I was an invited speaker yesterday at a debate at the annual Battle of Ideas, run at the Royal College of Art in central London. Speaking against the motion I was aligned with Spiked editor Helene Guldberg whose book "Just Another Ape? has just come out, and Tipu Aziz, professor of neurosurgery at Oxford, who uses a lot of monkeys in his research to patent methods of direct electrode stimulation of the brain to cure Parkinsons. For the motion were veteran rights campaigner Richard Ryder - the man who coined the term "painism", and lawyer David Thomas. The debate was chaired by Stuart Derbyshire - a researcher, ironically, on pain, at the University of Birmingham.
I argued that recent cognitive psychology research suggests very strongly that humans are, as many of us of course suspect, genuinely exceptional with regards to what our minds can do - and far less genetically close to chimps than apes' rights campaigners would like us to believe. Ryder did not dispute that, but did dispute the idea that this gave us any reason to value ourselves more than the rest of the animal kingdom. His "painism" idea is a level playing field that requires us to extend rights to all creatures that we believe can feel pain. Both he and Thomas seemed at pains to suggest that they were not talking about rights in the law court, international statute sense of the word - but in a wider and more general sense of having interests that we should be aware of and protect. They were thus dodging the issue that "rights" in the hard legal sense is exactly what their colleagues in the Great Ape Project have been pursuing for apes in three legislatures recently - the government of the Balearics, New Zealand, and in the International Court of Human Rights in the Hague. Both Thomas and Ryder punted the old Peter SInger argument that tiny children or the very old - with Alzheimers disease - have rights even though they are incapable of fully understanding what they are - like chimpanzees - so why make an exception for humans? I have always found this attempt to equilibrate normal chimps with human elderly and mentally frail as particularly repugnant - doing no justice to either species - and it is also irrelevant because we know that infants will eventually grow into the fully functional adults that elderly people with Alzheimers disease once were. It seems to me that if you are going to talk about rights - flawed and often un-workable concept that it may be in human society - you have to talk about them in a legislative statute-book sense otherwise the whole debate lacks focus and what you are really talking about is "being nice to nature". And if you are talking about rights in the hard sense then obviously this is a farce with regard to non-human primates and other animals because they can have no concept of what a right is, cannot fight for them or defend them, and have no concept of the obligations to society that attends them.
Are we humans simply remodelled apes? Chimps with a tweak? Is the difference between our genomes so minuscule it justifies the argument that our cognition and behaviour must also differ from chimps by barely a whisker? If “chimps are us” should we grant them human rights? Or is this one of the biggest fallacies in the study of evolution? NOT A CHIMP argues that these similarities have been grossly over-exaggerated - we should keep chimps at arm’s length. Are humans cognitively unique after all?
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Friendships Moderate an Association between a Dopamine Gene Variant and Political Ideology
In my chapter the ape that domesticated itself I strive toward a bio-social theory for humans and invoke recent work on a number of variants of prominent neuro-transmitters. These cases are prime examples of the subtle ways in which we are discovering that genes and the cultural environment interact to produce a number of behavioural phenotypes in human populations. I mention the 4R and 7R variants of the dopamine receptor at great length and in this fascinating paper the authors take these dopamine receptor variants into the realm of politics - specifically pointing out that a combination of the long 7R allele of DRD4 and a strong and functional circle of friends will produce a person with liberal tendencies. Heres the abstract:
"Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association. This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences."
"Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association. This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences."