It seems that language is what separates us from every other species, and what has enabled us to dominate our planet. I suppose that’s stating the obvious, but how this language feature of ours evolved isn’t so obvious, as we can’t examine the brains of our more recent hominin ancestors, or listen to them talk, if they could, to connect all the dots. All we have to go on is an increasingly detailed knowledge of the neurological correlates to human language, and similar brain regions in chimps and bonobos. It’s an enormously complicated subject for the brain of a near 70-year-old ignoramus to dive into, so let’s do it.
What is ‘theory of mind’? It’s the ability to attribute mental states to others. We can do this with dogs and cats and other creatures we’re familiar with, in a vague way, but our fellow humans communicate this – not always accurately or honestly of course – with language. Certainly language is a tool that gives us an incalculably enormous advantage over other species, and we have created many thousands of them – languages, that is. It helps that we have brains some three times the size of our closest living relatives, but size isn’t everything, as we know, for example, from corvids and other smart species.
So we’ve been studying certain areas of the brain, such as Broca’s area, involved in language production, and Wernicke’s area (language reception) for many decades, and have found similar regions in other primates, though there are important differences. The human Broca’s area is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere, and there are similar but different enlargements for the left Wernicke’s area. The same asymmetry exists for their smaller, less developed analogues in other primates. Interestingly, left-handed types, like myself, have less asymmetry (or I’d prefer to say, more symmetry) than right-handers.
Sadly, we can’t study the brains of Neanderthals or any other extinct hominid in close relation to H sapiens to determine whether they had anything like our language skills, or indeed whether the first members of our species had them. According to AI (never lies), gathering info from such sources as the Australian Museum, Reddit, Wikipedia, Science Daily and Discover Magazine, ‘complex’ language (as opposed to complex language) was in operation among humans from 200,000 to 50,000 years ago, so it’s all a bit vague.
Exploring the issue by way of brain processes is more than problematic because I can’t see how we’ll ever have evidence outside of modern H sapiens, but what about the physical structures required to produce speech? There’s a difference, at least in my mind, between speech and language in that speech doesn’t necessarily involve grammar, it just starts with vocalisations representing objects, states (fear, pleasure, anger, warning etc). To produce these requires particular ‘hardware’. Here’s AI again:
The ability to speak required specialized “hardware” that differs significantly from other primates:
Lowered Larynx: In humans, the larynx (voice box) is positioned lower in the throat, creating a larger space (the pharynx) that allows for a wider range of resonant sounds.
Tongue and Mouth: Unlike other mammals, the human tongue is thick, muscular, and almost circular, allowing it to move vertically and horizontally to shape complex sounds like vowels.
Breath Control: Humans evolved finer control over the muscles used for breathing, which is necessary to sustain the long exhalations needed for sentences.
The third item mixes hardware with neural developments, no doubt, but our current and perhaps permanent inability to trace these developments back in time is teasingly frustrating.
One interesting finding has to do with the FOXP2 gene, aka ‘the speech gene’, which we share with Neanderthals. It’s so named because it encodes the FOXP2 protein (Foxhead box protein P2), which is found in many vertebrates, and is associated with vocalisation, including birdsong and echo-location.
What’s a haplotype? It’s a bunch of alleles, so I have to be clear first about alleles. A haplotype, also known as a haploid genotype, is a set of alleles inherited (as a set) from a single parent.
Alleles are pretty complex, at least to me. I think of Mendel and his peas, but it’s vague. Looking up a definition hasn’t helped much. It might, or might not, be better to start with DNA and/or RNA, and of course I know something about these macromolecules and their structure. They’re made up of nucleotides, and an allele is described as ‘a variant of the sequence of nucleotides at a particular location, or locus, on a DNA molecule’. This doesn’t help much. Do I repeat myself?
I’ll keep trying. There are haploid cells and diploid cells. In humans they’re called gametes – the sperm and the eggs, and they each have 23 chromosomes. Fertilisation of eggs by sperm creates zygotes which are paired – 23 chromosomes from each gamete type. Twenty-three pairs of haplotype make a genotype.
Why am I bothering with this? I can’t remember now, but I think it was about alleles. There is a problem in my mind about a haplotype, say inherited from Mum, and this ‘bunch of alleles’ thing. I mean, what’s the difference between an allele and a gene?
So I plug this into the machine. It seems that genes are things that code for things. In the phenotype. Your phenotype is the expression of your genes. Hair colour, penis size, intelligence maybe. Also I suppose your species. Bonobos have 24 pairs, but so do chimps. So…
Whales, since I’ve been focussing on them a bit lately, have mostly 44 chromosomes (22 pairs), but some species have 42.
