Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023) was Emerita Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was the author of numerous books, including Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines; The Century of the Gene; Reflections on Gender and Science; and A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. She has been awarded many academic and professional honors, including a Blaise Pascal Research Chair by the Préfecture de la Région D’Ile-de-France for 2005–07, membership in the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture

By EVELYN FOX KELLER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4714-9

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………viiIntroduction………………………………………………………………………………………1One Nature and Nurture as Alternatives……………………………………………………………….15Two Changing the Question to One That Does Make Sense—From Trait to Trait Difference…………………31Three From Individuals to Populations………………………………………………………………..53Four What’s to Be Done?…………………………………………………………………………….73Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………….85Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………97Index…………………………………………………………………………………………….105

Chapter One

Nature and Nurture as Alternatives

Contemporary discussions about nature and nurture cover a broad range of territory, including many concerns that have echoed not only through the ages, but also across cultures. Indeed, we often see the nature-nurture debate traced back to ancient Greek discussions about physis (timeless nature, what is) and nomos (law, custom, culture); about sumphuton (innate, internal, or native) and epikteton (adventitious, artificial, or acquired); sometimes the debate is even linked to Confucian and neo-Confucian discussions about hsing (often translated as nature or innate) and hsui, yang, or chih (various expressions for nurture, cultivation, or culture). But I am deeply suspicious of such easy assimilations of our own questions with those of people living in different worlds—worlds carved in ways that bear so little resemblance to our own taxonomies—and my misgivings are clearly shared by scholars far more knowledgeable than I about these distant cultures and languages.

In any case, my subject is not nearly so large. Whatever resonance with the concerns of others we might be able to recognize, my subject is limited to the particular form in which we (at least in the English-speaking world) today tend to frame discussions of the roles that nature and nurture play in development. More specifically, my concern is with the tendency to think of nature and nurture as separable and hence as comparable, as forces to which relative strength can be assigned, as suggesting opposability and, accordingly, as inviting debate. Indeed, the very conjunction “nature and nurture” reflects a particular way of conceptualizing the relation between these two concepts: it implies that the two are already disjoint, for only things that are parted can be conjoined. That form of speaking, I claim, is specific to a time and a culture. It came into being at a particular historical moment, and it is sustained by a multitude of cultural, political, economic, and scientific interests characteristic of the particular world in which we live. Yet even so delimited, the subject is still too large. My focus in this book is even more restricted: I am interested in the ways in which that framing is sustained by a particular set of scientific discourses.

In other words, I will not attempt an analysis, or survey or history, of the family of concepts to which we might assimilate our notions of nature and nurture. Nor do I want to disparage the many legitimate and meaningful concerns that such discussions, even when cast as a debate, seem to address. There clearly are issues raised in the debate—even as it is represented in the quotes with which I began—that strike powerful chords for many people; there is something here (perhaps several somethings) that many people clearly do want to know. I will try to address these concerns in my final chapter, but here, in chapter 1, my focus is on the question of how (and when) an understanding of nature as sharply disjoined from our understanding of nurture comes into common parlance. Whence came the mirage of a space between nature and nurture?

Disjoining Nature from Nurture

It used to be claimed that the nature-nurture debate began with Francis Galton, and it certainly was Galton who, with English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874), put the conjunction into wide circulation. Galton refers to his phrase “nature and nurture” as “a convenient jingle of words” (1874, 12), and indeed it is. But as I’ve already said, it is also more than that: it is a catchphrase that conjoins two domains on the tacit assumption that they are initially disjoint; it sneaks into our language—as if it had always been there, and as if it were self-evident—the presupposition of disjunction on which conjunction rests. Recently, a fashion has arisen for tracing the phrase “nature and nurture,” and the debate with which that phrase is associated, back to Shakespeare, or at least to Prospero in The Tempest (1623), who writes off Caliban as uneducable: “a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture will never stick.” Some have traced it further back to a monograph on children’s education written by an Elizabethan pedagogue, Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster’s words, “Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward” (1581, 35), are sometimes cited as an early contribution, and perhaps even a beginning, of “the great war.” Indeed, if you consult Google on “nature and nurture,” you’ll find Prospero and Mulcaster repeatedly cited—usually by commentators who in one way or another seek their own fortunes in the supposed war. Steven Pinker, for example, writes: “When Richard Mulcaster referred in 1581 to ‘that treasure … bestowed on them [children, i.e.] by nature, to be bettered in them by nurture,’ he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since” (2004, 5). But in fact, although both Mulcaster and Shakespeare juxtapose the workings of nature and nurture, neither invokes the terms as an explicit conjunction; they do not write of “nature and nurture” as such. Indeed, when we look more closely at what they do write, we can see that their use of the two terms does not invite such a conjunction, for there is no presumption of an a priori disjunction.

