It's odd. Even though most people don't understand computers (how
many people don't get the difference between RAM and disk space?),
they seem to have absorbed the hardware vs. software distinction, and
they apply it to "nature vs. nurture" all the time. Perhaps, though,
that's because it mirrors (a) religious descriptions of the world and
(b) Descartes' Error -- which mirrors (a) anyway.
Descartes' Error is the term used by materialist (or monist)
philosophers to describe Cartesian Dualism -- the idea that Mind and
Body are separate things, made of separate substances. More on this
in a bit.
Animals (and it's amazing how many people don't understand or believe
that we're animals) don't have hardware and software (or Body and
Soul, as most European religious traditions -- and Descartes -- would
have it). Instead, we have what the cyberpunks of the early 1980s
called "wetware". I'd rather call it "meatware" -- that has the added
benefit of pissing off PETA.
Meatware is not like hardware and software: when you unplug a
computer, hardware stays the same (except for transient voltages), and
software just fades away (going back to being unactualized ones and
zeroes on the disk, or disappearing entirely if there's no copy on
disk). In contrast, if you "unplug" meatware, it just rots.
Meatware is hardware that changes, embodying the software in its very
being. Ironically, this is a lot like some of the original computers,
which were hand-wired to program them; the programs were not separate
from hardware at that point. It was a conceptual great leap forward
to separate hardware from software (see punch cards, Jacquard looms,
etc.), but it definitely also meant that Descartes was right -- but
about computers, if not human brains.
Discursive aside: I am a materialist. Not in the sense of liking to
acquire worldly goods (though I'm pretty happy to do that too), but in
the sense that I believe there is one kind of Stuff in the Universe:
Stuff. Matter and energy (which are both Stuff). There may also be
Dark Matter (which might be anything from supersymmetric
partner particles to other exotic stuff we haven't figured out
yet) and possibly Dark Energy (which could also be a supersymmetric
partner particle, or might just be the Cosmological Constant), but
it's all Stuff. It's not Souls. There is no Soul-stuff, separate
from Matter-stuff. That's the point of philosophical materialism.
Descartes' Error is believing that there is Soul-stuff separate from
Matter-stuff. It can be easily demonstrated to be an error, like
this: Soul stuff either affects Matter, or it doesn't. If it does
not affect matter, it has to be entirely separate, and then Soul just
becomes some metaphysical attribute that cannot be talked about in any
empirical way, because it cannot affect or interact with Matter. If
Soul does interact with Matter, it's just another kind of
Matter, and is in the realm of empirical science.
Discursive aside to the discursive aside: this does not mean that I
believe that morality (or ethics, or whatever) comes down to physics.
I simply don't, and anyone who makes the claim that philosophical
materialists are undermining morality because we deny the "Stuff-ness"
of Soul or Spirit is simply talking trash. Just as Chemistry deals
with a regime of behavior of Matter that fundamental Physics doesn't,
and Biology another regime of Matter Behavior, I believe that
philosophy, law, politics, morals, ethics, and other ways of
describing the world that deal with Human Behavior in Relation to
Other Humans are disciplines that deal with Matter Behaving in yet
another regime.
So: "nature vs. nurture": it's not just brains. It's the entire
life of each organism, from DNA up to the organism level, including
all its interactions with the physical world, including other
organisms.
What any organism is now, at this instant, is a deeply
historical integration of many many things: its genes have been
interacting with its environment for its entire life. Its environment
may have included being incubated in its mother's body (if it's a
mammal, for instance) and being washed in hormones from itself and its
mother (and potentially from siblings from the same litter) for the
period of its gestation. There is diet (or soil fertility and rain
for plants). There is exercise (for animals). There's stress level.
There are accidental things: cosmic rays, viral damage, physical
damage. And so on.
ALL of these contribute. All of these affect the others. Genes are
turned on or off: genes activate and deactivate depending on
environment, and the rates at which they are activated and deactivated
change depending on environment. Animals have equisitely complex
systems for adapting to their environment. Everything
interacts.
Are the Pima Indians who live in Texas and eat American fast food, and
many of whom are hugely obese, "naturally" fat? Their cousins in
Mexico, who eat a basically Aztec diet, are skinny. Are they
"naturally" skinny? Or is it all "nurture", and diet? Well, some
people eat lots of fast food and don't gain weight.
Is Yao Ming "naturally" 7'5" tall? Might he have been taller with a
different diet? He certainly could have been shorter with less
protein at the right times in his life.
Lots of people (including me before I started to learn about it)
think that genes are like a computer program -- a batch
computer program, that runs once, straight through to completion, and
then is done, like following a blueprint and then your building is
built. It turns out genes are a lot more like computer programs than
we guessed -- like modern computer programs that interact with the
world: operating systems, or phone switches, or complicated databases.
The code is constantly running, but different parts are active at
different times. Genes are turned on and off, or have their activity
modulated, based on what's going on in the cell. Hormones influence
gene activity. Levels of proteins influence gene activity. Other
genes' activity influences gene activity. It's bloody complex, and
it's going on all the time. There's no "completion" of the genetic
program. There's no done.
Like many other things in the world, the false dichotomy of "nature"
vs. "nurture" is bogus, because the world is a system -- a
complex, interlocking, feeding-back system that doesn't have
neat boundaries. Deal with it.
Anyone who says "nature vs. nurture", and believes it, is sadly
deluded.
Here endeth the rant.
Edited to add: go read Pharyngula today for a neat take on genes and development.