Anyway this all began with talk on social media about XY and XX chromosomes, male and female humans and longevity. XY is male (for humans and some other mammals, and some fish, snakes and even plants). These are the ‘sex chromosomes’, at least in these species. That’s to say, the sex-determining chromosomes.
So a karyotype is, for my information, ‘the general appearance of the complete set of chromosomes in the cells of a species or in an individual, mainly including their sizes, numbers and shapes’. The sex chromosomes, obviously, are part of that karyotype, and they’re not always named XY or XX. Bird sex chromosomes, very interestingly, are ZW for females and ZZ for males. And what researchers are finding, in this doubling up (ZZ for male birds, XX for female humans) has some effect on their longevity – male birds, on average, and somewhat dependent on species – live longer than females, while female humans, and other mammals with XX chromosomes, live longer, on average, than males. Correlation or causation?
But all of this stuff on haplotypes, and full genotypes, is intrinsically interesting, and I could do a complete free online course on it, maybe…?
So if you know the genotypes of both your parents, could you work out their particular contribution to your phenotype? ‘I got my braininess from mum and my good looks from dad’ type thing? I should listen to the Sapolsky videos online maybe…?
If only I was 40 years younger. Still my genotype, and some luck, has kept me alive thus far…
Science is always at its most thrilling when unsettled: it is the process of tackling mysteries, not the habit of accumulating facts.
Matt Ridley
bonobo matriarchy – still a mystery
So let’s switch from the ridiculous to the sublime and get back to bonobos. A recent bonobo video I’ve watched, together with my current reading of Carl Safina’s Beyond Words, which, so far, deals mostly with elephants, has made me wonder about the survival of these fascinatingly intelligent creatures in the wild. The human story of the DRC, where all wild bonobos live, has, since the arrival of white men, been one of horrific slaughter and suffering. The whites have mostly left, with their treasure, having created the boundaries of this new nation, where over 200 indigenous languages are spoken. Its official language, though, is French. It’s the second largest country in Africa, and has ten other mostly white-invented countries on its borders, along with a wee bit of the southern Atlantic. The land is very heavily forested, with bonobos being unevenly spread over an area of half a million square kilometres, bounded by the Congo, Kasai and Lualaba rivers.
The estimated minimum number of bonobos in the wild is between 15 and 2o thousand. Obviously it is hard to ascertain very precise numbers due to the dense terrain. The human population of the DRC is over 110 million. Habitat loss has been a problem, as has the bushmeat trade, hunting for medico-magical cures, and selling as novelty pets. Human depredations, enfin. Safina estimates the effects of such depredations on elephants:
Since Roman times, humans have reduced Africa’s elephant population by perhaps 99 percent. African elephants are gone from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800, when, despite earlier losses, an estimated 26 million elephants still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps 400 thousand (the diminishment of Asian elephants over historic times is far worse).
Bonobos were separated from chimps by the creation of the Congo River, said to be the deepest river in the world. The river is estimated to have formed between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, and this is supposed to have created the separate species. It sounds plausible, but I wouldn’t know.
Bonobos have been described as the hippy apes – probably by hippies. They’ve also been lauded for their vegetarianism, but they’re not vegetarian. Their lush environment has promoted a largely frugivorous and nutatarian diet, but the odd small monkey or large rodent-like creature, savagely ripped apart, doesn’t go amiss. What’s most interesting about them, for me, is their matriarchy, developed over those couple of million years, despite a slight, and apparently diminishing, size difference in favour of males. Bonobos are generally more gracile than chimps, and weigh less, on average (they used to be called pygmy chimpanzees). Their lips are more pink and kissable – well, maybe not, their faces are darker at birth, but lighten up with age, though their ears remain much darker than those of chimps. They have longer legs, and are more bipedal, and finally they generally have more high-pitched vocalisations than the guys north of the Congo. But does any of this offer a clue to their matriarchy? And are they really matriarchal? I’ve read articles that have claimed that there have never been any human matriarchies, though this seems to depend on the definition. After all, we can say that we, e.g. in Australia, live in a patriarchy, though it is less patriarchal than it was, a mere two hundred years ago. The change in that time has been social rather than physiological or genetic. Bonobos and chimps have, however, undergone physiological changes, as aforementioned – with respect to each other, and we have no way of knowing which of them has changed most. Interestingly there are four subspecies of chimps, with the possibility of a fifth. What’s the basis of these differences? Presumably they can interbreed, since bonobos and chimps can do so (they’ve done it in captivity and ‘genetic studies show that they have exchanged genes at least twice in the past 550,000 years [in the wild]’ – thanks, AI). And here’s what AI, which I presume is in this case a combination of primatologists, geneticists and such, has to say about the establishment of these subspecies:
Primatologists distinguish chimpanzee subspecies (or populations) based on a combination of genetic differences and geographic distribution. Genetic studies, including genome-wide analysis, reveal distinct populations with unique genetic markers. These genetic differences are often correlated with geographic separation, suggesting that physical barriers like rivers or mountain ranges have historically limited gene flow and led to the evolution of distinct subspecies.
