Determined, page 37
Lots of the effects we’re considering come from the left side of the table, the features of your biology that you were just handed by luck. Some of them concern how efficiently your gut absorbs nutrients versus flushing them down the toilet; how readily fat is stored or mobilized; whether you tend to accumulate fat in your butt or abdomen (the former’s healthier); whether stress hormones strengthen that propensity. Great news: you can still be judgmental—life’s caprices may bless some people and curse others as to their natural attributes, you say . . . but what really matters is your self-discipline when playing the hand you were dealt.
But some of these genetic effects are harder to categorize, as to which side of the table they should be placed. For example, genes code for types of taste receptors in your tongue. Hmm, is this merely a biological attribute such that even though food might taste better to you than to others, you are still expected to resist gluttony? Or is it possible for food to taste so good that it cannot be resisted?[*] Hormones like leptin that signal whether you feel full generate some similar difficulties in categorizing.
And then there are genetic effects related to obesity that are squarely on that right side of the chart, the world where we’re judged for the backbone and character we bring to our natural attributes. The genetics of how many dopamine neurons you formed, mediating anticipation and reward. The genetics of how much pictures of appealing food activate those neurons when you’re dieting. How intensely stress produces cravings for high-carb/high-fat foods, how aversive hunger feels. And of course, how readily your frontal cortex regulates parts of the hypothalamus relevant to hunger, bringing in the ever-present issue of willpower. Once again, both sides of the chart are made of the same biology.
This scientific truth has had zero impact on the general public. Encouraging studies show that the average levels of implicit, unconscious bias against people as a function of their race, age, or sexual orientation have all decreased significantly over the last decade. But not implicit biases against obese individuals. They’ve gotten worse. Significantly, it’s there among medical students, particularly among those who are thin, White, and male. Even your average obese individual shows implicit antiobesity biases, unconsciously associating obesity with laziness; this sort of self-loathing is rare among stigmatized groups. And this self-loathing has a price; for example, for people with the same diet and BMI, internalizing an antiobesity bias triples the chances of metabolic disease.[*] Throw in the explicit biases, and we have the world in which the obese are discriminated against when it comes to jobs, housing, health care (and one where stigma typically worsens obesity, rather than magically generating successful willpower).[11]
In other words, a realm in which people’s lives are ruined, where they are blamed for biology over which they had no control. And what happened when the person I was speaking with fully grasped the implications of what a leptin mutation means? “It was the start of my no longer thinking of myself as a fat pig, of being my own worst bully.”
Over and Over and Over
Everywhere you look, there’s that pain and self-loathing, staining all of life, about traits that are manifestations of biology. “I find myself beating myself up at times, wondering why I can’t get my shit together, wondering if these disorders say something about my character,” writes Sam about his bipolar disorder. “Over the years, I started to assume I was just lazy. Instead of thinking there might be something wrong biologically, I assumed it was all my fault. And, every time I’d resolve to be better at being attentive in class, or neat or diligent about homework, I’d inevitably fail,” wrote Arielle about her ADHD. “I called myself evil, cold, weird,” said Marianne about her autism spectrum disorder.[*],[12]
Again and again, the same voice, in domains where blame is as absurd as deciding that you were responsible for your height. Oh, but then there’s blame even there: “My mom (5ft 6) and my dad (6ft 1) constantly yell at me for being short saying I’m not active enough and don’t sleep enough,” writes one unnamed person. And Manas, living in India at the intersection of issues of height and of the societal obsession with shades of brownness writes: “I grew taller than everyone at home because I had an active lifestyle. I might be tall but I am darker than the rest of the people at home. That goes to show that we win in some areas but lose in others,” the deep misattributed pain made clear when because appears.[13]
Then there’s the learning about someone’s own different-ness. “[I was] so liberated knowing that there is a name for what I am experiencing,” writes Kat about her bipolar disorder; Erin about her borderline personality disorder: “My struggles with mental ill health were validated.” Sam, about his mood disorder: The discovery that “your first diet or binge didn’t ‘cause’ your eating disorder. Your first cut didn’t ‘cause’ your depression.” Michelle writes about her ADHD, “Everything fell into place. I wasn’t crap because I found [tax] returns painful, blurted out stuff and was messy. I wasn’t crap at all. I have a neuro difference.” Marianne about her autism: “I wished only that I hadn’t lost so much of my life hating myself.”[14]
And all the while, chaoticism teaches us that “being normal” is an impossibility, that it ultimately just means that you have the same sorts of abnormalities that are accepted as out of our control that everyone else has. Hey, it’s normal that you can’t cause objects to levitate.
