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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:32
Genes, Nature, Nurture and The Freedom of Self-Knowledge (HD)
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Rolene from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well. This is going to be a lengthy chat, so get comfortable if such as you want, and I will attempt to pepper spray the villains of your mind with facts and evidence.
So, twin studies and nature versus nurture is a very, very powerful and fascinating debate that's been going on for a long time, of course, throughout history.
It has hit some significant juice from the nature side versus the nurture side, Stephen Pinker's book and The Blank Slate and other books that have come out.
So, I would like to point out, again, this epigenetics thing is really important to understand, the degree to which genes and environment interact with each other.
So, of course, twin studies are considered to be very important, but twin studies, kind of tricky, kind of tricky to cite for the nurture side, for a couple of reasons.
Twin studies almost always specifically exclude the victims of child abuse.
There's a number of reasons for that.
In particular, it is because they want to be able to do follow-up studies and child abuse victims may be taken from their families and thus not available for follow-up studies down the road.
So that's sort of kind of important.
My argument is that if we were to significantly diminish or eliminate child abuse, then we will end up with a free society, an egalitarian society, a society without the delusions of religion or the political violence of statism.
And twin studies can't be used to refute that because they exclude child abuse.
So if I say the causal factor in statism and religiosity is child abuse and people say, well, twin studies refute that, but if twin studies exclude child abuse, then it doesn't really, you know, it's a swing and a miss, as they say in certain circles.
So that's really important to understand.
The second thing, of course, is that twin studies are also biased by the fact that people who are accepted into adopted families, those adopted families go through significant scrutiny to eliminate drug addictions, criminality, violence, and so on.
And so you're looking for the stable middle-class professional households to have kids adopted into.
So this also is not exactly a self-selecting group.
Thirdly, of course, Families that get involved in psychological studies are self-selected.
A call is put out and people are paid or not paid, but they're voluntarily coming to the program.
And people who are harming or mistreating their children are very unlikely to want to have psychologists come around, sniffing around their parenting practices and the outcome of their children.
So again, you have significant...
Bias in the selection.
Even some of the questions that are out there in these twin studies require significant degrees of literacy, so that's kind of important as well.
And of course, studies say that between 20% and 70% of identical twins do not share any kind of significant similarities.
Here's some other examples of epigenetics at work.
So did you know that when you look at turtle and crocodile eggs, and who doesn't, when you look at turtle and crocodile eggs, you will find, if you watch them hatch and measure the temperature, that the gender of the turtles and the crocodiles is determined by the temperature surrounding the eggs.
So even gender.
Oh, gender is genetic. No, no, no.
In this particular instance, and in other instances as well, gender is determined by environment.
And I'll put the notes for this below.
So young yellow-skinned grasshoppers become permanently black-skinned for camouflage if exposed to a blackened or burnt environment at a certain age.
Again, this is a permanent genetic change that is a response to an immediate environment.
Locusts living in a crowded environment become Schwarzenegger-style superlocusts.
They develop vastly more musculature, which is suitable for migration, than locusts living in less crowded conditions.
The genes for musculature are turned on.
Musculature develops which wouldn't otherwise.
And that's based entirely upon the environment.
As far as, you know, let's step into the human realm for a moment.
So this psychologist named Ella McGuire discovered in 1999, she did brain scans of London cab or taxi drivers.
Of course, London is, you know, like the streets are laid out like a map of your lower intestine after being shot through with a shell and glancing at it while you're on LSD on a significantly tilting ship.
It's convoluted, like that sentence.
That's really what I'm trying to say. And she found that...
The taxi drivers had greatly enlarged posterior hippocampus aspects of their brain, parts of their brain.
And this deals with recalling spatial representations.
And, of course, the result of – well, the argument against that, you know, correlation is not causality argument, is to say, well, okay, but those cab drivers who have larger – Posterior hippocampus sections are more likely to be cab drivers and so on.