Mulcaster’s lengthy treatise focuses entirely on the ways in which nurture—meaning here education—can help, assist, and confirm (all his words) that which has been provided by nature, and only occasionally can “procure that which we have not by Nature” (1581, 53). The function of education is to cultivate the course indicated by nature, “to see forward that which nature leans us toward.” So, for example, Mulcaster was a strong advocate for women’s education, on the ground that nature would never have pointed women toward idleness or smallness of purpose: “young maidens deserve the training because they have that treasure [the ability to learn] … bestowed on them by nature, to be bettered in them by nurture” (171). In effect, the very function of nurture is mandated by nature, for it is our nature that makes us nurturable, or trainable. Thus, not only does nurture not stand here in opposition to nature, but the two cannot even be separated. For Mulcaster and Shakespeare, the aim of education is to “nurture nature”; a nurture that is set in opposition to nature—directed toward ends that are too alien to a child’s nature—is useless, even meaningless. On a creature that is born too ill disposed, like Caliban, “Nurture can never stick” (The Tempest, act 4, scene 1).

John Locke did not explicitly juxtapose the terms nature and nurture, but he did write extensively about the relation between education and innate dispositions. And since he has so often been represented as a champion of sensationalism, an enemy of the doctrine of innate ideas, and the bête noire of the “blank slate,” it is worth noting, first, that innate ideas are not the same as innate dispositions and, second, how very dialectical his views on the latter actually were. Note, for example, his repeated advice to parents and educators that they

well study their [children’s] natures and aptitudes, and see by often trials what turn they easily take, and what becomes them; observe what their native stock is, how it may be improv’d, and what it is fit for … For in many cases, all that we can do, or should aim at, is, to make the best of what nature has given, to prevent the vices and faults to which such a constitution is most inclin’d, and give it all the advantages it is capable of. Every one’s natural genius should be carry’d as far as it could; but to attempt the putting another upon him, will be but labour in vain; and what is so plaister’d on, will at best sit but untowardly, and have always hanging to it the ungracefulness of constraint and affectation. (1692, part I, section 66)

And later in the same text, he urges them to “consider which way the natural make of his mind inclines him. Some men by the unalterable frame of their constitutions, are stout, others timorous, some confident, others modest, tractable, or obstinate, curious or careless, quick or slow. There are not more differences in men’s faces, and the outward lineaments of their bodies, than there are in the makes and tempers of their minds” (ibid., part I, section 101). And still later, “observe your son’s temper … See what are his predominate passions and prevailing inclinations” (ibid., part I, section 102).

I’m not certain just when a sense of separability or oppositionality between nature and nurture appeared in the English-speaking world, but it seems clear that there is no such sense either in Mulcaster’s or Shakespeare’s use of these terms, or in Locke’s arguments for the importance of education. Similarly, it seems not to have been present in the eighteenth century. Of the relationship between the natural and the artificial in that century, Lorraine Daston writes that the categories “could overlap, and the boundary between them was often blurred” (1992, 223). And when she adds that “the relationship between the natural and the artificial in general, and between nature and education (or upbringing) in particular, was never so starkly complementary as that between nature and nurture” (ibid.), it is clear that she is referring primarily to the concepts of nature and nurture that became predominant in the last third of the nineteenth century. Although the view of nurture as “powerless to change nature” (224) may not have been entirely alien to earlier writers, as Waller (2001) argues, I submit that it was only after Darwin and Galton that such a view became commonplace. Similarly, I suggest it is mainly late-nineteenth-century arguments that Daston has in mind when she writes: “attempts to subvert the dictates of nineteenth-century nature were deemed futile; attempts to subvert those of eighteenth-century nature, perverse” (1992, 224).

