We're Not Just Genes

For a moment there, I thought that modern technology had hit upon the solution to the Harvard social scene problem. Yes, folks, that's right--science, it seemed, was going to step in and cure our party woes and reinvigorate (or maybe just invigorate) our paltry non-academic lives. This past January, to lavish press and fantastic accolades, two groups of scientists independently reported that, in the words of a New York Times article on the first of this month, "people with an unshakable thirst for new sensations, who are impulsive, hot-blooded, fickle, excitable and extravagant, tend to have a distinctive variant of a gene that allows the brain to respond to dopamine, an essential communication signal."

At that moment, it all seemed so simple: we just needed to readjust our admissions policy to account for the severe and socially irresponsible deficiency of impulsive and excitable human beings in the Harvard-Radcliffe community. A little affirmative action, so to speak--to be maintained just so long as representation remained unbalanced--and we'd be all set. Harvard would become the novelty-seeking party scene it always had the potential to be.

But (alas!), social engineering of the genetic variety was not meant to be. Researchers from the United States and Finland announced recently that, despite attempts to replicate the results in two groups of Finnish men, they did not detect any connection between novelty-seeking and the longer gene variant of the so-called dopamine D4 receptor gene that was purported to correlate with it. The conclusion of these researchers: "These data suggest that D4DR may require re-evaluation as a candidate gene for personality variation."

Sad as this revelation is for the future possibilities of parties and excitement here at Harvard, the significance of this episode transcends the particular negative findings concerning the novelty-seeking gene. Dr. Anil K. Malhotra and his co-author on the recent report, Dr. David Goldman, are quoted as emphasizing that, "far from being social constructionists who question the ability of genetics to explain the tangles and contingencies of human nature," they consider psychiatric or behavioral genetics the key to unlocking the human essence. In the words of Dr. Malhotra, in reference to the burgeoning field of behavioral genetics: "It's the future. It leads to everything else. Our DNA is us."

Malhotra's statement reveals a conception of the human being that appeals to the utopian visions of much of the scientific community and has taken hold of many outside of the laboratory, as well. In this view, people are no more than a conglomeration of the genes that make them up. Granted, each person is complex and unique, but only because there are no two people with the identical combination of strands of As, Gs, Ts and Cs. As a foundation for human individuality and singularity, this belief system is pretty precarious.

There is another, perhaps more fundamental problem: if the very moments of seeming unpredictability can, in fact, be predicted by a long or short gene variant, if people can be reduced to their genetics, where does that leave any conception of human autonomy?

Free will, it seems, has no choice but to be subsumed by inherited traits, a sacrifice to the test-tube gods of biological determinism. What meaningful freedom do we have if all we are and all the decisions we "make" are, in the end, mere realizations of previously--and externally--determined realities?

I am not arguing that we hide behind a veil sewn of denial and artificial, ignorance-induced bliss, or, worse yet, suppress technological advances towards a fuller understanding of human beings because we are scared of what truths may be uncovered. I am, instead, cautioning a naive belief in the reducibility of infinitely complex and intricately multi-determined people to a simple equation and a string of letters.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott's column appears on alternate Saturdays.