A prolific science journalist challenged conventional wisdom on human behavior determination in a lecture Tuesday before a large audience in McCosh 50.
"Genes are at the mercy of our experience," said Matt Ridley, who holds a D.Phil in zoology from Oxford. Ridley proposed an alternative analytical paradigm, based on gene expression and learning, to replace the common "nature versus nurture" debate.
"We've always thought of genes as causes of behavior. We've got to start thinking of genes as consequences of behavior," Ridley said. "Behavior doesn't create the genes, but it determines whether the genes turn on or off."
Ridley began his lecture, "How Nature Turns on Nurture," with a humorous comparison of genome size among species. Through the late 1990s, scientists thought that the human species had around 100,000 genes to account for our highly advanced nervous system.
"In a moment of profound humiliation for our species," Ridley joked, scientists found that humans — and most mammals — only had about 24,000 genes, close to half the 40,000 genes in a rice plant.
Since humans and mice possess largely the same set of genes, it is not the genetic code itself but the parts that are expressed that differentiate mammalian species.
"There was something wrong with the model that because we are brilliant and sophisticated, we must have more genes to make us brilliant and sophisticated."
Instead, Ridley said, environmental factors ("nurture") affect expression of genes ("nature").
"My argument, essentially, is that we have an encoded genome, but that it has to be expressed, it has to be turned on, to determine how we behave," he said.
Ridley also discussed the role of learning in gene expression.
Monkeys born in labs, for instance, display no fear of snakes. But when lab monkeys view videos of wild monkeys frightened by snakes, the lab monkeys will express their genetically encoded fear of snakes as well. This reaction is not solely based on experience, Ridley said, because the lab monkeys do not learn to fear flowers inserted into the wild monkey video in place of the snakes.
"It is not nature versus nurture, but nature via nurture," Ridley concluded.
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