Why We Have To Either Pick Genes or The Environment, Not Both

Find more from Charlie Munford at www.talkingoctopus.com

Genes vs. The Environment.

This question, in explaining what happens in living systems, seems like an apparent causality problem. An apparent causality problem is a false dichotomy, like, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Both can of course be true, since no chicken ever arrived without an egg and no egg without a chicken. Chickens evolved from egg-laying dinosaurs, so maybe you could answer this silly riddle once and for all by knowing a little evolutionary biology, but no one takes this sort of question very seriously. Nor should they.

It seems easy to say to this question, as we say of chicken and egg, “Of course it’s both.” But genes vs. environment is actually not that kind of apparent causality problem, it’s a real causality problem. We have a messy habit in science of splitting causality between genes and the environment in explaining traits or behaviors. This is a valid statistical method, but it presents an artificially precise number which misrepresents the ways reality can change. I want to explain this perspective first to be sure you can see the deeper question I will ask afterward. The deeper problem with saying, “Of course it’s both,” is that it ignores the fact that we have to explain life based on where the knowledge within life forms originates. We cannot use both genes and the environment in explaining this, and I’ll show you why.

First, here is an example showing why it seems to be sensible to say, “Of course it’s both”:

All organisms require both genes and an environment. Of course, if you alter genes you alter the organism. Likewise, if you alter environment you alter the organism. In these sense the causality is bi-directional, and there is no choice necessary. Trying to explain how much a trait in a population, say running speed, for instance, is explained by genes and how much it is explained by environment is a tricky game, because if you change one or the other you also change the ratio of causality. Let’s say the background mean running speed for all humans is 6 miles per hour. Now, let’s say in a given population of Spartans the mean running speed is also 6 miles per hour, and at that speed the causal contribution of genes and the environment that explains mean running speed for an average Spartan is 50% genes, 50% environment. Now let’s say the population acquires a gene that prevents running entirely, but the gene spreads because it also increases fertility, for some reason. As the gene spreads two things will happen. The mean running speed of the population will slow down, say to 5 mph since some of them can’t run at all. But also, more and more of the mean running speed of the population will be explained by genetics. For an average Spartan, the degree to which their genetic makeup explains their running speed will climb as the maladaptive gene spreads, moving from 50% genes 50% environment up to say, 60% genes 40% environment.

Likewise, if the environment where the population lives changes, another change will happen in the causal ratio. For instance, let’s say that no genetic changes happen. Instead, Sparta declares war on Athens and half of the Spartans are required to run ten miles daily. Now instead of slowing down, the mean running speed of the Spartans will increase, to say 7 mph, since some of them are now running much more, and faster. But likewise, for an average Spartan, the degree to which the environment explains their running speed will increase as the war continues, and the degree to which genetics explains their speed will decrease slightly, to maybe 45% genes 55% environment.

The point of this example was to illustrate that when social scientists and biologists compute some trait or behavior and attribute it both to genes and the environment, they can only do so for a given set of conditions in a population. When conditions change, all bets are off. The calculations only work for a given population with given genes and a given environment. If any of these change, the contribution of the two factors has to be recalculated, and as we noticed, if one of them goes to zero (like there are no genes at all) then there will be no population of living beings either, so they both go to zero. People can be forgiven for not understanding this arcane point of statistical analysis, but it changes the meaning of these sort of statistics profoundly when you learn it.

But now the deeper point I want to make in this essay is totally different. Before getting into it, I wanted to be sure you recognized that I wasn’t unaware of statistics and how genes and environments are normally discussed in science, because I now want to discuss them in a totally different way. The real question about genes and environments that we face today in biology is a profound and genuine causality problem. The question is this: Where does the causal knowledge that shapes an organism originate?

The traditional explanation for this, for nearly one hundred years, has been simple: genes. Genes, through random mutation and natural selection, pass along heritable instructions that cause the assembly of an organism. In this explanation, the environment plays two important roles. Primarily, it is the required backdrop for the development of an organism and the expression of the genes. Secondarily, it is the factor that results in the natural selection of which genes persist. Both of these roles, however, are passive. Genes explain how forms of life have been controlled to remain organized and alive, and genes explain how novelty has arisen among life forms so that natural selection could act on it. The blind search for new forms, the grand atheistic designing influence, takes place at the level of the genes. This has explained how, without a roadmap, nature can have created “endless forms so beautiful” that achieve astonishingly complex function.

There is one interesting fact that could make us pause here. Let’s think about the boundary between life and non-life. When has a set of molecules, by itself, transitioned from non-life to life or vice versa? In the downward direction, life transitions to non-life all the time. Trillions of life forms are dying by themselves in your gut microflora today, with no assistance from other life forms around them. But none of them are coming alive by themselves; instead, all life comes from life. To be born, a cell must derive from another cell. The boundary from non-life upwards to life has only been crossed, as far as we can be sure, one time in the entire 4.6 billion year history of the earth.

