Explainer

Biology

Culture

Ethics

24 May 2023

8 min read

Inheritance and environment's impact on ethics

Once discounted insights are now found important and have ethical consequences. Andrew Davison concludes his series on biology’s current developments.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A wall tile shows a 1940s woman tend a stove below a washing line.

A commemorative tile honours Dutch woman who made 'something out of nothing. during the hunger winter.

Peter de Wit (FaceMePLS), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There’s no more exciting work in biology at the moment than thinking about organisms in terms of their environment. That’s a crucial part of the lively current scene in evolutionary thought (which I described in my previous article), and part of how a new generation of fascinating writers is urging us to throw off the overly narrow perspectives of the twentieth century. It’s not that Darwin’s fundamental insights were wrong, just that some of his followers took them to rule out, or discount, features of biology that turn out to be real and important.

In fact, Darwin was often ahead of the game here. He was more interested in cooperation between species, for instance, than many writers who went on to champion his ideas. He wrote brilliantly about the relationship between moths and orchids, for instance, and between plants and earthworms. Similarly, as Jessica Riskin has recently pointed out, he never dropped the idea that what organisms do during their lifetime affects what they pass on to their offspring (what he called ‘use and disuse’). For much of the twentieth century, that idea, of passing on of acquired characteristics, was biological heresy, but today it’s making a comeback.

The excitement in contemporary evolutionary biology can usefully be gathered under two headings. Alongside ‘organism and environment’, there’s also ‘extended heredity’, although the two are closely related on some points. They’re both important as part of the sort of discussion presented on this site – run in conjunction with the Church of England, of all things – not just because it’s good for religious institutions to demonstrate enthusiasm for science, but also because they’re full of ethical consequences.

Passing on to the progeny

Take ‘extended inheritance’: extended, in the sense that there’s so much more that’s inherited from parent to child than just a DNA sequence. For one thing, every organism bequeaths a world to its progeny, which means a world that’s at least somewhat adapted: at least a little (as with some bacteria, although others are adept at ‘ecosystem engineering’) or massively, as when a beaver completely changes its surroundings by building a dam, or when human beings cover the Earth with marvellous and terrible things. The transformed landscape of the beaver and the human being, even of the bacterium, is part and parcel of what they each pass on to their progeny, and therefore part of biological inheritance. That really puts the environment back at the centre of our thinking about organisms and evolution.

Taking a wider view than genes-are-all-you-pass-on has no lack of consequences. In their accessible and endlessly fascinating 2018 book Extended Heredity, Russell Bonduriansky and Troy Day show that narrow-mindedness on that front has had terrible consequences. They see it behind the Thalidomide birth defect tragedy, for instance, and the strange unwillingness of medics, in the middle of the twentieth century, to take the dangers of foetal alcohol syndrome seriously. If it’s a matter of scientific dogma that all that matters is what genes parents give to their offspring, other factors – like bothering to monitor what effects alcohol have on pregnant women and developing child, or the effects on them of a new medicine – don’t look as important as they should.

Genes aren’t everything, especially in the developmental phase (from conception through childhood and adolescence). Throughout that period, in particular, genes and environment dance an intimate tango, with genes turning on and off in response to its experience of its environment, before and after birth. Moreover, recent science shows that what happens to you during your lifetime can even be passed onto your offspring, and even to their children after them.

That flies in the face of the idea that all you have to pass on is the genetic hand of cards you were delt at conception (or its equivalent, for instance for a plant). On that hallowed view, the most that life has to offer from that moment on is testing your ‘fitness’, to see whether you manage to pass those genes on, or not, or how abundantly. But that’s far too limited a picture. We don’t just pass on genes; we also pass on the pattern of how genes are tagged to be turned on or off, and that is changed by the conditions the organism has experienced.

Hunger lessons

The most striking, but gruesome, example involving human beings is the ‘Dutch Hunger Winter’ of 1944–45, when occupying German forces starved the Dutch population in retaliation for resistance victories. Children conceived during that period grew up with poor metabolism (or, to be more accurate, metabolism that would be good at surviving starvation, but was not well-adapted to healthier post-war life nutrition, which is fascinating in itself). So much for genes being everything. More startling still was the observation that their children also had poor metabolism: the grandchildren of the starved pregnant women. We can pass on acquired characteristics, which really puts the cat among the twentieth century Darwinian pigeons. As the prophet Ezekiel put it, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’. This is full of ethical freight. The way we treat other people, and ourselves, affects those who come after us: yes, socially and culturally, which is significant enough, but even in how their bodies are programmed to develop.

