Thursday, November 10, 2022

No derminism here.

When talking about any contentious issue rooted in biology (IQ, gender, etc.) conversations often quickly lose nuance.  People are accused of either being Blank Slaters or Biological Determinists.  And the reality is that very few people are such extremists.  The question is where on the continuum you might lie.

Some people are such Biological Determinists that for them, everything is in the genes.  Your genes are your outcome.

The more empirical observation is that all outcome are a product of biology, environment, culture, behaviors, circumstance and contingency.  And possibly also variance.  To the latter point, there is a new study.  From The emergence and development of behavioral individuality in clonal fish by Kate L. Laskowski, et al.   From the Abstract:

Behavioral individuality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in animal populations, yet the origins and developmental trajectories of individuality, especially very early in life, are still a black box. Using a high-resolution tracking system, we mapped the behavioral trajectories of genetically identical fish (Poecilia formosa), separated immediately after birth into identical environments, over the first 10 weeks of their life at 3 s resolution. We find that (i) strong behavioral individuality is present at the very first day after birth, (ii) behavioral differences at day 1 of life predict behavior up to at least 10 weeks later, and (iii) patterns of individuality strengthen gradually over developmental time. Our results establish a null model for how behavioral individuality can develop in the absence of genetic and environmental variation and provide experimental evidence that later-in-life individuality can be strongly shaped by factors pre-dating birth like maternal provisioning, epigenetics and pre-birth developmental stochasticity.

Yes, genes are important.  Yes, environment is important.  But even when these are the same, there are differences in outcomes.  Culture, behaviors, circumstance and contingency all have their contribution in producing variable outcomes as well.  

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