In the ten chapters that make-up Nature via Nurture Matt Ridley sets out
to show how our genes (nature) influence our behavior the more they work
through nurture.

Although Ridley goes on to criticize any philosopher
who has ever had a ‘theory of human nature’ his starting point is Descartes who
he attacks for asserting that animals lack reason (11). Following Darwin, he
examines the life of various apes and chimps, in an attempt to convince us (if
we need convincing) that we are part of nature — nature being defined – in
this instance only, as ‘the non-human world’. He debates social behavior in
animals in some detail and seems particularly enthralled with the size of
gorilla testicles. After this he concludes that ‘every species is unique’ (23).

Ridley supports the innateness of human instincts,
to which he includes emotions such as jealousy and love: but leaves an
explanation of these loaded concepts out of account. Love, he equates with
sexuality (rather than with care or empathy), which leads him to conclude that
love is an inheritable factor that gives rise to changes in the brain when we
fall in love. Ridley explains ‘habitability’, as a ‘variation … in a particular sample‘ that does not
refer to any individuals genetic code. (76). Those who doubt the law of
averages as having any relation to individuality may, at this point, raise a
skeptical eyebrow — for if we cannot know, tell or say anything at all about
the genetic determinism of any individual, that age old question, ‘who am I‘ would seemingly have no genetic
content. Yet Ridley seems to believe it does. Given a range of school children,
some who do well and others badly in exams, Ridley asserts, ‘it is inevitable
that the difference between the high-scoring and the low-scoring pupils must be
down to their genes, for that is just about all that is left to vary’ (77).
Emotional stability, individual experience, parenting, care, and socio-economic
factors are not discussed, though Ridley suddenly decides to warn us against
believing too much in genetic determinism. ‘When the British twin-researcher
Thalia Eley … suggested a strong genetic influence on whether an individual
child would become a school bully’ we are told that a reporter mistakenly and
wrongly reported his claim as ‘bullying behavior may be genetic’ (82). As
Ridley explains, Eley’s comment means only that ‘variations in bullying behavior
may be genetic…’ so gene variability tells us very little. Then Ridley has a
change of mind, for he informs us that ‘having a certain set of genes
predisposes a person to experience a certain environment’ (92). We may wonder
what sort of environment Ridley means, birth trauma? rape? torture? Ridley
chooses, sport.

In exploring those aspects of our behavior that are
instinctual as distinct from those which are dependent on external forces,
Ridley takes us through experiments on worms and fruit flies, into the kitchen
where the analogy of genes and the environment is assimilated to ‘baking a
cake’ (131). Whether we accept that behavior lies in our genes depends on what
we actually mean by ‘behavior,’ which remains obscure. We learn the important
fact (for any girl/gay man on a date) that a lack of smell is proven to relate
to having a small penis (138). From this Ridley concludes that ‘the man with
low libido… remains sexually indifferent to women even after puberty’ (139)
thus proving ‘a pathway from a gene to a behavior’ (139). So now you know.

Never far from a sexual analogy, Ridley examines the
experience of early childhood on human behavior but digresses to the
relationship between the size of the male ring figure, the size of male
genitalia and health (157). This is followed by a discussion on incest that
broadly follows the sociologists Edward Westermarck’s research on marriage
between brother and sister. Though the highest incident of incestual
relationships is that between fathers and children, Ridley fails to mention
this at all. Instead, we are told the alarming story of Albert B, an orphan who
in the 1920’s became the subject of behavior experiments carried out by the
psychologists John B. Watson and his wife Rosalie Rayner (184). From this we
learn there are potential human abilities that the right kind of social
conditioning helps to evolve or bring to fruition.

Early on in the book Ridley makes the error of
confusing the human ‘mind’ with ‘brain function’ (74), a misnomer that
continues throughout, e.g., ‘human minds are never isolated’ (204, 208). Though
it is clear that Ridley has no knowledge of the philosophy of mind and fails to
understand the many arguments concerning mind / body dualism he makes a rather
gratuitous attempt to rubbish philosophers. To take one example. Ridley argues
that the strive for reproduction ‘immediately explains something that
Aristotle, Descartes, Rousseau and Hume had not even realized needed
explaining: why people are nice to their children…" (237). ‘People are
instinctively nice to their children because their genes make them that way,
and their genes make them that way because genes that do so survive — through
the children — at the expense of genes that do not’ (242). This leads to some
rather gratuitous claims, such as the verdict that the gene SRY ‘sets in motion
the sequence of events that (usually) leads to men sitting on couches drinking
beer and watching football while women shop and gossip'(247). At this point it
is hard to disagree with Mary Midgley’s comment, which Ridley quotes and then
quickly dismisses, that ‘genes … are just protein recipes; "they cannot
be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract
or biscuits teleological"’ (237).

The main problem with this book lies in its
mish-mash of controversial scientific data, its need to both accept and dismiss
genetic determinism, its failure to fully explain ‘nurture’ (which says nothing
about perception, affects, reason or intuition) its confusion of mind with
brain and its lull of perpetual contradictions, through which, it is clear,
Ridley remains unsure of his own position. Though Ridley turns, in his last
chapter, to a discussion of ‘freedom of will’ the absence of any philosophical
literature (which is vast) is all too apparent. It is therefore difficult to
determine to whom this book will appeal. Its mix of pop-psychology and pop
science is no doubt aimed at this market but its place in the nature/nurture
genre remains shallow. This is summed up in the last sentence, ‘Nature versus
nurture is dead. Long live nature via nurture’ (280).

©
2003 Eccy de Jonge