So sociopaths are made, not born? How do you explain amoral people who come from otherwise normal and nurturing family environments?
A little more than tangentially related: RadioLab recently did a show on a scientific look at “being good.” Worth a listen for the people invested in this subject.
Like who?
They don’t have to. They test whether a certain behavior appears to correlate to the environment vs. family relations or some other factor that separates nature from nurture. If the conclusion is that the behavior didn’t come from the environment, then it must have been biologically determined. Everything biologically determined comes from genes (or from disease or injury, but these can be controlled for).
Because nobody ever claims that complex behavior is 100% biologically caused. The purpose of inquiry is to find out whether it is at all biologically influenced. If it is, then further lines of inquiry investigate how much it is biologically influenced, how the environment affects this influence, and ultimately the exact physiological or biochemical cause, and what genes produced this cause.
Let me ask you this… have you ever sat down and read any books on this subject? Because there are a number of popularly accessible works that do a good job of explaining these concepts. They anticipate and demolish all the arguments you’ve made here. If you’re interested in improving your understanding, please ask and I will provide you some references.
Why can’t they be both, like the late Earl Warren?
Again, some minuscule amount of variation in personality might be good genetically, because organisms that robotically act the same way every time, given the same environment and genetics, might sooner or later run into a bottleneck where they will all make the “wrong” decision and all die.
I didn’t think you agreed with the OP at all, so that strikes me as a weird question.
The BTK killer.
Half the case histories in The Mask of Sanity.
Any sociopath in a twin study who was raised in a good home.
If genetic randomness (or a developmental glitch in the womb or so on) isn’t to blame for any sort of anti-social amoral behavior then…well, I don’t want to attack a straw man, but I’m not sure what the OP is proposing. The notion that serial killers and sociopaths do what they do because mommy didn’t love them enough went out of fashion like 30 years ago. If your 7 year old doesn’t have a conscience and doesn’t understand that other people have feelings or he has violent fantasies it’s doubtful you’re much to blame, unless you criminally neglected him or heavily abused drugs while you were pregnant.
Or maybe ITR champion isn’t going as far as I think. Do you disagree that normal people have an inborn moral faculty that develops along a predictable schedule?
No, I actually thought you were suggesting that there was no genetic component or else there would be no born sociopaths.
Are you saying there’s no environmental component to human behavior at all? That seems extraordinary to me.
If you’ve read other threads by ITR, his hypothesis is obvious. Human morality comes from God.
Why he doesn’t want to outright state his hypothesis should be obvious as well.
Of course, this is wrong, the chimp you’re thinking of didn’t kill and eat her own babies, instead she killed and ate the babies of other chimps. But nevermind. Next, you say this:
So which is it? That human morality can’t be analogous to a chimp’s, because humans don’t sometimes kill their babies, or that human behavior can’t be universal because humans sometimes kill their babies?
Infanticide has a long history, and the main reason we don’t see much of it today in 2011 America is because we have legal abortion which accomplishes the same objective, just earlier in the process.
Ah yes, the name was familiar, but I didn’t remember from what kind of thread.
The alarming thing is that now I think he’s implying that if it weren’t for god writing the law and wielding the pain stick, we’d all be eating our babies!
(he can’t be saying that god imbues us with an innate morality, because his arguments would work just as “well” against such a position)
The bigger point is that the existence of infanticide is not incompatible with morality. Infanticide is a horrifying thing, but it isn’t done haphazardly or remorselessly. It follows a rationality of maximizing your genetic survival to the next generation in situations of dire poverty (note that India and China are the biggest offenders). You might argue that a “morality” that includes infanticide is no kind of morality at all. I would counter that it’s unconscionable to kill in wartime or capital punishment, but that doesn’t stop conservatives who sanction this behavior from feeling like they’re following a good moral behavior. It goes to show that explicit moral precepts aren’t hardwired, but that we do have a sense of moral cognition that helps construct and maintain systems of morality that are adaptive to the environment and culture.
