The tenacity of the nature/nurture divide

organized by Maria Kronfeldner and Carlos López Beltrán

Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

Description

For the last 140 years, the formula nature/nurture (Na-Nu) has captured a very basic split in the causal structure we assign to the constitution of the human. The divide determines explanatory strategies in scientific and non-scientific arenas. We capture what human beings (as individuals and as groups) are like by seeing them from the viewpoint of the capacities with which they are thrown into the world (nature, biology, heredity, genes etc.), as well as what the world does to them (nurture, “epi-biology”, culture, environment etc.). The Na-Nu distinction is of course one version of a broader complex made up of a set of analogous binary distinctions that for different purposes have been drawn in multiple settings, e.g. nature/culture, natural/artificial, innate/acquired, race/ethnicity, savage/civilized, sex/gender, animal/human etc. All of these have undergone multiple incarnations and have been subject to criticism and constant historical change. During the 20th century and these first years of the 21st, historians and philosophers of biology have been interpreting and problematizing the Na-Nu complex of world making dichotomies. Notwithstanding this longstanding and strenuous critique, the divide has been so entrenched that it always seems to re-emerge at the center of ongoing scientific and cultural debates, and has become one of the central motifs around which the ideological and political clashes of the life sciences has formed. Given the tenacity of the Na-Nu complex, its roots and underpinnings merit a closer look.

To gain a deeper understanding of the tenacity of this binary, we need to contextualize it within a larger time scale, and through different cultures. In the West, the cultural matrixes that define nature in distinction from culture (or the spiritual) reach back before the early Modern era. Comparative work in other non-Western traditions, both ancient and contemporary has pointed to alternative ways of situating and understanding life and bodies in the world.

In a small workshop, which will bring together scientists, historians and philosophers, we intend to revisit the Na-Nu complex from different and complementary angles and to collectively face the questions of where we are standing now and how we got here. Is there something inevitable about our dramatic dichotomous structure? Why does it seem to recur, under ever new shapes, with every new shift in the life and social sciences? Has it progressively weakened under the strain of criticism and alternative frames? Are we witnessing its last incarnations? What would a future conceptual field of humanities and the life sciences look like without such a conceptual and ontological divide?

We will concentrate on five main themes:

(1) Western dichotomous Na-Nu thinking: The history of the nature-nurture distinction can be traced back to Greek philosophy, which contained, in contrast to other cultures, the principle of polarity. What was the function of polarity in its Greek context? What broad effect has this had on our times?

(2) Non-Western alternatives: The contexts of Western science should not occlude the alternatives to that tradition. Are there cultures of knowledge which conceptualise life without using the Na-Nu divide, or used it in a different manner than the Western tradition? While Levi-Strauss has insisted on the universality of the Na-Nu divide, contemporary anthropologists and historians have developed very different views.

(3) Origin and articulation of the Na-Nu complex in the 19th century: Within the local trajectories of Western science, post-Foucaldian histories point to a watershed occurring in the mid-19th century: the construction of a strong meaning for the Na-Nu distinction that fragmented the human field and allowed the conceptualisation of traits in terms of two radically different causal inputs. Twin studies, for example, could be construed as natural experiments that helped sort out the Na-Nu question after an adequate conceptual frame was in place. But was such a break real, or is it a historiographical artifact that hides continuities? In any case, what are the conceptual and cultural factors that moved naturalists, anthropologists, philosophers and others to increasingly believe in the “naturality” of the Na-Nu split? What is the state of the art in historiographical terms, and what are the new directions in the historical perspectives on the origins of nature/nurture as a dichotomy?

(4) The trajectories of the Na-Nu complex in the 20th century: In the early 20th century, different guises and degrees of the nature/nurture dichotomy can be distinguished. What are these degrees and guises of the Na-Nu divide and in which contexts do they appear? Important keywords are, for instance, heritability measures, the concept of the norm of reaction, gene-environment interaction studies. What exactly were the changes in the meaning of the Na-Nu divide, as they were initiated in the 20th century, i.e. in classical genetics, in the modern synthesis, in molecular biology, in our postgenomic period? How have the programs of socio-biology and behavioral genetics, as well as the possibilities of biotechnology, changed the picture?

(5) What does the Na-Nu complex do for us today? Finally, we intend to address contemporary debates and also ask a philosophical question: Should (and could) we get rid of the distinction or not? Some contemporary thinkers (e.g. developmental systems theorists) wish to eliminate the distinction, since they claim that it stands in the way of establishing a complexity-oriented and systemic understanding of biological and human realities. Or shall we regard the distinction to be in reality a cluster of useful distinctions that can be further analysed (and not kept lumped together) in order to be replaced, eventually, with more precise analytic ones? Is the issue a methodological one? A metaphysical one? An ideological one? What and where is the negotiating table on which it should be sorted out?

Back to past related workshops.