A stimulating environment

There’s a similar ethical charge to what is perhaps my favourite part of the newly boisterous world of biology: phenotypic plasticity. That’s the simple idea that the same genes (the ‘genotype’) will produce a differently structured organism (the ‘phenotype’) in response to different environments. In one sense, it’s obvious enough. If I go to the gym for a year – a particular kind of environment – I’ll look different afterwards than if I’d spend an equivalent length of time on the sofa.

But it goes much further than that. Various plants will produce different sorts of leaves, for instance, depending on whether they grow in more or less shady situations. Sometimes, one species can be mistaken for two, as happened with fish, called cichlids, in Lake Tanganyika (between Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo). What scientists had thought to be separate species, because their jaws are so different, turned out to be the same species. If a fish grows up at the bottom of the lake, it develops one mouth shape, with large, strong jaws, for munching shellfish; if a it with the same genes grows up at the top of the lake, it develops delicate jaws, useful for eating other kinds of food.

Again, the repercussions of ethics are enormous, and that brings us back to the ugly subject of eugenics, mentioned in the first of these articles. At root, eugenics is based on the assumption that some people just are healthy, and others just are sick, because some have ‘good genes’, while others have ‘bad genes’. You are either blessed with the former, or doomed with the later, and that’s set in stone, from conception. It’s then (supposedly) the ‘right thing’ to promote the former when it comes to reproduction and, at its most horrific, to restrain, sterilise, or even slaughter the latter. Eugenics cast its shadow over more of the twentieth century than we might like to admit. At one time or another, it was the darling of both the political right and the political left. It hasn’t gone away.

Before we say anything else, there’s a moral flaw in thinking that concern for the gene pool trumps concern for suffering individuals. More than that, though, the biology shows eugenics to be flawed even on its own, supposedly scientific, terms. We aren’t just blessed or doomed by the genetic hand of cards we’re delt at conception. Like those plants, growing in sunlight or shade, what our genes will mean is also determined by our setting. Like those African fish, our genes can run more than one programme, so the environment matters.

Eugenics presents the all-to-convenient picture that the sick will be sick, the weak will be weak, and that’s that. But we’re not just doomed or blessed by genes. It matters, for instance, what sort of housing we have, how we’re fed, and whether we have access to fresh air and places for exercise, and to stimulus for the mind, and companionship. Putting people into groups (healthy and sick, or worthy and unworthy), then writing off one of those groups might be politically and economically convenient, but it’s bad science, as well as bad morals.

Reason to be curious

I started this series by mentioning how important the theology and philosophy of the Middle Ages has been for me, in working between theology and science. In one of his little read works, Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) defended having the expansive curriculum used in training Dominican friars like himself. (It helped that this curriculum was being drawn up, in part, by Albert the Great – perhaps the greatest polymath of his century, and later patron saint of scientists.) One should be open to knowing about everything, Aquinas argued, because you never know what will come in useful later on. We have an excellent, and timely example of that, in how something as obscure as phenotypic plasticity bears on eugenics, and the eminently practical question of proper housing.

Recently, in fact, the Church of England has been working hard on housing. The Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, has the new housing brief among the bishops. The church’s council for Mission and Public Affairs has also been busy, not least with the publication of Coming Home: Christian Perspectives on Housing in 2020. What might have seemed like rather abstract wranglings among biologists, over where to put the emphasis in their theories about nature, turns out to show how right it is to be passionate about good housing (and, it turns out, about keeping abreast of biology).

The provocateur philosopher who wants to wean us off the junk food of popular science

David Bentley Hart serves up meat on mind and matter.

Isaac Frisby

Isaac is a PhD candidate in Theology at Durham University and preparing for priesthood in the Church of England.

Cupid and Psyche by François Pascal.

Simon Gérard via Wikimedia Commons.

It will be immediately obvious to the reader of David Bentley Hart’s new book that the structure is quite different to most other titles on the philosophy of mind.

