OK. What’s “Cognitive Epigenetics” anyway?
It’s a term I made up to describe something which may in fact soon be shown to be true … a process by which basic personality traits can be passed on from parents to children directly without having to wait for evolution to modify the DNA of the children.
We are often told that twins raised apart have very similar personalities and we are also aware of the studies which show various aspects of personality to be rooted in genetics. This is part of the ongoing “nature/nurture” debate in which we are repeatedly reminded that the genes we inherit get shaped by the social and environmental influences we experience throughout childhood.
Epigenetics is the process which relates how inherited genes are either expressed or suppressed in their expression as a result of environmental influences. It’s the means by which offspring which are genetically identical can exhibit fundamentally different physiological and psychological attributes in life and (and this is the really important part) these differences will be transmitted to their offspring directly.
Epigenetics refers to the patterns of how genes are expressed or suppressed is transmitted from one generation to the next.
So what?
At this writing the evidence only relates directly to creatures such as chickens and carpenter ants. But if the mechanisms of genetic inheritance, psychological genetics, and epigenetics are the same for humans as well as other evolving entities then we may be well advised to consider how these factors influence such immediate human social policies as migration and multiculturalism.
Considering the rather long stretch from ant societies to human societies it is obvious this speculation is more a call to research than a basis for policy analysis. All the same, since the vast majority of our political leaders do not seem to defend their policy positions using anything other than emotional and moralistic arguments, putting a little bit of “scientific” speculation into this mix of moral certitude and emotional bullying may be worthwhile. Or at least provocative.
Schizophrenic Chickens
Researchers in Linköping, Sweden, have recently published a paper showing the genetic basis for “anxiety behaviour” in chickens. Most people reading this paper will not be as surprised by the genetic basis for personality traits as they will with the idea that chickens are treated anthropomorphically as having the ability to experience “anxiety”.
All that is really needed to take away from this study is the evidence it provides for personality traits having some basis in genetics. The debates over the heritability of intelligence and personality are rooted in the theory of eugenics and as such is all but guaranteed to run afoul of those who embrace political correctness as a worldview. People are more than willing to discuss at length the idea that some breeds of dogs are more intelligent or more vicious than others. Those same people will almost certainly exhibit extreme unease (perhaps even “anxiety”) if the organism under consideration stops being “canine” and becomes “homo sapiens”. If they become uneasy enough then any number of aggressive and punitive behaviours may result.
Free speech can in fact be very expensive. Never say anything you can’t afford.
It’s safer to study chickens.
Carpenter Ant Castes
Another recent study shows that epigenetics can “program” or “re-program” genetically identical carpenter ants into one of three types: the Queen, the “major” caste, and the “minor” caste. The queen is the largest and lives the longest. The majors outlive the minors. All three types are genetically identical so which one a given ant becomes is entirely due to the environment in which they live before they hatch.
After they hatch they don’t just look different, they behave differently. They carry out their caste-specific roles in the carpenter ant community without complaint. The researchers don’t have any realistic way of trying to get the “minor” ants to engage in political action to establish a more equitable nest but this does not prevent us from asking if the epigenetic changes are so robust as to make it all but impossible for changes to the “social environment” to have any impact at all on the ant-caste system.
It doesn’t take much imagination to extrapolate this observation to other living societies. Can epigenetics program “genetically identical” or “genetically very similar” individuals in violent or dishonest or distrusting societies not only to be prone to violence, dishonesty, and corruption themselves but to pass these epigenetic adaptations on to their offspring? And can these changes take place before the offspring are born?
If so then changing the “childhood” environment will be either wholly or partly insufficient. Epigenetic changes – for carpenter ants at least – occur before, as well as after, birth. Could this also be the case for humans? Dare we ask?
Migrants and Cultures
On New Year’s Eve in Köln about 1000 men who were described as appearing to be of “Arab or North African origin” sexually assaulted and robbed over 90 women during public celebrations. German chancellor Angela Merkel and Köln’s mayor Henriette Reker both insisted it was unwise to blame this on “migrants” even as they announced their disgust at the actions themselves and suggested the real blame should fall on the police. Mayor Reker also suggested it would be wise for the women of her city to be more aware of the new realities of their social environment and change their behaviours accordingly. Epigenetics in action.
About a decade ago, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan gave the same basic kind of advice to Norwegian women when she cautioned them against dressing “too provocatively” in those parts of the country where Muslim men were found. Is this advice a concession to the realities of the environmental influences Norwegian women must now anticipate? Is more going on?
Culturally Scandinavian men have been enduring such provocations from Scandinavian women without incident for centuries. Is this also “epigenetics” in action? And what of those “genes” which are presently suppressed? With sufficient environmental inducement can we anticipate the Viking genes to be expressed again?
We can go farther.