But this was not really the case because what they did was they found that the longer you had been a cab driver, the larger the section for spatial reasoning within the brain became.
So, again, this is just something to notice that the brain develops in response to choices within the environment.
So, let's look at...
This is from 1932.
So these two psychologists discovered that IQ scores correlated inversely with a community's degree of isolation.
The higher the cultural isolation, the lower the scores.
So in the remote hollow of Colvin, Virginia, where most adults are illiterate and access to newspapers, radio, schools, and so on, severely limited...
The six-year-olds in this particular isolated community scored closer than the national average in IQ when they were six.
But as the kids got older, their IQ scores drifted lower and lower.
They fell further and further behind the national average due to inadequate schooling and acculturation.
And there's canal boat children in England and other isolated cultural pockets.
The same phenomenon has all been figured out.
Even IQ, which for many people, and I remember reading Losing Ground by Charles Murray many years ago, IQ is considered to be some genetic bedrock for the personality, but it is a response.
Intelligence is a response to the stimulation of the environment.
Something I talked about on this show, Many years ago, children develop as the environment demands development.
I talked about the Flynn effect many years ago on this show, and using a late 20th century average score of 100, around 1900, people had an IQ of about 60.
And it is an absurd conclusion, but health holds up statistically that the majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded compared to current situations.
That's because there's increased stimulation of children and less trauma and, to some degree, improved parenting.
What about language skills?
Ah, class, class, class.
Class, say the Marxists, is the result of impersonal economic forces.
What nonsense.
So, children in the homes of professionals were exposed to an average of more than 1,500 more spoken words per hour than children in welfare homes.
1,500 more spoken words per hour and words of greater density and complexity and abstraction.
So over one year, this amounts to a difference of nearly 8 million words, which by age 4 amounted to a total gap of 32 million words that the children in welfare homes had heard less of than the children of professional homes.
They also found substantial gap in tone and complexity of the words being used.
So that's quite important.
The number of words the child hears is not going to have some effect on language development and intelligence and verbal abilities and all that kind of stuff.
Well, of course. And let's look at self-esteem or positive self-image.
Very, very important to success, to sustaining the slings and arrows of outrageous objections.
So in the first four years after birth, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback.
Let's say that again. From 0 to 4, the average child from a professional family receives 560,000 more instances of encouraging feedback than discouraging feedback.
Language builds the brain.
Language and emotional interaction.
A working class child receives merely 100,000 more encouragements than discouragements.
A welfare child receives 125,000 more discouragements than encouragements.
Because the welfare state is so good and necessary.
More about the twin studies.
Susan Farber, in her 1981 book, Identical Twins Reared Apart, reviewed 121 cases of twins described by researchers as separated at birth or reared apart.
Only three of those pairs had actually been separated at birth, less than 3%.
The average age of the separated twins studied at the University of Minnesota turned out to be 40, while their average year spent apart was 30.
So, 10 years worth of contact is prior to their research interviews.
So, a quarter of their lives have been spent in contact and then these are considered to be twins reared apart.
Well, nonsense. So, this is really, I'm making the case for environment as the key to who we are and how we become.
Now, let's deal with the problem right up front of turtles all the way down.
Mmm, I love turtles.
This is the problem of infinite regression.
So, this is what people say.
Okay. My mother hit me and that is bad, but of course her mother hit her and her mother hit her and her father hit her and so on, right?
So it's just like a rock rolling down a hill.
It is just the inevitable reproduction of these things.
Okay, well, there are two objections to that, both of which, of course, are just philosophical, which is my only even remote area of expertise.
The first objection to that is that If we have a society...
That removes the moral responsibility of parents because their parents were abused as children, then we should not use moral blame against children.
So if your mother is abusive towards you, just to pick a gender, if your mother is abusive towards you and she uses moral responsibility as part of her abuse, you're bad, you're naughty, you're irresponsible, you're hurtful, you're selfish, you're lazy, these are all moral judgments.