I am not even sure that I can find a sense of separability or oppositionality in the writings of John Stuart Mill to which Charles Darwin takes such exception. Let us look at Darwin’s complaint:

Mr. J. S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, ‘Utilitarianism,’ (1864, pp. 45, 46), of the social feelings as a “powerful natural sentiment,” and as “the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality.” Again he says, “Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural out-growth from it; capable, like them, in a certain small degree of springing up spontaneously.” But in opposition to all this, he also remarks, “if, as in my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural.” It is with hesitation that I venture to diver at all from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? (Descent [2nd ed., 1879], part 4, note 240)

What exactly is Darwin’s concern here? Although Mill would appear to be posing an opposition between innate and acquired, he immediately follows by undermining that disjunction: “they are not for that reason less natural.” The moral faculty, though acquired, may not be part of our nature, but it is “a natural out-growth from it.” Indeed, although not included in Darwin’s excerpt, Mill’s text continues with an even more explicit expression of his denial of an opposition between the two: “It is natural to man to speak, to reason, to build cities, to cultivate the ground, though these are acquired facilities” (Utilitarianism, 1861, 230). But Darwin ignores this sequitur, focusing instead on the disjunction that Mill rhetorically denies while at the same time expressing a view that would substantially affirm it. Social feeling would fall in the same category as man’s ability to speak: natural even though requiring experience and education for its development. Perhaps a hint of the source of Darwin’s concern might be found in his particular understanding of “transmitted qualities.” In his concluding sentence, he writes: “The ignoring of all transmitted mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill” (Descent [2nd ed., 1879], part 4, note 240).

The Turning Point

The first explicit use of the terms nature and nurture as an unambiguous disjunction—as clear alternatives, even if not necessarily in opposition—that I have been able to find comes from the very same year, and it appears not in Darwin’s writings, but in the text (to which I’ve already referred) written by his cousin, Francis Galton. But before turning to the writings of Galton, I want to suggest that there is already in Darwin’s dissent from Mill a clear hint of the turn that Galton makes explicit. This turn, I claim, is rooted in changing conceptions of heredity, and in accord with these changes, with the new alignment between innate and hereditary then taking place. I am not persuaded that there is anything in Mill’s writings to indicate such an equation between innate and hereditary, still less to support an equation between nature and heredity. In fact, in many of Mill’s remarks, hereditary refers primarily to the inheritance of property or title; as for most writers of his time, the noun heredity was not yet part of his usual vocabulary.

But in Darwin’s thinking, such an alignment is clearly already in view; furthermore, he himself contributed greatly to bringing this realignment into common parlance. Indeed, translating the recently coined French word hérédité, Spencer and Darwin were probably the first to introduce heredity into the English language, and they did so in the early 1860s. Carlos López Beltrán has argued that the term brought with it a new ontological commitment to the material concreteness of whatever it was that lay behind hereditary processes, and I think he is right. The crucial point is that, for Darwin, heredity is both nominalized and interiorized. Not the law, not civil or church code, not custom, and not theological prescription, but the body is now the vehicle of inheritance. Here is where the concept of heredity begins to take on its modern meaning, referring not to external inheritance, but to the transmission of something biological, of some substance that resided inside the body. Accordingly, when Darwin writes of the “transmission” of qualities, physical or mental, he is already referring to the passing on of an internal substance. Indeed, I suggest that it is precisely the simultaneous internalization and substantiation of heredity that makes the alignment of the notion of inborn or innate with that of heredity seem, as it were, so natural.