Then there’s the liberation of understanding that what you mistook as the consequences of different choices could be nothing more than a butterfly flapping its wings. I once spent a day teaching some incarcerated men about the brain. Afterward, one guy asked me, “My brother and I grew up in the same house. He’s the vice president of a bank; how’d I wind up like this?” We talked, figured out a likely explanation for his brother—by whatever hiccup of chance, his motor cortex and visual cortex gave him great hand-eye coordination, and he happened to be spotted playing pickup basketball by the right person . . . who got him a scholarship to the fancy prep school on the other side of the tracks that groomed him into the ruling class.
Then there’s one of the deepest sources of pain. I once lectured at an elementary school about other primates. Afterward, a deeply homely child asked if baboons cared if you’re not pretty. As Wicked’s ostracized green-skinned Elphaba sings about a boy who could make someone feel loved and desired, she concludes, “He could be that boy. But I’m not that girl.” And every time someone less attractive is less likely to be hired, to get a raise, to be voted for, to be exonerated by a jury, an implicit belief is being expressed that lack of beauty on the outside and lack of beauty on the inside go hand in hand.
Naturally, sexuality comes into this too. In 1991, the superb neuroscientist Simon LeVay at the Salk Institute rocked the world with front-page news. LeVay, gay and still reeling from the death of the love of his life from AIDS, had discovered a part of the brain that differed structurally depending on whether you loved people of your gender or the opposite one. Sexual orientation as a biological trait—a release from the cesspool of a pastor whose church would picket funerals with signs saying god hates fags, from medieval conversion therapy. As Lady Gaga sings, “God makes no mistakes, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way.” For the lucky, this was no news, something they’d known all along. For the less fortunate, there was release from the belief that they could have, should have, chosen to love differently than they did. Or the revelation could have been among those on the outside—parents writing to LeVay about being freed from the likes of “If only I hadn’t encouraged him to pursue arts camp instead of basketball camp, he wouldn’t have turned out gay.”[15]
Blame shows up as well concerning fertility, where a woman’s lack of reproductive potency can prompt a doctor to grossly exaggerate the effects of stress on fertility (“You’re too uptight,” “You’re too type A”), where psychoanalytic toxins still fester (“The problem is your ambivalence about having a child”), where blame is heaped on lifestyle choices (“You wouldn’t have had the abortion that left scar tissue in your uterus if you hadn’t slept around and been careless”). Where, as studies show, infertility can be as psychiatrically debilitating as cancer.[16]
A particularly pernicious consequence of misplaced belief in captaining your own ship comes with the work of Duke University epidemiologist Sherman James. He described a personality style that he called “John Henryism,” named for the American folk hero, the railroad construction worker who drove steel with unmatched strength; challenged by his boss to compete against a new machine doing the same, he vowed that no machine was going to keep him down, battled and defeated it . . . only to then drop dead from exhaustion. The John Henryism profile is one of someone who feels like they can take on any challenge if they apply themselves enough, endorsing statements on a questionnaire like “When things don’t go the way I want them to, that just makes me work even harder” or “I’ve always felt that I could make of my life pretty much what I wanted to make of it.” Well, what’s wrong with that? It sounds like a good, healthy locus of control. Unless, like John Henry, you were an African American blue-collar worker or sharecropper, where this attributional style results in a greatly increased risk of cardiovascular disease. It’s a pathogenic belief that with enough effort, you could overcome a racist system guaranteed to keep you down.[*] A fatal belief that you should be able to control the uncontrollable.[17]
There’s our nation with its cult of meritocracy that judges your worth by your IQ and your number of degrees. A nation that spews bilge about equal economic potential while, as of 2021, the top 1 percent has 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half less than 3 percent, where you can find an advice column headlined “It’s Not Your Fault if You Are Born Poor, but It’s Your Fault if You Die Poor,” which goes on to say that if that was your lamentable outcome, “I’ll say you’re a wasted sperm.”[18]
Having a neuropsychiatric disorder, having been born into a poor family, having the wrong face or skin color, having the wrong ovaries, loving the wrong gender. Not being smart enough, beautiful enough, successful enough, extroverted enough, lovable enough. Hatred, loathing, disappointment, the have-nots persuaded to believe that they deserve to be where they are because of the blemish on their face or their brain. All wrapped in the lie of a just world.
* * *
• • •
In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19]
Where I Rest
Look not for me in nature’s greenery
You will not find me there, I fear.
Where lives are wasted by machinery
That is where I rest, my dear.
Look not for me where birds are singing
Enchanting songs find not my ear.
For in my slavery, chains a-ringing
Is the music I do hear.
Not where the streams of life are flowing
I draw not from these fountains clear.