So somebody can't use moral judgments as a form of abuse and then say that they themselves are excluded from a moral judgment.
We just can't do it.
If you use moral judgments, then you are subject to moral judgments.
And that is the first thing.
The second thing, of course, is let's say that it's perfectly valid that adults are not responsible for the harm they cause to their children because The adults themselves were harmed as children and so on.
Okay, let's accept that as completely responsible.
Ah! Here is the rub, says the thinker.
The rub is that if we exclude adults from moral responsibility, then we clearly have to immediately shift our focus to children and exclude them infinitely more from moral responsibility or causal responsibility, right?
So, think of the...
This is the adult, right?
This is my right hand on your left.
This is the adult. This is the children's.
If we move... The adult moral responsibility down 10%, the children goes down like 90%, right?
Because adults are much more independent than children, they have choices, they have economic freedom to a large degree, they are no longer subject to their own parents directly, and they have all the liberties that children don't have, just by the nature of Children's helplessness and dependence.
So anytime we shift the moral up and down spectrum for adults, particularly when we reduce it, we significantly, much in many, many more ways, reduce it for children.
So if we say, okay, adults are not responsible for hitting kids because they were hit as children, fine, okay, fantastic.
Then we have to put that aside and we have to focus on the children and say, okay, we've got a fundamental problem because we pass and fail children in school.
But if adults are not responsible for child abuse, then children sure as heck aren't responsible for studying for tests.
I mean, which is more important? Hurting a child or studying for a test?
Which is more morally significant?
The moment that we reduce or eliminate moral responsibility for adults, we must immediately reduce or eliminate it infinitely more so for children and restructure our entire society so that children can't fail, so that children can't be bossed around, so that children are not responsible for their own behavior.
If, on the other hand, which tends to be the common phenomenon, if, on the other hand, We say, well, you see, we're going to reduce or eliminate the moral responsibility for parents, but we're going to maintain these very high moral standards for children.
Well, that's just bullshit abuse that's being heaped on the children.
That is an abusive tactic and unworthy of any reasonably civilized human being.
So if you're not willing to get rid of grades and exams and tests and passes and fails and winners and losers for children Then you can't let the parents off the hook of course This is also true interestingly enough of ADHD studies that they exclude abuse victims They're also self-reporting and all this kind of stuff so the argument That Kaplan and Pinker make.
Basically, children are very little affected by parenting.
That who you are or how you behave as a parent has very little effect on how your children turn out.
Masses of studies contradict this completely.
But people will come to me, and I'll just speak about my personal experience here.
I can take on these great thinkers another time.
Well, Steph, you're just wrong.
You're just wrong about the role that parents or society or environment plays in the raising of children.
That children are largely unaffected by their parents.
Okay, but this is what I take from the Socratic commandment, know thyself.
So, so, so important.
People without self-knowledge are completely boring to debate with because they do not have the fluidity of intelligence that self-knowledge provides to reasonably examine their own premises, the premises embedded in their debate, and actually intelligently approach the subject.
I mean, debating somebody who lacks self-knowledge is like punching a robot which only has one move.
It's like pretending you're boxing. It's not.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's embarrassing. So know thyself is, to me, philosophically what it means is obviously know your own motives for getting involved in the debate, right?
So if I put out the idea that parenting is the root cause of society and socialills and the potential cause of social benefits, and you get upset and incensed to the point where you sit down and write blogs and send me emails and posts and this and that and the other, great.
At least you have to know why you're doing it.
Are your motivations honorable?
Are your motivations honorable?
If your motivations are honourable, fantastic.
Yay! Let's have a conversation.
If they're not honourable, then I'm not going to pretend we're having a debate about the subject, because what we're having a debate about is your emotional reaction, your immaturity, your defensiveness.
And let's not pretend it's about the facts.
Let's accept that it's about some emotional reaction rather than the facts.
That's very important.
But know thyself.
