WHO ARE WE?

According to the latest genetic research, who we are is influenced much more by our genes, and much less by our environment, than we have been led to believe. And the older we get, the more we are an expression of our DNA, and the less we are an expression of our environment. The more, in a way, we become who we are.

This is based on decades of statistical research, particularly into twins. Even our environment is partially a product of our DNA: eg the availability of TV as a child used to be taken just as an environmental influence. But it's not. How much the child actually watches is mainly genetic. Academic attainment is largely genetic. And because it is heritable, the favourable environment for it as a child is also genetically related. If there is genuine equality of opportunity, then heritable meritocracies are produced.

This is not fair in the slightest, and goes against much social theory that tends to favour the environmental influence. But it seems to be how things are. The implications are huge.

Weight is another example. Adopted children growing up in a health-conscious family tend to adopt the weight pattern of their biological parents. The environment makes little difference.

The reasons these findings are controversial is that they seem to give backing to the idea of an innately superior class of people. If you think in terms of some people being 'better' than others, and you assess that in terms of peoples job ability and earning power, the fact that is heritable gives backing to this idea. But I see it as an idea that has always been around: people have egos, and if we can find a way of feeling better than others, we often will. 

Having grown up around such 'better' people, I never noticed a marked ability for sensitivity to and care for others. If anything, it seemed to me worse. And I'm sure that is heritable as well. And ultimately we all have our own unique gifts, and it misses the point to get into comparing ourselves to others. Each person, each plant, each animal has its own spirit.

Anyway, for me there is a mystery in all this. Professor Plomin does not even state his assumption that there are only 2 possible influences on who we are: DNA and the environment. And there seem to be a lot of factors that are not explained by either. Plomin calls these influences 'non-shared environment' to explain the differences between eg identical twins. But these influences continually stump researchers, however hard they look. They seem to be unobservable and unmeasurable. They just assume they have to be there.

I think they have found the spirit-element! It seems to me rather like the brain researchers who, after all these years, are still completely stumped by what consciousness is and how it arises. This, to my mind, is because consciousness, the dreaming, is what lies behind even the perception of a thing called the brain in the first place.

So back to this part of who we are that stumps the geneticists. Good! Plomin is a bit of a straight-line thinker who doesn't even name, let alone question, his own assumptions. He can't bring himself to say well there's a mystery here. But there clearly is a mystery. There is a way in which we are unknowable that is at the heart of who we are. It is the spirit within our earthly presence that continually dreams us into being. It brings influences and characteristics from who-knows-where. And it is creative, it cannot be pinned down.

We are this synergy between spirit, DNA and environment.

I think science can only go so far in any field before it is defied. That is because it is a specialised, and therefore limited, way of looking at reality. Matter dissolves into counter-intuitive quantum reality, in which there are only probabilities. Most of the universe has been discovered to be missing. And much of the human personality turns out to be a mystery, not explicable in terms of either genes or the environment.