Are the attitudes of progressive multiculturalists also the product of their environmental influences? Do Unni Wikan, Angela Merkel, and Henriette Reker react they way they do because they are wiser and more ethical and better informed than those who attack them – or – are they using their intelligence and positions of social influence to rationalise a worldview which was given to them before they were old enough and self-aware enough to see it objectively? People are not carpenter ants to be sure but the general biological mechanisms of evolution and adaptation are shared by all life on this planet.
To what extent to we – any of us – have “free will” anyway? Brain scans tell us that the brain initiates the neuroelectrical signals for some actions before we are consciously aware of the options and “decide” to do one of them. There is in fact a very short time-window in which our higher cognitive centres can veto the action which has been initiated. Which may mean that free will is often little more than the conscious awareness of the brain’s decision to act just before our bodies do it.
What’s “free will” got to do with it?
Distraction. If we only have a limited period of time to make a decision before the “unconscious wiring” makes thought irrelevant then browbeating people, denying them time for calm and deliberate reflection, and subjecting them to group pressure will result in actions which will later need to be “rationalised” through the processes of cognitive dissonance rather than rejected before being carried out.
By the purposive use of the above techniques in daily life people can be “habituated” (with apologies to Aristotle) to political correctness. But the same techniques can just as easily habituate us to any other series of attitudes as the fate of Winston Smith shows. The German women in Köln on New Year’s Eve had been habituated to expect one kind of treatment. The 1000 or so men from a different culture had been habituated to act differently.
The doctrine of multiculturalism, at its most abstract, tells us that “all cultures are equal”. This is not the kind of equality that extends all the way down from the heights of theory to the realities of the public square. It is a bounded, bracketed, and local equality.
All cultures may be equal in the sense that they are “cultures” but they are decidedly not equal in terms of the life-chances enjoyed by those who participate in them. All cultures exhibit corruption, violence, structured social inequality, the hierarchy of social roles assigned by achievement or ascription, and ideologies which explain why such patterns of social life are good, bad, transient, inevitable, or matters of fate. All of them list the means by which actions can be termed either appropriate or inappropriate. All of them address the matter of adaptation and change to the forces of the world outside the direct control of those who share the culture. And so on.
At this level of abstraction cultures are generally equal.
They become unequal at the level where people actually live their lives. They become unequal for women who wander around unescorted in public while attired provocatively, for people who while born into Islam have decided to renounce it and declare themselves to be nonbelievers, for civilians who do not wish to be slaves even though they were captured by armed fighters in their homes. And so on.
Cultures which regard Islamic Sharia law as the “appropriate” way to ogranise society are different from – unequal to – cultures which seek to organise society in accordance with the Christian concept of subsidiarity.
Here we confront the embedded logical incoherence of Multiculturalism. All cultures are equal and all cultures are different. It almost always works in the abstract. It almost never works in reality.
Epigenetics and Cognition Again
Culture is a word we use to indicate the cognitive environment within which we learn not only the language we will call our “mother tongue” and the kinds of foods we will regard as “comforting” throughout our lives, it indicates the environment in which we learn to categorise the world and the proper way to contend with these categories. The cultural environment lets us know who are the “superiors” and who are the “inferiors” of our social world. It lets us know who gets deference and who defers. It tells us what is just and what is unjust.
Those who grew up expecting their cultural inferiors to defer to them may mistake “politeness” for “weakness”. Those who grew up considering all cultures to be equal may regard the thugishness of newcomers as an “individual” rather than a “cultural” attribute. Both of these misunderstandings will only lead to more misunderstanding.
And despite the abstracted long-term moralism of such urgings of Angela Merkel and Henriette Reker, the concrete and immediately present realities of assault and violence will most likely prove to be too distracting for those who are victimised to appreciate the high-minded ideals of political leaders who have bodyguards, servants, and handsome state pensions to fall back on.
It takes generations, not weeks, to bring about any meaningful cultural changes in large populations. Historians have always known this. Now additional weight it being added to this conclusion by both cognitive psychology and epigenetics.
The world’s political elites are just as incapable of seeing their own biases as anyone else. In their case, however, the consequences of this ignorance extend to the lives of those who have no choice but to trust them.
The migrant crisis of Europe is not entirely due to the lack of self-knowledge of the leaders of the EU but their ignorance of their own motivations and their collective unwillingness to examine the most logical consequences of their decisions is manifestly going to make the future worse than it needed to be.
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M. Johnsson, M.J. Williams, P. Jensen & D. Wright. Genetics. A novel chicken genomic model for anxiety behaviour. Genetics, January 2016 DOI:10.1534/genetics.116.179010
D.F. Simola, R. J. Graham, C. M. Brady, B. L. Enzmann, C. Desplan, A. Ray, L. J. Zwiebel, R. Bonasio, D. Reinberg, J. Liebig, S. L. Berger. 2015. “Epigenetic (re)programming of caste-specific behavior in the ant Camponotus floridanus.”Science, 2015; 351 (6268): aac6633 DOI:10.1126/science.aac6633
Unjustified Margins 