It doesn't just mean know your own motivations for getting involved in a debate.
It also means know what the hell you're doing when you get involved in a debate.
So I'll give you an example. If somebody says to me that parental behavior doesn't affect children very much, and they want me to change my mind about that, that's because they want me to change my behavior.
You understand? You see where I'm going with this, right?
So somebody who says to me, Parents don't affect children.
Wants me to accept their argument and as a result repudiate my, I think more than beliefs, repudiate the reason and evidence that I've accumulated that parents have massive influences on children.
They want me to accept their belief and change my behavior.
They're attempting to rewire my brain with arguments.
All argumentation is a form of attempted rewiring of the brain, hopefully to fix it in the case of good arguments, but more often than not, designed to break it.
And so if somebody is attempting to causally change my behavior at the age of 45 through an argument about a cause that is very important to me, obviously, Then they are attempting to have enormous influence upon me as separate internet remote adults with no dependence upon each other whatsoever.
They are attempting through their ideas to rewire my brain and fundamentally change my behavior.
Because if I accept their arguments but still continue to argue the old way, that of course is hypocrisy, a lack of integrity, and so on.
So if they are accepting that as remote internet denizens that I have no dependence on and no interaction with and can ignore without consequence, that with such a remote and distant and inaccessible non-relationship, that they have the power to fundamentally affect how I think and what I do, to change how I think and what I do, then they're saying that the influence of others upon people is enormous.
And how could you then rationally argue that the influence of remote netizens on the X dimension of TCIP space can have a huge impact on me, and these people are striving to have a huge impact on me, but that the parents who raise you for the first 18, 20, 25 years of your life have almost no impact?
You see, that doesn't make any sense at all.
That's like saying to somebody, that's like somebody saying to me, Steph, I can teach you how to speak Romanian in 10 minutes, remotely.
Over the internet. But your parents had no capacity to teach you any language at all, virtually, when you were growing up.
Well, if you're able to teach me a language in 10 minutes remotely, then clearly my parents, who had infinitely more access when I was infinitely more dependent, and they had infinitely more control over my life when I was young, had much more power and capacity to teach me a language.
Understand? This is what I mean by know thyself.
What are the implications buried in your very act?
It's the determinism debate.
You're trying to change my mind about whether I can change my mind.
You're trying to change my mind to accept that I cannot change my mind.
It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
It doesn't work. But people don't know themselves well enough to examine their own motives and the premises embedded in the very act of engaging in a debate.
The very act of engaging in a debate is attempting to change someone's behavior by changing someone's mind.
Of course you're trying to change someone's behavior.
If you can't change someone's behavior by changing their mind, it wouldn't matter.
I mean, if I was an ad executive and I went to Coke and said, I'm going to run a fantastic advertising campaign and it's going to get people to really like Coke, but I guarantee you that zero people are going to switch from any other soft drink to Coke and it's not going to increase any of your sales whatsoever.
He would say, well, how on earth can I measure whether somebody's mind has changed unless I can look at their behavior?
It's like saying there's zero correlation, zero correlation between your political beliefs and who you vote for.
Anyway, so people who lack self-knowledge will come charging in and try to change my mind or try to change your mind.
And fundamentally, they will try to influence you in this debate.
They will influence you, try to influence you into believing that others have no influence over you.
Or parents in particular, that some remote netizen has huge influence potentially over you, but your parents don't.
I mean, this is nonsense. It's embarrassing.
It just indicates a complete blindness to the self and to the motives.
So, I think that this is a very powerful issue, of course, for many people for many, many important reasons.
The agony of parents who've done wrong is an incredibly powerful force within society.
I mean, you bring your kids into some doctor because the teacher has complained that they have ADHD. And there's significant studies that show ADHD is simply a form of post-traumatic stress disorder for children who've been abused.
If this was clear, then that would be really bad for parents, right?
If ADHD was a symptom of child abuse, then that would be really bad for parents.
