Born That Way
ALSO BY WILLIAM WRIGHT
PAVAROTTI: MY WORLD (coauthor)
SINS OF THE FATHER
THE VON BÜLOW AFFAIR
ALL THE PAIN THAT MONEY CAN BUY
LILLIAN HELLMAN: THE IMAGE, THE WOMAN
PAVAROTTI: MY OWN STORY (coauthor)
THE WASHINGTON GAME
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1998 by William Wright
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Simon & Schuster and Marianne Craig Moore for permission to reprint an excerpt from “In Distrust of Merits” from The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, copyright 1944, copyright renewed 1972 by Marianne Moore.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster and Marianne Craig Moore,
Literary Executor for the Estate of Marianne Moore. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, William, [date]
Born that way : genes, behavior, personality / by William Wright.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81938-3
1. Human genetics. 2. Nature and nuture. I. Title.
QH431.W785 1998
304.5—dc21 98–641
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE The Chemistry of Self
TWO Birth of a Study
THREE Desperately Seeking Twins
FOUR Cosmic Secrets of Twins
FIVE Minnesota’s Triumphs
SIX Two Dogs Named Toy
SEVEN More Weirdness
EIGHT Other Behavioral Genetics Studies
NINE Stars of the New Field
TEN The Other End—Searching the DNA
ELEVEN Moving Right Along the Double Helix
TWELVE The Ups and Downs of Human Nature
THIRTEEN Short and Happy Life of the Tabula Rasa
FOURTEEN Surviving the Jensen Furor
FIFTEEN Oh So Political Science
SIXTEEN Scientists in Denial
SEVENTEEN Violent Crime in the Maryland Woods
EIGHTEEN Conclusions
APPENDIX
NOTES
Preface
MY FOUR-DECADE JOURNEY to this book began when I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1950s. Psychology was the day’s hot subject. Actually, Freudian analysis was the center of heat and light, but the closest a Yale freshman could come to that glamorous, high-fashion truth about human functioning was Yale’s psychology department. Undergraduate aficionados of psychoanalysis had to content themselves with snap-remedy films like Spellbound; Now, Voyager; and The Snake Pit.
Undaunted, I went to New Haven with the intention of majoring in psychology. If inspired as hoped, I would proceed to medical school and on into psychiatry. I had just read The Brothers Karamazov and was enthralled by the saintly brother, Alyosha, who couldn’t do enough for everybody. With hopes of emulating his compassion, I envisioned myself an analyst ministering to the broken and tormented. In the process, I might gain insight into my own psyche—which at the time seemed to be careening in directions I didn’t like.
Rather than inspired, however, I was depressed by Yale’s entry-level psychology. The courses were arid, dull, and obsessed with rats. It was as though Yale hoped, by boring neophytes silly, to weed out students keen on kinks and aberrations, or even worse, students keen on self-contemplation. I, of course, was keen on kinks and aberrations, my own and those of others, and began to rethink my academic future.
My disillusion had a more substantial component. I did not have to delve very deeply into the psychological literature to learn the degree to which the field was dominated by behaviorism, the theory that humans are born free of any significant innate programming and can be molded as society desires by systems of rewards and punishments. It was made clear to undergraduates that whatever back-porch wisdom we may have brought to New Haven about inherited traits was the kind of bunk we were paying Yale to purge. Behaviorism was where it was at. “Theory” is too weak a word for behaviorism’s hold on psychology in the fifties; it was the day’s indisputable truth and was embraced by virtually every university in the U.S. and Europe.
The vision of the tabula rasa human did not stop with the psychology departments. All the country’s social scientists were in the thrall of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and other anthropologists who promoted the same vision of unprogrammed humans. For decades their disciples saw toddlers as just so much random-access memory onto which any number of operating systems could be downloaded by culture. Generations of anthropologists were happily certain that humans per se were fine; culture and society had turned us into the messes we were. It followed that different cultures and societies (and political systems) could refashion the human into something quite adorable. As with the behaviorists, the views of these cultural determinists prevailed.
I felt that the model of the human as a blank slate on which anything could be written was too simple, too tidy, too optimistic. I was, after all, at the institution that had turned Cole Porter into a bulldog and crafted the unpromising raw material of Dink Stover into a Yale man! Yes, in their eyes the environment could do anything. (While reading this book, you must forget about the environment as clean air and toxic rivers; psychologists had the word first and use it to mean all the external influences at work on an organism, from womb conditions to nursing home.)
None of this born-free dogma, sometimes called environmental determinism, jibed with what I had experienced in eighteen years of sly observation of my fellow humans. I had known brothers raised in the same family who were entirely different in personality and temperament. My sister and I, growing up in one household with the same parents, the same diet, the same rewards and punishments, were highly dissimilar people. I had read enough about other cultures to know that, Mead’s Samoan utopia notwithstanding, certain nasty human characteristics seemed to turn up in culture after culture with disheartening regularity. The social sciences in the 1950s were addressing a human quite different from the one I knew.
