds of things tend to group together. It indicates a possible common cause or set of causes. That would likely be some particular combination of nature and nurture. I not only take more after my mother’s family for I also spent more time with my mother as a child than did my brothers, since she took time off from work when I was born (I was the third and last child, although fourth pregnancy following a miscarriage). My brothers didn’t get the same opportunity. So, I was also more likely to pick up behaviors from her. Between my brothers and I, only I am able to relate well with my mother. In particular, my older brother’s sensitivity is in constant conflict with my mother’s insensitivity. But I’m used to my mother’s way of relating, allowing me to better understand and sympathize, not to mention be more forgiving, partly because I share some of her tendencies.

Why is one kind of high sensitivity often related to other high sensitivities: emotional, social, pain, immune system, allergies, etc? And why is the opposite pattern seen with low sensitivities? What causes these clustered differences? And how can two such distinct clusters be found among siblings, sometimes even identical twins, who shared many factors?

It makes me curious.

It’s not just conditions like allergies and intolerances. There are similar clusters of neurocognitive, behavioral, and health conditions observed in various immune system disorders, the autism spectrum, fragile x syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome and other nutritional/dietary/intestinal issues, migraines, ADHD, toxoplasmosis and parasite load, heavy metal toxicity such as lead and mercury, etc. When there is one abnormal symptom or developmental issue, there are often others that show up at the same time or later on. This can involve such things as depression, anxiety, IQ, learning disabilities, irritability, impulse control issues, emotional instability, suicidal tendencies, accident proneness, etc along with more basic issues like asthma, diabetes, obesity, and much else.

In some cases, such as lead toxicity, the causal mechanisms are known as the toxin impacts every part of the body, especially the brain and nervous system. Or consider toxoplasmosis which apparently can alter the rates of personality traits in a population, along with differences in health consequences and social results, whatever is the exact chain of causation. But sometimes the correlations are far less clear and certain in their causal relationship. For example, what is the possible connection(s) between depressive tendencies, anger issues, addictive behaviors, learning difficulties, and physical hardiness among my maternal family?

There was a particular conversation that inspired this line of thought. My parents and I were discussing many of the above issues. But a major focus was on sleep patterns. My brother, like my dad, has a difficulty getting up and moving in the morning. They both tend to feel groggy when first waking up and prefer to remain physically inactive for a long period after. They also both find it hard to fall asleep and, in the case of my dad, a problem of waking up in the middle of the night. My mom and I, however, don’t have any of these issues. We fall asleep easily, typically stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up quickly. So, the difference between sensitivity and insensitivity impacts every aspect of life, even sleeping and waking.

Oftentimes, in our society, we blame individuals for the way they are. We act like people have a choice about how they feel and what motivates them. But it’s not as if because of moral superiority and strength of will that I’ve chosen to sleep well, have a strong immune system, feel physically energetic, and generally be insensitive. No more than I chose to have a learning disability and severe depression. It’s simply the way I’ve always been.

There is obviously much more going on here than mere genetics. And so genetic determinism is intellectually unsatisfying, even as some might find it personally convenient as a way of rationalizing differences. We have too much data proving environmental and epigenetic causes. A recent study could only find a few percentage of genes correlated to intelligence and, even then, they couldn’t prove a causal connection. The same thing is seen with so much other correlation research. The way various clusters form, as I argue, implies a complex web of factors that as of yet we don’t come close to understanding.

One intriguing connection that has been found is that between the brain and the gut. There are more neurons in the lining of the gastrointestinal system (the enteric nervous system) than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system. This is often called the “second brain,” but in evolutionary terms it was the earliest part of the brain. This is why there has been proven such a close relationship between intestinal health, diet, nutrition, microbiome, neurotransmitters, and mood. The human brain isn’t limited to the skull. The importance of this is demonstrated by introducing a new microbiome into the gut which can lead to physiological and pyschological changes.

Much else, however, remains a mystery. Seemingly minor changes in initial conditions, even epigenetic changes from prior generations, can lead to major changes in results. There can be a cascade of effects that follow. As I’ve previously stated, “This is because of the cumulative effect of initial conditions. One thing leads to another. Lowered nutrition or increased toxicity has its impact which gets magnified by such things as school tracking. Each effect becoming a cause and all the causal factors combining to form significant differences in end results.”

Later conditions can either lessen or exacerbate these results. Even epigenetics, by way of altered environmental conditions, can be switched back the opposite direction in a single generation with results that we know little about. Now consider the complexity of reality where there are millions of factors involved, with only a tiny fraction of those factors having been discovered and studied in scientific research. Those multitudinous factors act in combined ways that couldn’t be predicted by any single factor. All of this has to be kept in mind at the very moment in history when humans are ignorantly and carelessly throwing in further factors with unknown consequences such as the diversity of largely untested chemicals in our food and other products, not to mention large-scale environmental changes.

We don’t live at a society ruled by the precautionary principle. Instead, our collective ignorance makes us even more brazen in our actions and more indifferent to the results. The measured increase in certain physical and mental health conditions could be partly just an increase in diagnosis, but it’s more probable that at least some of the increase is actual. We are progressing in some ways as a society such as seen with the Moral Flynn Effect, but this is balanced by an Amoral Flynn Effect along with many other unintended consequences.

Along with this, our society has a lack of appreciation for the larger context such as historical legacies and a lack of respect for the power of larger forces such as environmental conditions. We are born into a world created by others, each generation forming a new layer upon the ground below. We are facing some tough issues here. And we aren’t prepared to deal with them.

As individuals, the consequences are laid upon our shoulders, without our realizing all that we have inherited and have had externalized onto our lives, as we grow up internalizing these realities and coming to identify with them. Each of us does the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt, but in the process we get more praise and blame than we deserve. The individual, as the product of collective forces, is the ultimate scapegoat of society. The lives we find ourselves in are a confluence of currents and undercurrents, the interference pattern of waves. Yet, in our shared ignorance and incomprehension, we are simply who we are.

* * * *

The Ending of the Nature vs Nurture Debate
Heritability & Inheritance, Genetics & Epigenetics, Etc
What Genetics Does And Doesn’t Tell Us
Weak Evidence, Weak Argument: Race, IQ, Adoption
Identically Different: A Scientist Changes His Mind
What do we inherit? And from whom?
To Put the Rat Back in the Rat Park
Rationalizing the Rat Race, Imagining the Rat Park
Social Conditions of an Individual’s Condition
On Welfare: Poverty, Unemployment, Health, Etc
From Bad to Worse: Trends Across Generations
The Desperate Acting Desperately
It’s All Your Fault, You Fat Loser!
Facing Shared Trauma and Seeking Hope
Society: Precarious or Persistent?
Plowing the Furrows of the Mind
Union Membership, Free Labor, and the Legacy of Slavery.
Uncomfortable Questions About Ideology