Because then everybody would know who the problem was.
So they don't want that. And there's lots of profit into selling people relief from a bad conscience.
Look at Catholicism, right?
There's lots of profit in selling people relief for a bad conscience.
And drugs and imaginary brain disorders and hormone deficiencies or whatever deficiencies that people imagine is going on in the brain is a great way of letting parents off.
It wasn't anything I did.
Because, I mean...
Parents don't want to look in the mirror and say that they've done significant harm to the developing mind of a young child.
This is why Head Start doesn't work.
Seven, what, billion dollars spent on trying to improve kids starting at the age of four or five?
Too late. Too late.
This is what is repeatedly found.
It's far too late.
Because by the time of zero to four, if you're out 30 plus million words, that's a deficiency that cannot be undone.
You can't change the deficiencies of early childhood.
You can't change the deficiencies of early childhood.
We can no more develop as if we had been loved and properly stimulated than we can regrow an arm that's been cut off.
I mean, we can put on prosthetics, we can find ways around it.
There's neuroplasticity, which means we can continue to develop, and we may even end up stronger than if we had never been harmed, but we can never be someone who was never harmed.
I mean, you have a heart attack and you may say, oh my goodness, I'm going to lose weight and exercise, and you may become really fit.
You may become even fitter than if you've never had a heart attack, but you can still be somebody.
You can never be somebody who didn't have a heart attack.
So there's a lot of profit and a lot of motivation in this.
And people also at the top of the society don't like the idea that where they are is the result of accidental virtues on the part of their parents or their surroundings.
I mean, look at these guys. They all have really pretty great childhoods, I would say.
And they don't like the idea that they're on the top of the pyramid because they had specific gifts and advantages that are randomly distributed across the population.
I mean people will all like to think that it's our own virtues that have allowed us to achieve what it is that we have achieved.
We don't like the idea.
That there are massive and powerful environmental factors that shatter the minds of developing children or strengthen and shore them up.
And that is a fundamental lack of empathy to the wounded among us.
I think it's also important to understand that This idea of the invulnerability of the personality to the environment is, interestingly enough, I'll argue, a hangover of the concept of the soul.
This is really, really important.
So, many years ago, when I was a goldpanner after high school, I went prospecting in Northern Ontario.
I was a goldpanner and a prospector and explorer.
And I read...
I just grabbed books, and I grabbed a bunch of Stephen King books from somewhere and read them.
And I read... The Stand, I think it is.
And in The Stand, there's a mentally challenged young man.
And at one point, the lead character is talking, has a dream or some sort of vision where he's talking to the mentally challenged young man who now has a great vocabulary.
And he says, I'm God's Bob, or whatever it is his name is.
In other words, I'm the part that is not mentally challenged, that is not handicapped.
I'm the part with a full and fluid mental life.
But I just, you know, because I'm God's Bob.
This is my soul. There is this idea that the essence of the identity is indestructible.
And this is the nature side of the nature versus nurture.
That we are born who we are.
That where you're going to end up is largely the result of your genetic makeup.
That you are fundamentally kind of indestructible.
You're bulletproof. And that is, I would argue, a very, very strong...
A hangover of the concept of the soul.
Of course, in the soul, the soul is created or placed into the body at conception or whatever, and somehow splits it to two after conception if they're twins.
But your soul is independent of your environment.
Your soul is eternal, your soul is perfect, and your soul is godlike.
And it's independent of your environment.
And no matter how corrupted you become, your soul, the purity of your soul and its attachment to God is always available.
It's always available that you just simply have to find your way through the maze of earthly distractions and corruption and degeneracy to find your way back to God.
And that's really, really a fundamentally powerful concept, that we are independent of our body, that there's a perfect essence to our personalities that is indestructible and does not become corrupted by our environment, that always retains its purity and its access to God.
And whenever I approach an argument...
Around ethics and responsibility, morality and so on.
I always look for the hangovers of religion.
And this is really, really a moment.