But where we reap what greed is sowing
Hungry teeth and falling tears.
But if your heart does love me truly
Join it with mine and hold me near.
Then will this world of toil and cruelty
Die in birth of Eden here.[*]
It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence.
There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.
And we need to accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done; ultimately, that hatred is sadder than hating the sky for storming, hating the earth when it quakes, hating a virus because it’s good at getting into lung cells. This is where the science has brought us as well.
Not everyone agrees; they suggest that the science that has filled these pages is about the statistical properties of populations, unable to predict enough about the individual. They suggest that we don’t know enough yet. But we know that every step higher in an Adverse Childhood Experience score increases the odds of adult antisocial behavior by about 35 percent; given that, we already know enough. We know that your life expectancy will vary by thirty years depending on the country you’re born in,[*] twenty years depending on the American family into which you happen to be born; we already know enough. And we already know enough, because we understand that the biology of frontocortical function explains why at life’s junctures, some people consistently make the wrong decision. We already know enough to understand that the endless people whose lives are less fortunate than ours don’t implicitly “deserve” to be invisible. Ninety-nine percent of the time I can’t remotely achieve this mindset, but there is nothing to do but try, because it will be freeing.
Those in the future will marvel at what we didn’t yet know. There will be scholars opining about why in the course of a few decades around the start of the third millennium, most Americans stopped opposing gay marriage. History majors will struggle on final exams to remember whether it was the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century when people began to understand epigenetics. They will view us as being as ignorant as we view the goitered peasants who thought Satan caused seizures. That borders on the inevitable. But it need not be inevitable that they also view us as heartless.
Acknowledgments
I’ve been very lucky in my life, something which I certainly did not earn (see the previous ~400 pages for details). In my book-writing realm, that good fortune has included having wonderful, generous colleagues and friends who, along with my family, have provided feedback (sometimes in the form of conversations going back decades, and/or who have read sections of this book, amid any mistakes being my own). These include:
Peter Alces, William and Mary Law School
David Barash, University of Washington
Alessandro Bartolomucci, University of Minnesota
Robert Bishop, Wheaton College
Sean Carroll, Johns Hopkins University
Gregg Caruso, State University of New York
Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Hank Greely, Stanford University
Josh Greene, Harvard University
Daniel Greenwood, Hofstra University School of Law, cofounder of the “Third-Floor Holmes Hall Ethics of Free Will and Determinism” lecture series almost half a century ago
Sam Harris
Robin Hiesinger, Free University of Berlin
Jim Kahn, University of California, San Francisco
Neil Levy, Oxford University
Liqun Luo, Stanford University
Rickard Sjoberg, Umea University, Sweden
The late Bruce Waller, Youngstown State University.
Thanks as well to Bhupendra Madhiwalla, Tom Mendosa, Raul Rivers, and Harlen Tanenbaum.
I am now many books into having Katinka Matson as my book agent, and many years into having Steven Barclay as my speaking agent—deep thanks to you both for your friendship and for always having my back.
At Penguin Random House, I thank Hilary Roberts for her careful read and suggestions as copy editor. I warmly thank Mia Council for overseeing the process of getting this book to print, and for providing some truly insightful feedback. Most of all, I thank Scott Moyers, my editor for this and my previous book; your help has been such that at every juncture where my writing/thinking/self-confidence has stalled, my automatic first thought now is “What would Scott say?”
I closed my lab about a decade ago. Typically, lab scientists ending research at what was a relatively young age do so to become the dean of something or other, or an editor of a science journal. As such, my bidding farewell to pipetting in order to sit at home writing is unorthodox; I am grateful to Stanford University for the intellectual freedom that it gifts its faculty, and to the two chairs of my department during this period—Martha Cyert and Time Stearns—and the late, truly beloved Bob Simoni.
And heck, while we’re at it, thanks to Tony Fauci for battling the Forces of Darkness. And good going Malala.
Thanks to our twelve-pound Havanese, Kupenda, and our eighty-five-pound Golden Retriever, Safi. The former has taught me how social status is more about social intelligence than muscle mass, passing his days terrorizing the helpless, hapless latter. And to the primate members of my family—Benjamin and Rachel, who bring me joy beyond measure, and to Lisa, my everything.
Appendix
Neuroscience 101
Consider two different scenarios.
First: Think back to when you hit puberty. You’d been primed by a parent or teacher about what to expect. You woke up with a funny feeling, found your jammies alarmingly soiled. You excitedly woke up your parents, who, along with my family, got tearful; they took embarrassing pictures, a sheep was slaughtered in your honor, you were carried through town in a sedan chair while neighbors chanted in an ancient language. This was a big deal.