This makes me pause and notice. When a life form transitions to non-life, is it the genes or the environment that has changed? DNA is a relatively stable, inert molecule. It is still present, and still usable, when a cell dies. In your body when you die there will still be trillions of serviceable copies of your DNA that, given known technologies today, could theoretically be transferred into other cells that would remain living. But you, as an organism, as a process, would nevertheless cross the boundary to non-life. You will give a coin to the boatman and cross the river, never to return. So genes don’t really explain the transition from life to non-life very well, only environment.

The deeper problem with this explanation, however, is that epigenetic or non-genetic influences are heritable. This spoils the blind search at the level of the genome. The search is no longer blind, in other words; it is, as physiologist Denis Noble puts it, “one-eyed.” This is a profound, genuine causality problem. This is not a problem we can simply sweep under the rug in the category of “surprising facts that don’t make sense.” This realization undermines the entire atheistic underpinnings of biological science.

To put this another way, the explanation for how the environment could be putting knowledge into an organism’s body was based on the idea of a random lottery in genetic mutations. Whichever genes were randomly produced, and “won” this lottery of replication, were then included in the future bodies of living organisms to cause them to replicate the same genes yet again. This is a logically complete explanation for life that does not require any divine influence. It neatly encapsulates the “endless forms so beautiful” of evolved life. It has all the characteristics of a good scientific theory. It is parsimonious, logical, informative, testable, and hard-to-vary. It is a beautiful theory. But it is wrong. The search for knowledge is not blind at the level of the genome.

Not only are epigenetic and non-genetic influences heritable, but the epigenetic conditions of the cell affect the mutation of DNA itself, making it non-random with respect to function. As the evolutionists Michael Skinner and Eric Nilsson put it in their Unified Evolutionary Theory review in Evolutionary Epigenetics in 2021, “We now know environmental epigenetics can dramatically influence genetic variation through the promotion of genetic mutations and alterations.”

This makes perfect sense to me. Surely the configuration of the cell in general cannot be entirely irrelevant to which genetic mutations occur and where they occur in the genome. If you think about it, it should have been obvious a long time ago that this must be the case, even without a lot of modern molecular biology to prove it. How could even purely genetic mutations ever have been considered entirely random with respect to function, if they happened inside the structure of a living cell? The entire structure of the cell is designed (by nature, somehow) to prevent most forms of randomness, and certainly to prevent dysfunction.

There are only two ways to avoid the conclusion that the atheistic foundations of biology have been spoiled by these discoveries in epigenetics. The first is to propose that somehow gene-controlled matter has evolved a will to evolve epigenetically. That the blind search, in other words, has discovered a configuration of matter that brings with it intentions and goals to further remain organized and evolve adaptive functions. The second is to propose that there is another blind search at the level of the organism during active life. This second option is epistolution, and it is the direction where I am virtually certain the truth lies.

The idea that gene-controlled evolved life has subsequently evolved a will to evolve epigenetically is not a credible assertion. This is only a defensive reaction of scientists caught in a profound paradigm shift and uncertain where to place their faith. Matter controlled by DNA cannot have evolved a will to evolve beyond the influence of its purported DNA instructions. For one thing, if this will-to-evolve-epigenetically was an evolved trait we would have to claim that it has evolved in every lineage on earth that displays transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Since all single-celled organisms pass along their entire cellular structure in some form to their offspring in mitosis, all single-celled life has transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. This must be true simply because there seems to be no conceivable mechanism to prevent it. Therefore, all single-celled life must have evolved this trait. Single-celled life is the vast majority of life on earth. It is also the simplest, so we could assume in this case that all life has this will-to-evolve-epigenetically trait. This idea is simply incompatible with genes containing instructions. It is hard to distinguish this reality, in other words, from epistolution.

Epistolution insists that there must be a blind search in nature for the organization of life forms. It relocates this blind search from the genes to the level of the whole organism during active life. It is synonymous, I believe, with the missing fundamental theory of intelligence that will explain organisms’ ability, unlike all narrow AI, to form contextual inferences. It will also explain, I believe, our moral sense, and why this moral sense must be a property of all life forms. It will do the same for beauty, curiosity, experimentation, fear, and love. Epistolution insists that reality is atheistic, but also holistic. It insists that the whole universe is involved in controlling the development of a living being. It recognizes the tremendous importance of DNA as an information storage and retrieval system, but not as a set of instructions. It recognizes both our entrapment in our circumstances and our freedom to interpret them given who we are. It presents an organism as something that asks questions, rather than as something that inherits an answer.

Alone in its world, floating in an envelope of influences that only it can truly understand, the epistevolving life form asks its world, “Given what I am, what can I know?” and at the same time, in a sincere voice it asks itself, “Given what I know, what should I become?”