Religion, of course, massive, massive foundational aspect of our thinking.
I mean, you simply can't escape it.
Know thyself means also know your religious history.
And I was raised as a Christian.
And so I absorbed the same values and arguments and approaches.
And almost everyone has.
There are very few people who've been raised without any influence from religion.
Almost none, I would say. And so, if you have a strong opinion about a particular ethical thing, the first place to look at is, is there a parallel to religion?
And if there is, it's just important to know.
This is around self-knowledge.
It's important to know if you have a parallel to religion.
The indestructibility of the soul mirrors perfectly with...
The indestructibility of personality.
The genetics of the soul are very close.
And what they do is they both absolve the power structures that are of moral responsibility.
Because if you have a perfect soul and you can gain access to God at any time, through prayer or through the intermediary of a priest, if that grace, if that morality, if that virtue...
is open to you at any time then fundamentally it's your damn fault if you get corrupted because you still have that pure part of you That can't be corrupted or destroyed.
And so if you allow that to happen, you always had that option of being perfect and connected to God and therefore virtuous.
And the same thing, of course, I would argue is true as well.
It's not the power structures. It's not the environment.
The parents aren't to blame if you go bad.
I mean, this is why the devil was invented.
The devil was invented to take parents off the hook for the bad behavior of their children.
What you always hear from parents whose children turn out badly.
We did everything we could. Our children were everything.
Blah-de-blah-de-blah. And that's all nonsense.
Because if parents absolve themselves of moral responsibility, they must absolve their children of any kind of moral responsibility.
And in the same way, genetics takes parents off the hook as well.
You see, this is a common theme.
A parent whose child is misbehaving to the point of intervention from someone else in society, psychiatrist, social worker, or psychologist, they are desperately vulnerable.
They, I would argue, most times have done harm to their children, abandoned, neglected, abused them, and the effects are showing up in the physical brain structure.
And they're going desperate, pleading to a professional, Make this not my fault.
Make this not my fault.
With society as a whole, we don't want to examine some important things like how are children educated.
Well, the education of the children is left to the powers of the state.
And the powers of the state and the public sector unions are not interested fundamentally in the quality of education for children.
As the head of the American Union, Teachers' union said, I will start caring about the interests of the kids when kids start paying union dues.
This is very fundamental.
Of course, it's terrible for children that they get a couple of months off in the summer.
It's terrible for their development, but nobody wants to change it because children don't even remotely come first in our society.
So if we can say that somehow the personality is fixed and the Christians do this, We're good to go.
Genetics, it's just a way of absolving people of responsibility.
I'm not willing to do that because I grew up in a society where I was assigned moral responsibility as a child for everything that I did.
I was expected to be good. I was punished for being bad.
And I simply, you know, the most dangerous thing that children can do in society is actually listen to society when society is this corrupt.
I listened and I went, okay, so if I at the age of five am morally responsible, if I'm at the age of seven morally responsible, then when I grow up, I'm going to hold parents and teachers and politicians and other adults to infinitely higher moral standards than I had at seven when I was powerless and a child and not independent at someone.
And so I think that's really, really important to understand.
Nobody likes the idea that permanent brain damage is done in the first few years of children's lives by bad parents, by bad childcare arrangements, bad daycares, bad kindergartens, and that this damage is only continued through uncaring, exploitive, and destructive...
Public school, quote, education.
We don't like that.
We don't like the idea, like that scene in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie, where the children are being tossed into the faceless kids or being tossed into the meat grinder and coming out as...
Awful tubes on the other side.
We don't like that idea, because that challenges our sentimentality about how we think that children are so wonderful, but we do almost nothing to nurture and protect them, and we do everything we can to squirm away from the responsibility of what we do as a culture, as a society, as parents, to so many of our children.
80 to 90% of parents are still hitting their children.
How would you feel about marriage if 80 to 90% of husbands were still hitting their wives?
Not good. Not good.
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