Hart admits that in its original form it was in fact far longer than its substantial 500 plus pages, but, in a perhaps inspired move, it has undertaken a metamorphosis from the ponderous-tome genre of philosophical discourse to one much older: the dialogue.

Instead of other such works which draw on an enormous and panoramic amount of literature presented in regular academic style with copious footnotes, Hart has opted for intelligibility in the mode of a dialogue between characters, historically most notably deployed by Plato. For this reason, it works well as an audiobook, as well as printed text. The downside to this format is that Hart has opted for a somewhat unfortunate weighting of three-on-one. Whilst this format makes the twist and turn of the at times obstruse argumentation more accessible, the impression can feel somewhat unbalanced. Hephaistos, one of those in dialogue, sometimes cuts a lonely and sympathetic figure, and his opponents sometimes are slightly too self-satisfied. This is not overwhelmingly so, but it is worth remembering that all voices are Hart’s.

His choice of dialogicians is telling - four Greek divinities. Psyche (soul), the mortal woman made divine by love. Eros (love), the divine lover of Psyche, Hermes, Psychopomp (that is, the guide of souls in the afterlife). And the stolid Hephaistos, god of craft and manufacture, the main antagonist as the advocate of all things materialist and physicalist. Three characters signal Hart’s intent to guide the reader into a new realm beyond the mundane; the fourth is the mouthpiece of this mundanity. Together in a garden, prompted by a plucked rose, they discuss some the deepest questions of mind, matter, and life.

The title, All Things Are Full of Gods, is a quotation attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales. Like Thales, Hart wants to argue that not only is the divine a reality but is in fact the ground of all things. The six days of dialogue cover the full gauntlet of metaphysical debate over the nature of reality.

On day one, ‘Mind, Life, and Pictures of Reality’ the gods set up the groundwork of the reductionist materialist physicalism (RMP) perspective and the older pictures of classical philosophies.

Day two, ‘Mind and Matter’, draws the battlelines between the qualitative difference between mind and matter.

Day three, ‘Brain and Mind’, engages with arguments concerning how mind and matter relate.

On day four, ‘Machine and Soul’, the place of mind in the body is deepened in the debates on computationalism and functionalism and a useful unpacking of the limitations of panpsychism, which is currently seeing a revival in philosophical circles.

Day five, ‘Soul and Nature’, sees the dialogue broadened to nature itself, reconsidering the mechanical paradigm which presently dominates.

Concluding, day six, ‘Nature and Supernature’, is where Hart delivers his final case, having thoroughly prepared the ground, arguing that mind characterises all of reality and that this is ultimately the only truly rational account of being.

In an important ‘Coda: The Age of the Machine’ Hart addresses the problem of evil, something largely absent from the rest of the work. Hart has a good track record on this topic: The Doors of the Sea, written in light of the Boxing Day Tsunami, is essential reading for Christians and others who see the paradox between an all-loving, all-powerful God and the presence of suffering and evil. Readers will have to decide for themselves; it is not a topic on which one may enforce an opinion either way. The discussion concludes on the sixth day, “. . . and on the seventh day they rest.” (483)

Whilst All Things is dialogic, it also appears to be something else: catechesis. Hart is a catechist. Theologian and philosopher also; linguist certainly; provocateur undoubtedly. But the intention of this book is to catechise the reader, to induct them into the mystery of mind and reality. This might be a somewhat dusty word to some, implying the rote learning of religious dogma. Others will be barely aware of such a word. In Christianity, catechesis is the process of instruction, usually conducted through question and answer.

Hart is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, though in many ways an unorthodox one. His commitment to a form of perennialism, his belief that many of the major religious philosophies of the world (Vedic, Greek, Jewish, Christian, Islamic) share important and compatible insights into the nature of reality and God as the primordial ground of all things, is evident through the pages of All Things. This is unsurprising as he states that of all his writings All Things is the natural successor to The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (a deliberate allusion to the Vedic concepts of sit, chat, ananda) in which he sought to argue the rational coherence of a theism shared by a number of the great religions over and against the irrationality of modern physicalist materialism. It is worth reading and would certainly give the reader of All Things a primer for the extended discussion.

