A while ago I’d read that some wildlife biologists had speculated that there’s a regulatory gene for size in grizzly bears and that the mother could change the setting on that gene, setting it to BIG when there was plenty of food and grizzlies were dominant and to a lesser setting when the conditions were less ideal for those humpbacked bears. There have been other speculations as well as factual hints that an organism doesn’t develop under the strict control of its genes, that genes are part of an organism and not some sort of all-powerful dictator beyond the reach of its slaves. The strongest evidence that the gene-as-dictator model is defective was the discovery by the Human Genome Project that human beings have about the same number of active genes as the average worm. I’ll leave it to the reader to think about that or to research the thoughts of geneticists and others who’ve tried to make sense of that result.
Now we have evidence for the complication of inheritance in the form of data from reproducible studies of the inheritance of diabetes: Diabetes Transmitted From Parents To Children, New Research Suggests.
DNA is the primary mechanism of inheritance; kids get half their genes from mom and half from dad. However, scientists are just starting to understand additional kinds of inheritance like metabolic programming, which occurs when an insult during a critical period of development, either in the womb or soon after birth, triggers permanent changes in metabolism.
In this study, the researchers looked at the effects of a diet high in saturated fat on mice and their offspring. As expected, they found that a high-fat diet induced type 2 diabetes in the adult mice and that this effect was reversed by stopping the diet.
However, if female mice continued a high-fat diet during pregnancy and/or suckling, their offspring also had a greater frequency of diabetes development, even though the offspring were given a moderate-fat diet. These mice were then mated with healthy mice, and the next generation offspring (grandchildren of the original high-fat fed generation) could develop diabetes as well.
In effect, exposing a fetal mouse to high levels of saturated fats can cause it and its offspring to acquire diabetes, even if the mouse goes off the high-fat diet and its young are never directly exposed.
The study used mice so it’s not time to warn women to eat differently during pregnancy and breastfeeding but earlier research has shown that this kind of inheritance is at work in humans. For example, there is an increased risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease in children born of malnourished mothers.
Changes from metabolic programming can pass on through multiple generations even though there’s no changes to DNA, or at least no plausible Lamarckian mechanism for transmitting a metabolic change back to the corresponding genes. Though we don’t yet know how important this is in human beings, there is reason to suspect it could be very important. In any case, it greatly complicates our understanding of our particular human natures and how we fit into a family line. In theory, though not yet proven for our species, we could inherit the effects of bad luck or bad habits of our grandmothers by way of our mothers or fathers.
While this can seem unfair, most of us can accept this for physical problems such as hypertension and diabetes. What about inheritable traits or dispositions that have a more direct bearing on moral matters? Many accept that a man might have too strong a taste for whiskey and yet draw back the conclusion that our moral freedom is constrained by factors inherited from prior generations. This sort of constraint on our moral freedom seems all the more unfair if it’s a matter of our mother’s or grandmother’s habits rather than the DNA they carried through no fault of their own, though I’m not sure about the use of the word ‘fault’ when talking about who we are. To say that it is or isn’t my fault that I’m me, that I possess certain strengths and certain weaknesses, might be a little strange. That we talk this way might be a sign of the confusion that leads us to think constraints remove our moral freedom though constraints are necessary for a well-formed human nature. To be sure, constraints can strangle us or choke off some vulnerable part of us, but we shouldn’t speak as if freedom were some sort of formlessness. And usually we don’t.
We get close to our fears about being morally misshaped when we consider the results of another study as summarized i this article, Nature or nurture — Are you who your brain chemistry says you are?, we read:
Our main finding was that reward dependence is the only personality dimension correlated with opiate receptor binding, and that positive correlation was restricted to the ventral striatum, which is considered the key area of the human reward system and of the development of addictive behavior,” said Peter Bartenstein, M.D., professor of nuclear medicine, Ludwig Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany. “This correlation means that people with high reward dependence have a high concentration of opiate receptors available in that area, while people with low dependence have fewer opiate receptors.
