In Defense of Nature
Popular question: How much of human behavior is explained by biology (“nature”) and how much is due to upbringing/culture/environment (“nurture”)?
Popular answer: “Everything interesting is due to nurture! Biology tells us almost nothing of any import about human behavior. In particular, none or almost none of the variation in behavioral traits among humans has anything to do with genes, or hormones, or anything crudely biological like that.”
I’ve been running into that answer repeatedly among American (left-wing) intellectuals for decades. It’s typically embraced without question, and also without any justification, as though it were a self-evident axiom. I shall label this position “cultural determinism”. By contrast, by the way, I don’t believe I have ever met a biological determinist – no one I know of claims that culture plays no interesting role in explaining human behavior and that everything interesting is due to biology. (I have, however, seen people misdescribed as biological determinists.)
Cultural determinism is indefensible. There is no evidence for it and there is obvious and compelling evidence against it. I can’t explain that comprehensively for all dimensions of behavior here, though. So I’m just going to discuss one example, based on an earlier post: how we explain violent crime.
Example: Explaining Violence
Men commit 96% of homicides worldwide – over 20 times more than women. They’re also 79% of the murder victims. Why is that?
Answer #1: Males are genetically predisposed toward higher aggression, perhaps as an effect of higher testosterone levels in the blood, or perhaps some other biological mechanism. The reason for this lies in our evolutionary past, during which men often attacked neighboring tribes, killed the foreign men, and kidnaped the women. The men who did this left behind more offspring than those who remained peaceful. See: “Why Humans Fight”, https://fakenous.net/?p=2207.
Notes: Obviously, this doesn’t mean that your genes compel you to commit violence, or that there are no other causal factors. But the biological explanation is the main explanation for the sex disparity.
Answer #2: Society teaches men to be aggressive.
Answer #2 is the cultural determinist’s theory. As far as I can tell, that is the whole theory. Now I’m going to explain why answer #1 is obviously superior.
Why the Biological Explanation Is Better
Burden of proof?
In my experience, this is how cultural determinists reason: They start by assuming cultural determinism, then challenge you to disprove it. In examining your arguments, they apply near-Cartesian standards of proof, so that it’s nearly impossible to count as proving anything. As long as there remains any conceivable way that the target phenomenon could be a cultural product, the cultural determinist feels vindicated.
The problem is that there is no reason to start by assuming a cultural explanation. It's an arbitrary dogma. A reasonable starting point would be to treat cultural and biological explanations as on a par. From there, you’re going to notice several ways in which the biological explanation in this case is superior . . .
Depth of explanation
The cultural explanations I’ve heard tend to be extremely shallow. In the present case, they would posit as a brute fact that society teaches men to be aggressive. There’s no explanation for why society does that; it doesn’t fall out of any deeper theoretical framework for understanding cultures, and one could just as plausibly have posited that society teaches men to be passive, if that was what we observed.
The biological explanation is not like that. It does not just say “biology makes men aggressive” as a brute fact. Rather, there is a logical explanation for why biology is like that. As I explained in my earlier post, the selective pressure for male aggression naturally falls out of a larger theory that we independently know to be generally true -- the theory of evolution -- given undisputed general facts about males and females.
Constraint
Closely connected to the previous point is the fact that cultural “explanations” are almost entirely unconstrained – no matter what behavior we see, we can always say, “society taught people to do that.”
This may not always be plausible – e.g., because maybe we don’t clearly observe society teaching people to do the thing in question. But the cultural determinists will say it anyway, as in the present case. E.g., even if we observe many cases of boys being explicitly told not to hit other children, etc., the cultural determinists can always come up with ways in which society is somehow more subtly, implicitly conveying the message that boys are supposed to be aggressive. There is an almost unlimited range to the implicit ‘messages’ that one can attribute to ‘society’, so for pretty much any behavior, you can find some way in which something about our society might support it.
In a pinch, you can always appeal to widespread portrayals of men as more aggressive in the news and in fictional stories. Since any robust pattern of behavior is going to be noticed by people, you can count on there being many media portrayals of that behavior pattern simply because it exists. You can always then claim that those very portrayals are the cause of the behavior pattern.