But how is it exactly catechesis? Hart wants to wean the reader off the junk food of popular science with its tendency to not take questions about its philosophical basis very seriously, especially in how its epistemology, ‘what it knows’, produces its ontology, ‘what exists’. This deficiency, as Hart is keen to point out, means that often ontology secretly precedes epistemology. For instance, most scientist will take central place of mathematics within their discipline for granted, without acknowledging that mathematics is itself is groundless: it is epistemologically irreducible as it is not empirical, but is ontologically essential to the scientific method. Hart argues that it is in it’s very groundlessness and givenness to intelligibility, i.e. that the world can be understood at all, that means the world in fact shows itself to have rational mind-like structure, capable of being known. Many advocates for RMP will simply shrug and say that we’ve simply evolved to see structure which isn’t inherently there; Hart is here to pick a philosophical bone with them. His intention as catechist is that, even if one does not become a Christian at the end of this book, one can no longer remain in the comfortable and familiar philosophical milk of the dominant RMP paradigm but be stirred to hunger for the meat of reality. Although not an explicitly Christian book, there are certain hints. A number of Christian theologians recur, especially towards the end: Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Meister Eckhart. That the dialogue is set over six days “. . . and on the seventh day they rest” (483) ought not to be lost on the reader.

His position in a nutshell is that all is mind or spirit (this linking of terms that are separate in English derives from their indistinction in the German Geist, used extensively in German Idealism, in which a lot of this debate has its origins in modernity). This is not a denial of matter (as in some forms of idealism), but that matter is a material manifestation or substrate of the principle of mind behind all reality: God. In many ways All Things is the extension of his previous book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which he acknowledges in the ‘Introduction’. His position is argued in response to the currently most dominant intellectual paradigm, RMP: the idea that reality consists only of that which is matter or can be observed as a consistent mechanical attribute of matter (such as gravity).

Hart’s argument rests on a number of fallacies in this paradigm; the most important of these and the one which recurs most frequently throughout the dialogue between the gods is the ‘pleonastic’ fallacy:

No matter how many purely objective quantitative steps the supposedly mechanistic material order may have taken in the direction of mind, none of them seems as if it could have constituted that sudden qualitative transition from pure exteriority into an unprecedented inwardness.

In short, quantitative accumulation cannot produce qualitative transformation. Mind is not another form of exterior reality, like the physical world; thought takes up no space and is of an entirely different, interior order. This is Hart’s principle complaint against both RMP and historical forms of dualism such as that of Descartes. The six ‘days’ of dialogue is essentially an account of the various arguments presented by the RMP paradigm to demonstrate that this fallacy is not in fact true. The most important of these concerns the trend in various sciences to speak of ‘emergence’: the appearing of qualities or realities such as mind which, whilst dependent upon a physical foundation for their existence, cannot be understood or explained by examination of their physical foundation; they cannot be reduced (explained) by the substrate. Hart draws the distinction between water’s property to extinguish fire, despite it being made up of the highly combustible elements hydrogen and oxygen, and the emergence of mind as a different order of reality from physical combination:

Physical properties derived from other physical properties—no great problem there. So long as this is all that’s meant by “emergence,” then the concept is as inoffensive as it is obvious. But there’s a point at which vague talk of emergence is just another way of talking about something that you might otherwise justly call magic.

This is because water’s watery-ness is also a physical phenomenon, the product of the combination of these particular elements in this particular configuration. But this is still and exterior reality; mind on the other hand is not a property like the watery-ness of water because mind is an interior phenomenon, one which is entirely inaccessible except for the mind who is the mind in first-person perspective. To then argue that pure exterior accumulation quantitative of reality can produce this interiority is, to Hart, not only nonsensical but irrational. Part of his argument thus also turns upon the principle of Occam’s Razor: “if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one,” as Chris Simms describes it. With some of the arguments from RMP approaching this almost ‘magical’ solution, Hart is at pains to argue that indeed the simplest explanation for the mind-like structure of reality is that it is indeed Mind.

I believe this to be a crucial book in the ongoing dialogue between philosophers and theologians on the one hand and the sciences on the other. The project of pointing out the philosophical problems with the dominant paradigm is a difficult when the other side rarely wishes to listen; Hart, however, is a voice that cannot be ignored.

All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, By David Bentley Hart, Yale University Press.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up