In other words, be born with too many of those opiate receptors and you’re in relatively greater risk of becoming a junkie. This returns us to the harsher mysteries of that phrase domesticated by gentle Christians of a prosperous age: There, but for the grace of God, go I. But I have no interest in developing that line of thought.
Thomistic intentional morality can easily handle these findings which are serious problems to nearly all modern moral theories and most pre-modern moral theories as well. We’re creatures, organisms, and our moral natures grow as part of our overall growth. We’re not rational agents, nor are we autonomous agents. I don’t say we aren’t rational and autonomous because such words do describe certain aspects of our beings. I do say we’re primarily organisms and our stomachs do have some impact upon our moral decision-making, especially when we’re truly hungry. Our sex organs and brains interact in complicated ways. We inhabit environments where the meaning and impact of a habitual behavior or a single action vary according to context. We’re organisms in specific contexts.
I’m not trying to introduce any sort of ‘holistic’ mysticism. Organisms act as such but they can be usefully studied. Human beings are the ‘rational animal’ only as a way of qualifying certain differences between us and even the most intelligent of other animals. Our human natures aren’t rational in a complete sense but they can be understood in scientific terms, in terms of rationality. The mind can study that which isn’t mind or isn’t only mind. That’s tautologically true because even the human mind takes its form in response to its environments, the universe is all goes well, the world — or universe seen in light of God’s purposes — if all goes still better. Moreover, our minds respond even to our own bodies. As a consequence, even in it’s ‘immaterial’ aspects, the mind is a process of response to Creation, in part or whole. The human mind is a fairly well-defined subset of those organic development processes which are human nature, but there is substantial overlap between our intellectual natures and our moral natures.
We become moral beings — and mindful, self-aware beings — by processes which are spread over time and over our own bodies and our environments. It’s those development processes, part of more general development processes of human organisms, which are our moral natures or our intellectual natures. Each and every act we make is part of the movement of the whole of the organisms which are us. As a consequence, each and every act we make with any moral import, even the decision whether to pick up a hobby and cut back on watching television, is a part of our moral development.
What interests me for now is that the organic foundation of human nature, including its moral aspects, argues for ways of speaking of cause and effect as being, shall we say, more diffuse than the well-defined ways of speaking of agents and decisions in spacetime terms reminiscent of billiard-ball physics. I have read that the logician and philosopher Quine has spoken of the possibility of causation which is non-local but haven’t yet followed up on that. I suspect he was motivated by the non-local nature of some fields in modern physics and that’s actually my primary motivation as well. Human moral nature is easier to discuss than relationships involving the mathematics and concepts of general relativity or quantum mechanics — though likely not easier to define unless we have that understanding of fundamental being which comes from physics and mathematics. One reason I say that human moral nature is easier to discuss is the availability of interesting results from modern research which cast doubt on so many models of human decision-making, for example, the idea that our conscious brain regions play an important role in all our decisions.
The interested reader can follow up on the basics of Thomistic moral nature as I understand it by reading Is This Evidence Against Free-will? for a discussion of one set of experiments showing we make at least some simple decisions without any prior activity in the regions of our brain which are associated with higher levels of consciousness. The problem is that this sort of a result does argue against ‘traditional’ models of free-will, tradition being reshaped by modern philosophers in the various schools of liberalism with those results feeding back into would-be traditional schools of philosophy. This sort of a result doesn’t argue at all against models of moral freedom which recognize the organic nature of the human being.
Thomistic moral philosophy is perhaps the best such model. For a discussion of intentional morality as advocated by the neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman, see:
I’m still more interested in causation in the realm of physics proper because that can provide us with an understanding of the possibilities in terms of the fundamental being of this universe. I’m particularly interested in non-locality, which occurs in general relativity and quantum mechanics but also in other physical realms such as those of self-organizing systems. Hurricanes are one example of a self-organizing system where there are lots of local processes but no one dominates the process of a tropical storm developing from hot ocean water and disturbed air masses. Getting a handle on this issue of locality vs. non-locality, which is fairly well-defined and somewhat understood in its physical aspects, might well lead to a useful breakdown of much of the language and the conceptual apparatus we use to try and understand causation in the moral and non-moral realms.