Dalton Conley, A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way, NYTimes, 13 March 2025.
Since Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.
Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our homes and beyond? What started as an intellectual debate quickly expanded to whatever anyone wanted it to mean, invoked in arguments about everything from free will to race to inequality to whether public policy can, or should, level the playing field.
Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.
The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way. For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it’s already underway.
Genes, it turns out, don’t affect who we become just on their own, inside our bodies — they work, in part, by shaping the environments we seek out or engender.
Picture a kid who is born with two working copies of what’s known as the sprinter’s gene, ACTN3. By elementary school she might be winning every game of tag, every race, and be chosen first whenever sides are drawn up. You could see how parents and coaches might encourage a kid like that to join an organized sports team and how she would be likely to receive positive feedback for her performance on it, which in turn might motivate her to train harder. By high school she makes varsity track and soccer, and the more she excels, the more coaching and training is made available to her.
Of course, any number of factors might cause her to quit sports — an injury, say, or a toxic team environment. But if she keeps at it, her starting position on a big college team won’t be the result of just her genes or her hard work. It will also be the result of how her genes shaped her environment, influencing the people and opportunities she encountered, and how her environment shaped the way and the degree to which her genes expressed themselves.
It’s a continuous feedback loop, in which neither nature nor nurture is a fixed entity.
Later:
The part of this research that really blows me away is the realization that our environment is, in part, made up of the genes of the people around us. Our friends’, our partners’, even our peers’ genes all influence us. Preliminary research that I was involved in suggests that your spouse’s genes influence your likelihood of depression almost a third as much as your own genes do. Meanwhile, research I helped conduct shows that the presence of a few genetically predisposed smokers in a high school appears to cause smoking rates to spike for an entire grade — even among those students who didn’t personally know those nicotine-prone classmates — spreading like a genetically sparked wildfire through the social network.
There’s much more at the link.
But I guess I’m going to declare myself skeptical, mostly on general principle. What’s the principle? Mostly that the academy is about on intellectual boundaries laid down in the 19th century and it has so far resisted changing them in any fundamental way. Oh, in the last half century we’ve seen interdisciplinary-this and intedisciplinary-that and all sort of conferences and centers, lots and lots of interdisciplinary. But those ancient boundaries remain.
What do I think about nature/nurture? Think of chess. On the one hand we have the rules of the game, the size of the board, the different pieces and their moves, and a couple other rules. That’s nature, that’s biology. In order to play chess at all, you have to know and abide by those rules. But to play chess well, that’s something else. For that you need to know tactics and strategies that have been build over centuries. That’s nurture, that’s society and culture.
Now, as that’s a metaphor, and only a metaphor, of course it fits “new” scientific program, this new paradigm, this “sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics.” But how will this program unfold, develop? That is very much dependent on the surrounding intellectual environment. That’s what gives me pause.
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