Cognitive Epigenetics and Europe’s Migrant Crisis

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

Rachel and Caitlyn. Subjectivity and Objectivity. Individuals and Groups. Trust and Justice.

By now everyone has learned more than they really cared to learn about Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. The formerly male Olympic gold medalist is now female.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlyn_Jenner

Just as this was fading in the news cycle we are given another name to conjure: Rachel Dolezal. Rachel is a professor African American Studies in East Washington University (Spokane) and describes herself as an “African American woman”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Her parents claim she is white. They have provided photos of her revealing her to be a blue-eyed blonde.

Rachel resigned as the head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP on June 15 (the 800th Anniversary of Magna Carta) and is reported to be in seclusion at this writing. In the next few days and perhaps weeks the media will be relentlessly picking apart Rachel’s life and spreading it out before anyone who cares to look. In all likelihood the focus will be on the individuals and their unique social circumstances. The “rationalities” that will be sought in these dissections will all be one way or the other “local”.

There are three pairs of rationalities which are illustrated in these two cases. Subjectivity and Objectivity, Individuals and Groups, Trust and Justice. These three dimensions and the focal points we choose to take along each of them determines for us how we will experience “identity” in many of life’s situations. The complexities of the first two dictate to some extent who we trust and how we experience or define justice in our social dealings.

In terms of objectivity, we have some fairly good evidence to support calling Bruce Jenner biologically male and Rachel Dolezal biologically white. Rachel’s case is a bit more difficult because the male/female distinction is usually determined by a few physical attributes and the XX or XY chromosome difference. Race, while being “observable” and so to some extent “objective” is on a number of sliding scales. Both sex and race designations make predictions (challenged or not) about attitudes, beliefs, and abilities.

The social constructivist school regards almost all differences as the result of ‘nurture’ and not ‘nature’, of the social roles we play and not our biology.

From this perspective, the (white?) woman known as Caitlyn Jenner came into social existence in June of 2015. I’m assuming Caitlyn is white. I may be wrong on this.

Rachel Dolezal’s arrival as a black woman took place about 20 years ago. In terms of “time in role” it is possible to argue Rachel is “more black” than Caitlyn is “female”.

But maybe “time in role” is not important. Maybe it’s how each of us “feels” that is important. Maybe, too, the facility with which we play the roles is the crucial factor. If the role does not require any specifically biological attribute (such as are given by genitalia or the need for SPF 50 in winter) then we could possibly argue that the way the role is played is more important than anything else.

If we take this seriously then we have a problem with the designation of certain “visible” (that is “objective”) criteria for affirmative action considerations. In some settings now applicants are asked to “self-identify” as it relates to their racial, sexual, gender, orientational, or other category. Could able-bodied people “self-identify” as disabled in order to get better parking spots?

Caitlyn did not in all probability emerge from Bruce because some affirmative action employment advantage was available. Did Rachel find in her early school career a strong interest in “African American studies” and come to the conclusion her employment opportunities would be substantially enhanced if her “birth race” were otherwise?

If the categories of race and sex and gender are used as visible proxies for assumed lacks of opportunities are hardships in early life then are these policies not making a huge problem? What about the “hidden injuries” of poverty, homelessness, and simple isolation from networks and resources that are taken for granted by the children of privilege?

In 1972, British author Richard Sennett wrote “The Hidden Injuries of Class”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sennett

Will President Obama’s daughters ever be asked to check theirs?

The children of the relatively disadvantaged: those who grow up in poor parts of town and attend inferior schools and do not have well-connected and stimulating friends, they are all reminded of one fact of life when they are growing up.

Poor people have little if any margin for error. The smaller your margin for error, the more you will rely on the predictability of the rules of the game to be able to plan for an honest and successful life. It’s not enough for the system to be fair or the playing field to be level. They need to be stable. Stability is even more important than fairness or levelness as long as these two are not too extreme.

The honest disadvantaged people in this world need to trust that the rules won’t change. Nobody really expects perfectly fair rules. At least not once they get to be seven or eight years old. What they do want is for the rules to be stable. Cheating is “breaking the rules” much more than it is “getting a lucky break in life” because of who our parents are or the country in which we were born.

When we decide as “individuals” we want to think of ourselves as male or female or oriental or occidental that’s one thing. When we take these “self-designations” into a biased context which will assign selective advantage to some choices more than to others then charges of “cheating” may arise.

Cheating brings up the idea of “local rationality”. Some CEOs define their corporate actions as “rational” from the point of view of “increasing shareholder value”. Moving the frame of reference a bit it may be possible to see that putting 50,000 people out of work by closing a profitable but marginal facility does not so much “increase shareholder value” as much as cost the wider community far more money because of the increased need for social service expenditures and these costs will be passed on to taxpayers. Increasing shareholder value may be another way of phrasing “redistributing wealth to the benefit of those who are already wealthy”.

Rachel may be just as subjectively sure of her identity as being that of a “black” person as Caitlyn is of her identity as a “female” person.