My presumption, however, ended with my skepticism. I decided it would be daft to enter a field the fundamental tenets of which I rejected. I wished the psychologists well with their rat mazes and their behaviorist certainties, and headed into the less insistent world of art and literature. (I should not make light of the “rat-runners,” although, to my shame, or perhaps to Yale’s, I considered this important and fascinating research ridiculous at the time.)
In the 1960s, a decade after I finished college, books appeared and caused a stir that pointed to a very different view of human nature from the one that had driven me from psychology. Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis and Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression took the strongly Darwinian view that humans, like all animals, were products of evolution and, like all animals, were born with an elaborate structure of behavioral dispositions transmitted through the generations by genes.
Simple and logical, even obvious, as this view might now appear, it was considered blasphemy in some quarters—and still is to an immovable few. Large numbers of thoughtful people, however, saw it as important news; a handful even recognized the idea’s epoch-shifting potential. The behaviorist Bastille had, if not fall
en, suffered a telling blow. This alternative view excited me mightily, not because I relished Ardrey’s notion that we humans were domesticated killer apes, but because the basic assumption of inherited characteristics rang true, the entrenched orthodoxy about man-made human nature rang false.
I began reading other books by these authors and the works of scientists with similar ideas—Niko Tinbergen, Edward O. Wilson, Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, Jane Goodall—and was delighted to discover so many with this Darwinist perspective on our species. My enthusiasm for the changing view of the human was apparently shared by many other nonscientists who may have shared as well my dissatisfaction with the view we all had been fed at college. Whatever needs the books met, they found a wide audience among general readers and attracted broad media attention.
Predictably, social scientists reacted violently to the trend that saw human personality as just another fruit of the evolutionary tree. The reviews of African Genesis, predominately written by academics, were mostly negative, some scathing. Like-minded books, all but a few about animals but with clear implications for humans, were similarly trounced, usually in proportion to the degree to which the author suggested a relevance to human behavior. To casual readers, Ardrey and the others were offering an interesting new slant on the human; social scientists and other experts on the human saw the books’ ruinous challenge to their systems.
It says something about behaviorism’s weak hold on public consciousness that Ardrey’s book, and others with a similar outlook, sold so well in spite of the reviews. But their claim to significance was not the large sales—a distinction shared by books about after-death experiences and UFO encounters. Except for Ardrey, the authors were respected scientists with solid credentials. Konrad Lorenz would soon win the Nobel Prize. For all the outcry from the entrenched social scientists, the new books launched a tectonic shift in the established view of human nature, a slow, steady movement that, three decades later, advances in the same direction.
For the next few years I kept up with this literature. Then, in 1980, my enthusiasm for the genetic view peaked when I read an article in Smithsonian about a study just then starting out at the University of Minnesota of identical twins who had been raised separately. The similarities of the twins reared in different environments but who sprang from identical DNA was, for me and many others, an unequivocal demonstration of the power of genes to shape personality.
I saw the article as a landmark. The identical-twin study was dragging the infant science of behavioral genetics from behind the safe and remote chimpanzees, geese, and fruit flies and was boldly delivering it at the feet of the animal everyone knew we had been discussing all along: the human. For me, this was an exciting development, too momentous for a magazine article, and I began thinking about writing a book.
As the Minnesota research grew with the discovery of additional separated twins, the scientific community began to take note of the gusher of gene-personality evidence. The popular press took note as well. Although the study was clearly serious and scientifically respectable, it was seasoned to the media’s taste with spicy anecdotes about bizarre parallels in the separately reared twins.
Some of the congruences were so improbable they sounded like the imaginings of Gilbert and Sullivan on a bad plot day—for example, sisters arriving at their first meeting each wearing seven rings—and the far-fetched weirdness of the similarities brought down an amount of ridicule on the Minnesota researchers. This was primarily from the antigenetics people who dreaded the implications of Minnesota’s more substantial findings and hoped to divert attention away from this data and refocus it on the hard-to-swallow anecdotes. The gene-fearing opposition may have been poking fun, but they weren’t laughing.
Understandably, the Minnesotans sought to seal off this vulnerable flank by drawing a veil over the twin oddities. While they were certainly present, and in large numbers, they resisted systematic tabulation, so were useless to the study, yet were undermining the hard-won scientific evidence of genetic influence on personality traits. The result was that quite early in the study, when the Minnesotans spoke publicly, it was only about the statistical evidence of trait inheritance; nothing more was said about the identical hobbies, dress styles, and phobias of the twins who had never met.
I was very let down at this moratorium on the striking twin parallels. I appreciated the psychology profession’s comfort with statistics and its discomfort with anecdotal phenomena. It was struggling against a soft-science image. But it seemed that the Minnesota study, with its rare and exotic raised-apart twins, had stumbled on natural phenomena teeming with valid, scientific implications.
