Charles Darwin

Culture was caused by culture was caused by culture. It was turtles all the way down. Biology? Genes? Fiddlesticks!

Notice the diminishing—the belittling—of the human being in this outlook. Nurturism is commonly presented as the humane, optimistic view of human nature. If we just get the environment right—level the playing field! fix the schools!—human nature will be cleansed of all impurities, of all prejudice and injustice. Naturism, by contrast, is cruel and hopeless. You’re stuck with your bestial nature and genetic heritage. Nothing much you can do—sorry, pal.

Yet in fact the nurturist sees us as interchangeable units, such individuality as we possess stamped on us by external forces. It is the naturist view that more easily accommodates real individuality and freedom. To be sure, the individuality is innate, not acquired, and the freedom is tethered by genetics, but at least we are not mere lumps of modeling putty. Biology is freedom! (In more senses than one.)

The common perception is that biology began its comeback in the human sciences with E. O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology; or with William Hamilton’s “kin selection” papers of 1964; or at the earliest with the 1953 discovery of the DNA double helix. In fact psychologists took the lead as early as the 1940s, bringing back instinct theory out of frustration with behaviorism’s dry tautologies, and persuaded by decades of piled-up results from ethology (studies of animal behavior).

Resistance to the biological revival was very fierce, though. Social engineers had captured all the Western nations’ political establishments. The broader intellectual culture was steeped in sub-Marxist egalitarianism. Even as innate qualities were being tentatively readmitted to psychology, race was being driven from its last redoubt in physical anthropology.

The anthropologists are still holding fast today, responding to the incoming evidence from genetics mainly by sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA!” The other human sciences are more and more open to arguments from biology, though—most recently, to judge from that New York Times article, the criminologists.

Biology’s comeback has been so arduous and hard-fought, it is hard to believe that when it is complete at last, round about 2025, it will easily yield to a new cycle back to nurturism and behaviorism. Future paradigm changes will likely be mere shifts of emphasis, not purges and revolutions.

Perhaps one day we’ll even wean the politicians away from nurturism. Although then, unable to promise improvements to our lives through social transformation, what on Earth will they say?