The larger social problems begin when the subjectivity of these assignments is applied to categories which have group or collective impact. What would happen to the Affirmative Action or Positive Discrimination policies of companies and government agencies if all applicants just decided to “self-identify” as African American Lesbians?

Are we going to wind up having to enunciate our own variants of the Nuremberg Laws? Are the now abandoned Apartheid Laws of South African going to appear to future generations as models of simplicity and clarity? What does it mean to be “black” in America? In 1961, the white southern male John Howard Griffin wrote “Black Like Me”. He used walnut oil to make his skin dark, he shaved his head, and he set off to live like a black man in the southern states of the US in 1959.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me

These questions lurk just below the surface of the coverage of the Jenner and Dolezal diversions. If we look more closely at the underlying social context of these events and pay less attention to the personal factors involved in each we can ask better questions.

What do we mean by “identity” and how do we determine what “objective” collective policies should be when all of the identity categories to which they apply are “subjective”?

Societies, like physical structures, cannot progress to their next level of development until the already existing levels are stable. It is this stability which gives people the degree of trust they need to make informed choices in the present because of what they anticipate will result in the future. When these factors are damaged or destroyed the first people to suffer are those who are honest and hard working and just coincidentally come from modest backgrounds.

The difficulties do not stop there. Collective trust and predictability are the psychological equivalent of glue. Societies are stable only to the degree people can predict one-another’s actions and trust one-another’s motives and intentions. This is one reason why now, as the global order is under so much pressure to change, we see the unmistakable rise of ethnic and tribal loyalties. These are loyalties which are assumed to be more stable and more enduring than contractual obligations defined by written documents and interpreted by members of one or another group of intelligentsia.

This brings us to the context of this comment. Followers of George Lakoff will call it “framing” while Jürgen Habermas enthusiasts will detect “systematically distorted communication”.

The focus can either be “individual” or “group”, the interpretative dimension can be either “subjective” or “objective” and the trajectory of the narrative can either be directed towards the goal of “people feeling good about themselves” or “maintaining a social order which fosters trust and stability”.

Is there an opportunity here to open up a conversation examining the potential conflict in a society which celebrates local short-term rationality so much its own collective long-term rationality is being called into question?

We can only hope the pundits and sages can find a little time, in between segments picking apart the childhood difficulties of the temporarily famous, to ask themselves if they are contributing positively to making the world a bit more stable and predictable for those who need it most.

Generation, Circulation, Maturation

Yesterday I was in conversation with a doctoral student in philosophy. During the chat I mentioned again my concerns over the problems of the immigration and other social policies in the country which seemed to be undermining the cultural coherence and unity of the nation without bringing anything manifestly better or more positive to the table.

It is one thing to argue that Western society is replete with examples of sexism, ethnocentrism, and imperial conquest. It is something else entirely to regard the West as somehow having invented these ideas, or ideologies, or social forms. The West, for all its faults, appeared to be the place where most others wanted to be. People are leaving the West now because the effects of political correctness and its variations are making the West less like it was and more like the places people are trying to escape.

After a few minutes of this the student offered an explanation for my views. People of my generation just see the world differently than those of the younger generation. There really are no problems at all. What I’m seeing is not ‘bad’ but just ‘different’ and something I’m not used to.

The younger generation simply sees the world in different terms.

From this I assumed I was being told to “get on the right side of history”. History was unfolding as it should and my attitudes were rooted in the past just as my fears were really nothing more than my attempts to avoid losing my “privilege”.

If one generation is simply more advanced on the path of progress than previous generations then the idea of progress — unavoidable progress at that — is the operative worldview. This inevitability of progress is particularly popular with the variants of Cultural Marxism currently in vogue.

This is a replacement theory for the old “Circulation” patterns which were believed to be true of human history until the Renaissance gave us the idea we could make things “better”. Plato’s “Republic” speaks of the circulation of government forms propelled by the various forms of human folly, weakness, and corruption. Ibn Khaldun likewise wrote of the cyclical nature of society.

With the rise of science there were obvious improvements in the mechanical efficiency in our machines, plus the great advances in transportation and communication, medical care, public health, and other scientific discoveries are making it possible for more people to live longer and healthier lives than ever before. If we combine this with the theory of human psychology which says “nurture” and not “nature” is what makes us who we are, then the future is only going to be brighter and better. The old “circulation” theory was only true because technology did not change enough to produce a better environment for the nurturing to take place.

I tried to counter with the third of the words in the title: “maturation”. I suggested that the difference between the “youthful whiz kid” and the “aging expert” was this:

Both of them know “the rules”, but you’re not an expert until you know the exceptions. To become an expert means making your own mistakes as well as learning from the mistakes of others. Becoming an expert takes time.

The conversation ended with me being given a cheery and indulgent smile. I imagined behind the smile was “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. Behind my smile were the words “that trick never works”.

Time will tell.