I began to see their cautionary silence as an addition to my short list of advantages to a nonscientist writing a book on this subject. Instead of rushing past the bizarre twin similarities as threats to my scientific dignity, I could linger over them, ruminate about them, discuss their implications. Among other pluses I awarded myself: I had no published positions to defend, no scholarly reputation to protect, no academic toes to fear trampling. An overview book for the layman was badly needed and I could approach such a book as a journalist, an infiltrator of unfamiliar worlds, and a translator of the geneticists’ arcane terminology.
I even saw advantages to my rudimentary knowledge of molecular biology. For the experts, the amazing chemical interactions propelling all of us are more interesting than the often banal human behavior these systems produce. Adding to the fascination of the molecular level are the newness of this research and the challenge of the fresh enigmas that are emerging on a routine basis. The complex interplay of proteins that influence personality is still a mysterious no-man’s-land stretching between genes and behavior. My helplessness in the face of the scientific conundrums would force me to concentrate on the overall cause-and-effect tableaux.
These, then, are the reasons I have for the past twenty years been an armchair follower of this inspiring movement. In addition to my excitement over the subject, I saw the project as atonement for not having stuck with my undergraduate hunches about genes in the first place. Because of this, I dedicate the result that follows to the small band of scientists—such as Irving Gottesman, Sandra Scarr, David Lykken, and Thomas Bouchard—who during behaviorism’s brook-no-dissent reign shared my skepticism, but who, unlike me, were not driven from psychology by the prevailing wisdom, but who hung in, courageously, to make their wisdom prevail.
Acknowledgments
WHEN I PLUNGED INTO this alien territory, I was continually amazed by the generosity and patience shown by busy scientists toward a journalistic interloper. Although most of these men and women were consumed with important research, all graciously took time to explain their work to one who—at least at the outset—barely spoke their language. My first thanks go to Thomas Bouchard and his dedicated group at the Minnesota Twin Studies—in particular David Lykken, Auke Tellegen, Matthew McGue, and Margaret Keyes.
Among the many other scientists and science writers whose help stands out in my memory are the following: Jonathan Beckwith, Dorothy Berner, Wade Berretini, Nathaniel Comfort, Barbara Ehrenreich, Frank Elliott, Robin Fox, Irving Gottesman, Dean Hamer, Jerome Kagan, Leon Kamin, Kenneth Kendler, Daniel Koshland, Nancy Pedersen, Richard Pillard, Robert Plomin, Arlen Price, Vincent Sarich, Sandra Scarr, Nancy Segal, Alcino Silva, Lee Silver, Stephen Suomi, Lionel Tiger, Ming Tsuang, Tim Tully, Eric Turkheimer, James Watson, Jonathan Weiner, Jan Witkowski, Robert Wright, and Philip Zimbardo. My thanks to them all.
Special gratitude goes to my editor, Victoria Wilson, who weathered with stoicism and optimism the early efforts of a writer grappling with a new genre. And most of all, I want to express profound thanks to my agent, Helen Brann, who had many solid reasons to discourage my ambition in undertaking this book, but did nothing but cheer me on. Few have such faith.
ONE
THE CHEMISTRY OF SELF
ON A MONDAY MORNING of a typical workweek, a single woman in her early thirties is awakened by k.d. lang
coming over her clock radio. She switches to a classical station and is pleased to hear a Haydn symphony; the soothing rationality of classical music is her preference for starting the day. After a hot shower, she applies her usual discreet makeup, then selects a beige suit with gold buttons to wear to the office. She wore it only four days ago, but she feels good in it and knows it’s becoming.
She brews a pot of Yuban French Roast and drinks a cup—milk but no sugar—while skimming the morning paper, which annoys her for having nothing about a major film star’s arrest on drug charges that had been mentioned on the eleven o’clock news. An article on the obstructed relief efforts in Zaire upsets her and she resolves to donate another fifty dollars to Save the Children. On her way to the street, the elevator stops at a lower floor and an unfamiliar man in his forties enters and greets her cheerfully. She grunts and feels a complicated mix of obligatory civility, stranger-fear, violated space, and anger at male sexual presumption. She yearns for the elevator to reach the lobby.
Once outside her building, she resists splurging on a taxi and waits for a bus. Finding a seat next to a teenaged boy with books on his lap, one open to a page of graphs, she feels a rush of satisfaction at her success since leaving college, where her grades were lackluster. But then a pang of regret hits her about career opportunities missed, missteps taken. The boy indicates he is getting off. She slides into his seat and looks out the window to see an old man carrying a suitcase stumble on the curb and almost fall. An urge to help comes over her.
The empty seat beside the woman is taken by a tall slender man in his forties. From the corner of her eye she sees that he has curly brown hair, a trim mustache, and glasses—three of her favorite attributes in a male. She reads her newspaper, but glances at his pants leg so close to her skirt and wonders if his leg is hairy. She forces down an erotic surge by plunging into an editorial on redistricting. Traffic is moving slowly; she fears she’ll be late. A Hispanic man who looks drunk boards the bus and fumbles for the fare as the traffic light turns red. She wants to scream.