In a rare example of Wikipedia being right, the article about Phineas Gage does say that most of what has been reported as fact about that particular case is actually fiction:
Based on what I’ve read, those paragraphs seem like a pretty decent summary of the facts of the case. For example this article from The Psychologist says:
As for studies about brain injury patients, that’s a much larger topic and one that I’m not an expert on. However, I’ve read from a number of sources (here’s one) that recent research on neuroplasticity has called into doubt some of the results that were previously thought of as settled in this area. This research is very recent, as in within the last ten years, for the most part. Hence I imagine it will be awhile before definite conclusions are reached about the extent to which damages to certain brain areas does produce lasting changes in morality or any other function.
I only started posting to SDMB in the past year and I should have known you (or any other person that consistently debates) would focus on the weak case study from the mid1800s instead of the introduction to the link I provided, the study provided by the link and anything modern and with great support in favor of that one attack point in my argument.
Unsurprisingly, the full text of your link supports what I have been saying all long:
It is saying that the older model was that recovery from stroke was due to the functionally identical region in the undamaged hemisphere of the brain taking over the job. What is now known is that the damaged region, the region that was doing the job, the job that its genetically programmed connections and chemistry allow it to do, also reorganizes to do that job once more or to at least assist in it. This does not disagree with what I was saying and in fact supports it. The article also comments on how the environment plays a far more important role in getting this reorganization started.
The fact that protein activity determines the behavior of an axon does not prove that genese control the behavior of the human brain, just as the fact that the keys on my keyboard produces letters in this post does not mean that the content of this post originated from my keyboard. Neurons are constantly changing through a human’s life. New axons are being formed, old axons are being removed, and existing axons are being strengthened or weakened. These changes in the brain’s wiring result from various stimuli from the outside and from the choices made by the individual. They do not result from any gene or genes, since the brain is capable of radically changing itself within an individual’s lifetime (within a very short time, in fact). Similarly I can write radically different posts using the same keyboard.
They don’t. Not nearly as well as we’ve been lead to believe, at least.
As I already said, I find no fundamental rule for human morality that’s obeyed by all humans, or by a majority in all societies. In societies where there’s overriding pressure towards believing that murder is wrong, almost everyone believes that it is wrong. In societies where there’s overriding pressure towards believing that murder is acceptable in certain cases, almost everyone believes that it is acceptable in those cases. Likewise with theft, sexual mores, government, property ownership, or anything else one cares to name. Most individuals pick up a moral outline from the society in which they are raised. However, an individual is still free to decide whether to follow that moral outline or not. Some choose to follow it, some ignore it, some choose to go against it in radical ways.
The error that many make in discussions like this is in assuming that anything genetic must be absolute. And that by finding a single exception that “proves” it must be cultural.
In reality, pretty much everything natural has variation. And no-one doubts that cultural pressures do have a huge effect on our species.
This does not take away from the fact that there is huge degree of overlap when you start to look at things like morality.
If morality is purely cultural, where are the populations with no concept of morality whatsoever? Where are the populations that have no morals that we could relate to?
So some cultures find murder to be wrong, while some find murder to be generally wrong but justifiable under certain circumstances, such as to prevent greater evil.
Well, with a massive spectrum of morality like that it must be entirely cultural :rolleyes:
Who argues this? You argue this but nobody else does. It is a product of your imagination. You are making up this opposing point of view based on your understanding of neuroscience. The people you are arguing with do not believe what you think they believe. The closest anyone has come to arguing what you think they arguing is Chief Pedant, but he is not making this illusory argument. What is your purpose in arguing against this phantom point-of-view anyway?
To help me understand, fit Rett Syndrome into your point-of-view. Rett Syndrome is a disease caused by mutations in a gene which codes for a protein that in turn regulates the expression of other genes. Rett Syndrome causes severe developmental deficits in brain and behavior of females and since males only carry one copy of the gene responsible for Rett Syndrome, the mutations are embryonically lethal. Explain the behavioral effects of Down Syndrome, Angelman Syndrome, Prader-Willi Syndrome, Brain Tumors, Phenylketonuria, Fragile-X Syndrome, Cri Du Chat Syndrome, and any other misregulated/mutated gene effect on behavior that you can think of.
Also, your computer analogy is misunderstanding the role of genes. Genes would provide the blueprint for your computer.
Do you contend that the only class of psychoactive drug is the modern antidepressant? I am intrigued, I admit, but frankly rather dubious.
Could you give an example of someone in this thread who would argue with that statement?