During the remaining part of the century, with the considerable help of Francis Galton, and later of biometricians like Karl Pearson, the translation of innate to hereditary appears ever more explicitly and ever more frequently; by the end of the century, at least within the biological community, the equation has been consolidated, and the terms of the nature-nurture debate decisively transformed. Innate has given way to heredity, and acquired to environment. What this shift does is to displace Mill’s differentiation between innate and acquired—understood as a distinction marked by an event in time (birth)—by a distinction that cuts along a different axis, a division between internal and external, and concomitantly between the kinds of substances belonging to these different spaces, rather than between influences acting over different periods of time. Furthermore, this change to a new set of axes corresponds to much more than a change of variable: it introduces a distinction of a different kind. Where before we had an effectively nominal distinction, one readily compatible with the construal of influences after birth “nurturing” those that came before, now we have a concrete, material division, a division between different kinds of things found in different spaces.

But there is also another point that I need to make. The new conception of heredity, especially as formulated by Galton, had one additional component, a feature that I believe was especially crucial to casting the respective influences of nature and nurture—now understood in terms of internal and external factors, heredity and environment—into a relation of competition and opposition. For Darwin writing in the 1860s, and certainly by 1868, what was internal to the body and transmitted from generation to generation was cast as a particulate something, a substance composed of submicroscopic elements (Darwin called them “gemmules,” or “invisible characters”) that “represented” or were “responsible for” the various aspects of the organism. As I will show, Darwin’s gemmules take on an even more particulate (or atomic) character for Galton than they did for Darwin, becoming not only more independent, but also invariant. Where Darwin held that these particles might be shaped by the experience of an organism, beginning with Galton, they were reconceived as fixed entities that were passed on from generation to generation without change. The relevance of this difference to the causal separation of nature and nurture is that although the effects of malleable (or soft) hereditary particles might be regarded as separable from the effects of “nurture” within a single generation, over the course of many generations, their influence would become hopelessly entangled with the influence of experience (or “nurture”).

In fact, Galton’s own writings are our best source here. In the text already cited, he offers as a reason “the phrase ‘nature and nurture’ is a convenient jingle of words” the fact that “it separates under two distinct heads the innumerable elements of which personality is composed” (1874, 12). Here certainly is a hard disjunction between the causal effects of nature and nurture, and it is explicit. What exactly is the disjunction between? On the one hand, it is between “nature,” initially defined by Galton according to the convention of his time as “all that a man brings with himself into the world,” and “nurture,” defined, equally conventionally, as “every influence that affects him after his birth”—in other words, between pre- and postnatal influences (i.e., as a temporal divide). But on the other hand, and in the same breath, the difference between nature and nurture is characterized as a substantive disjunction—i.e., as a divide between the two different kinds of “elements of which personality is composed.” One set of elements belongs to “nature,” and the other, to “nurture.”

To be sure, this reformulation does not give us the means to make such a causal partition in practice; it only claims that partition’s feasibility. Furthermore, Galton goes on to disavow any implication that either of the terms “implies any theory; natural gifts may or may not be hereditary; nurture does not especially consist of food, clothing, education or tradition, but it includes all these and similar influences whether known or unknown” (1874, 12). He even acknowledges that neither is self-sufficient. Nevertheless, he also claims that “the distinction is clear: the one produces the infant such as it actually is, including its latent faculties of growth of body and mind; the other affords the environment amid which the growth takes place,” and he insists that “when nature and nurture compete for supremacy …, the former proves the stronger.” Moreover, his professed agnosticism about the character of the components of nature is scarcely evident in his actual practice; in virtually all his investigations, the elements belonging to nature—what he refers to in his preface as “pre-efficients,” a term that he defines as “all that has gone into the making of eminent men” (vi)—are assumed to be elements of heredity.

In Galton’s mind, such a distinction was not only clear; it was also necessary to make explicit. He was well aware of the criticism mounted against his emphasis on the importance of heredity, especially in the development of genius, but he believed that separating what belongs to nature from what belongs to nurture would make a conclusive argument possible; indeed, for him, the argument depended on “drawing the necessary distinction” (1876a, 391). The difficulty was how to do so in practice. Seeking a “method by which it would be possible to weigh in just scales the respective effects of nature and nurture,” he seized on the idea that his program could be implemented through the study of twins. The history of twins, he writes, “affords the means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and of those that were imposed by the circumstances of their after lives; in other words, between the effects of nature and nurture.”

(Continues…)

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