By contrast, the biological theory is tightly constrained: once you understand the explanation, you see that it only works to explain greater aggression in males. One could not adjust the theory to accommodate any other behavior pattern. This is ultimately because the explanation is rooted in the fact that women can reproduce a maximum of once per 9 months, whereas men have a much larger possible range of reproductive success. From there, following evolutionary logic, we can only support a prediction of greater aggression for men.
Cross-cultural phenomena
The pattern of male aggression is seen across cultures and throughout history. How does the cultural determinist theory explain this? Since it just posits a brute fact that “society socializes males to be aggressive”, it could only say that this is a giant coincidence.
The biological theory explains the phenomenon – the evolutionary logic that made men more aggressive applied regardless of one’s culture.
Cross-species phenomena
Even harder for cultural determinists to explain is why we see the same pattern in other species. Have a look at these creatures:
Anyone care to guess what sex all those animals are?
I presume no one is going to say that deer, lion, seal, and monkey cultures "socialize their males to be more aggressive". I assume everyone knows that it’s biology in the case of those animals. Now, if you see the same behavior pattern among humans, what would make you think that it’s a completely different phenomenon in our case? We were not specially created by God; we evolved from other animals. Are we supposed to believe that at some time in our evolutionary history, the genes producing greater male aggression were selected out, and then replaced with cultural mechanisms that happen to produce the same behavior pattern?
Other details
We also see variation in aggression across age groups:
The probability of committing a murder starts to spike in puberty for males, peaks in one’s early 20’s, then declines with age. (The probability for females remains low throughout, though still highest in one’s 20’s.) Coincidentally, testosterone levels start to spike during puberty for males, reaching their peak in your 20’s, then they decline with age, starting at about the same time that the murder rate starts to decline. (Though the murder rate declines much faster than the testosterone levels decline.)
Notice how the cultural determinist theory has nothing to say about this. What are they going to say – society teaches males to be most aggressive in their 20’s, but to become less aggressive as they age, while still remaining more aggressive than women the whole time?
Studies of the connection between testosterone and aggression are mixed: some studies find no connection, while others find a link between testosterone levels and aggression. E.g.:
Injecting animals with testosterone results in greater aggression (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0031938495022465).
Serial killers are more likely to have extremely high levels of testosterone (https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201803/do-all-serial-killers-have-genetic-predisposition-kill).
Testosterone levels in men vary in ways predicted by the evolutionary psychology account of male aggression (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763405000102).
We don’t get anything like this kind of empirical support with the cultural theory.
Why Do People Believe Cultural Determinism?
In the interests of brevity, I’ve just discussed one issue – violence by men versus women. But there are similar cultural “explanations” of nearly all other behavior patterns that we observe. For those on the left, it’s a point of ideology to claim that anything that could possibly be cultural is cultural.
But why? From the beginning, this always struck me as an odd article of faith to start with. I know of one explanation: left-leaning people want to say that human nature is plastic, so that they can propose improving it, so that, e.g., socialism will work. But if there are biological explanations for some large features of human psychology, then it will probably be difficult or impossible to change those features. Therefore, let’s say that there aren’t any biological explanations for any large features of human psychology.
When I first heard this explanation, I couldn't believe that people thought that way, because it’s so obviously irrational. But eventually, I guess, I’ve come to accept that this is really how people think. So I can only point out that, obviously, the fact that we want to be able to do something is not a reason for believing that we can do it. It’s like (to borrow an example from David Friedman) thinking that if you don’t want it to rain, you shouldn’t bring an umbrella.
The biological basis for male aggression is bad news, since it means that aggression will probably be harder to combat than it would otherwise be. But our best hope for reducing it is to start by recognizing the actual facts about it. Then we can work around the facts. Obviously, even high-T males don’t automatically engage in violence. If we start by understanding why violence happens, we have a better chance of figuring out how to make less of it happen.
This case, by the way, is similar to the situation with the more general trait of human selfishness: we wish people were more altruistic, but that’s no reason for closing our eyes to the reality of human selfishness. If we want to design a social system in which people benefit rather than harm each other, our best bet is to start by recognizing how selfish people actually are, and understanding why they are that way.