Genes and the Black Box (Part 2)

The field of genetics is rapidly maturing -- it attracts more attention and excitement than any other field of science today. As part of this maturation, it has become necessary to consider both nurture an nature. This is easier said than done, however, especially when it comes to the brain and human behavior. In a classic black box experiment, input and output are a given, while the contents of the black box -- the unknown quantity in between input and output -- must be figured out. Let's say that the black box is actually a gene. If you possess a certain gene, can its output be predicted and controlled?

We might recall the decades-long fad for behaviorism, which was a classic black box theory of psychology. Behaviorism attempted to say that the mind is trainable, and since it can be trained, the mind is predictable, like any machine. It doesn't matter if we never find out what the mind actually is, or even if it exists. The mind can remain forever in the black box. All that matters is results, controlling input and output. As you can see, this is much like genetics today. If you can trigger a gene and get a predictable result, that's all that matters.

But is it? With animals, you can elicit the behavior you want by controlling the input. If you want your dog to come when you call, for example, wait until he's hungry and hold out a doggy biscuit. The dog will respond every time, and on the basis of reward (sometimes mixed with punishment, known as negative reinforcement), a process of predictable training is the result. However, the same isn't true with human beings. If you want someone to come on command, they may decide to resist all your enticements. Telling small children that dinner is on the table usually brings them running, but they aren't responding like a dog. As we all discover upon growing up, individuality has a lot to say. Even if hungry, we may refuse to come to the table because we don't like the person who's calling. We may be preoccupied with other things. We may be dieting and have other motivations besides hunger. We may be mentally ill or stubborn or anorexic. A universe of possibilities silently hides within the black box of the mind, preventing a predictable response from a given input.

At present, genes are being treated at the level of dog training, as if input and output can be reliably controlled. For a long time even the notion that genes respond to the environment was strongly resisted. Either you had the gene for blue eyes or you didn't. That still holds true for certain genes. Then it was maintained that other genes were on-off switches. We all possess the genes for cancer, for example, but in some people they get switched on while in others they get switched off. To date, this on-off model has a committed following, but there is evidence that genes are much more ambiguous.

In the studies I mentioned in Part 1, traits like shyness and loneliness seem to have a genetic component. But being born with the shyness gene isn't the whole story; upbringing and life experiences will play a part in determining if the gene is active. Since we all know people who exhibit varying degrees of shyness, it may be that the shyness gene is like a rheostat -- it has more than one position, resembling a thermostat rather than a light switch. If so, then the black box becomes far more mysterious. Behaviorism didn't become popular because it was true but rather because it was simple and easily applicable to experiments. Subjects can be treated like lab rats or pigeons, and a lot of the time the results look plausible. If you put 100 hungry people in a room with a hamburger, the vast majority will eat it. But even if all 100 ate it, the result would be unreliable, because you have not ruled out --and cannot rule out -- all the other responses that remain viable at the level of potentiality. Every once in a while, somebody will step on the hamburger, throw it against the all, meditate on it, draw a picture of it -- who know what else?

Genes seem to be like that. In their complex inter-relatedness, they comprise all the responses that human beings are capable of. I have confidence that genetics is right to claim that every physical and mental response will involve a gene somewhere in the chain of cause and effect. But this says little about what is in the black box. A single neuron operates mechanically in isolation. Put it back inside the brain, in combination with billions of other neurons, and what results is radically uncertain and unpredictable. You can prove this to yourself with a simple experiment. Look at the following words: good, evil, up, down, in, out. If the next word on the list is "black," what word occurs to you? Almost everyone will say "white."

This seems to indicate that you have found a simple, mechanical operation inside the black box of the mind. But what if the word is "potential" or "asparagus" or "rhinoceros," words that have no opposite? The next word that comes to mind can be anything, and even if you knew how every single neuron operated, you couldn't predict the output of the brain. In between "rhinoceros" and the next word that pops into your head lies a gap, and inside that gap an unknown process occurs. The mind is so radically uncertain that no mechanism will ever predict what people will say or think next, even though patterns of predictability can be very persuasive (if you yell "fire" in a theater, almost everyone will run). Could it be that genes will prove just as individual and unpredictable? If so, will we ever know for sure what's in the black box?

In the next post, we'll look at the implications of the black box as it applies to the future of genetics.

(to be cont.)

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Comments

[MTGradwell]

Most of this article is right. But - a "shyness gene"? I don't think so. Think of genes as like the instructions for building a microprocessor. Microprocessors can be built in an almost infinite number of different ways, and some are more powerful than others. But when they are made sufficiently powerful and flexible they become general-purpose devices, and the actual purpose which they fulfil depends entirely on the program which they run. That program is supplied externally i.e. by the environment. Of course humans are far more powerful and flexible than any microprocessor, and are not "programmed" like a computer is, but the analogy is sufficiently good for the point I am wanting to make:

Human intelligence is general-purpose. A human can be a musician or a politician or a soldier or a shop assistant or all of the above (unlike a spider, say, which is designed as a fly-catching machine and has no choice in the matter, so that we can expect its behaviour to be genetically determined).

To be as versatile as we are, humans need minds which start off as blank sheets. No specific language programmed in: The same person could grow up to be an English Speaker or Chinese speaker or whatever, depending on environment. The most that can be built in is a propensity to learn language - any language. And the same goes for temperament and for the specific interests that we develop over our lifetimes - they originated out of that mental blank sheet, influenced by environmental pressures and by our developing ability to make free choices. These things are not determined by genes.

[Guitarsandmore]

Behaviorism says: (1) find out what motivates the subject (ice cream for example). (2)When you want the subject to do their homework, offer the ice cream as a reward for the completed homework. In many cases that is enough. We don"t need to understand why it works, what the underlying problems are, or the history of the psychosis, only that you found some way to get the kid to do their homework. But we all agree that we want our kids to do homework. Other problems have no foregone conclusion.

It gets more complicated when we start sending troops to the Middle East. We know HOW to send troops to war, the question is SHOULD we do it and why or why not? Why do Republicans believe it is always a good idea and Democrats think maybe or maybe not? Why do we process information differently?

We will always disagree and short of trying to genetically alter the Republicans or commit genocide the only fair solution is to have a national dialogue, try to convince the representatives, and vote.