Which suggests that the chimp-bonobo divide is much like the chimp subspecies divisions, only more so. For example, Madam AI describes the different subspecies of chimps in terms of genetic markers, not morphology. So, presumably, it is only due to our recent understanding of genetics that we differentiated these subspecies, whereas bonobos were recognised as a different species before genetic analysis was available. They were first called pygmy chimps – something distinct from ‘normal’ chimps, obviously due to their morphology.
So when were these subspecies established, and how, exactly? AI mentions geographic distribution, suggesting that there was physical isolation, with each isolated group adapting to different environments which, over time, led to – different gene expression, genetic markers, epigenetics, SNPs? I’m not a scientist of any kind, these are just amateur speculations and likely misunderstandings.
What is more important to me, of course, is that I can find no mention of any of these chimp subspecies, no matter when they diverged, or what their habitat, being anything other than male dominant. So it is the bonobos, it seems to me, who changed in the way that most matters to me. They became female dominant, and of course, so should we.
I find it both frustrating and amusing to research online – and ‘research’ is perhaps too sophisticated a term for what I’m doing – the subject of bonobo matriarchy, especially in relation to violence. There are of course those who go on about ‘enlightened’ bonobo peacefulness, and there are others, rather more irritating, who won’t have a bar of all this peacefulness (and sex) nonsense. I’ve written not so long ago about this here, here and here. Go and read it all now! The claim that we cannot possibly have anything to learn from bonobos seems pretty egregious considering the human slaughter that is going on as I write, in Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, Burma and, sadly, the ‘Democratic’ Republic of Congo, only home of our bonobo cousins. Macho stuff, to pare it down to its most basic. And of course it has gone on for a very long time. I’m currently reading, inter alia, Christopher Tyerman’s massive and rather mind-numbing history of the Crusades, God’s War, for my sins methinks, because it’s about three of my least favourite things: war, religion and patriarchy. Overall, the human world is a little less gung-ho nowadays about religions and cultures ‘over there’ or ‘on the other side’ – or in our midst – being inferior to ‘us’. Terms such as ‘savage’, ‘pagan’ and ‘infidel’ are looked upon as quaintly ignorant. We now prefer ‘illegals’, ‘deplorables’ and ‘wokes’, among others, and our approaches to these ‘problem types’ are a little less violent than in the days of the crucesignatus, but generally no less contemptuous. Bonobos, of course, don’t have the linguistic skills that we have to voice our contempt for others, or even to reveal ourselves as worthy of contempt. They judge each other by their actions, sometimes ganging up to punish those actions, more often turning the other cheek and offering a hearty and heartfelt genito-genital rub. We’re unlikely to copy those actions in naked, graphic detail, but there’s much in the spirit of their behaviour that should inspire us, and even shame us, just a little.
References
Carl Safina, Beyond words: what animals think and feel, 2015
The Hapsburg, and sickly, Charles II of Spain (1665-1700). All in the family.
Here’s a simple thought experiment, if perhaps an unlikely scenario. Imagine two children born to the same parents, a male and a female. For some reason they’re both separated from those parents at a very early age, before they know each other as siblings. For the next twenty years or so they’re brought up in separate households, unaware of each others’ existence.
Guess what happens next – they meet, they ‘fall in love’, because after all they’re each as good-looking as the other, and they share interests, politics and ambitions, and they each want to start a family. What could go wrong?
Or more to the point of these explorations, how would these two individuals have any sense that they might be entering into dodgy territory? Of course they might start comparing backgrounds and entertaining suspicions, but what if they both share a tendency to bullshit about their past? Obviously this is a ridiculously rare scenario, but hopefully it makes a point.
So, when I try to learn about inbreeding I’m quickly taken into the inherent dangers, and the complexities of autosomal inheritance, whether dominant or recessive – all of which is fascinating in itself, but of little interest to bonobos, bats or budgerigars – or bodgies and widgies – when mating season arrives. Inbreeding avoidance is all very well if you know who to avoid. But a lot of the info I’m gathering tells me that we do know who to avoid, and I don’t just mean we humans. According to Wikipedia’s article on inbreeding avoidance, ‘there have been numerous documented examples of instances in which individuals are shown to find closely related conspecifics unattractive’. But this bald statement strikes me as totally unconvincing. I’m sure we could find plenty of ‘documented examples’ of the exact opposite too.
However there does seem to be something, beyond choice or preference or awareness, that promotes inbreeding avoidance, whether it’s pheromones, MHC (major histocompatibility complex) genes, or other evolved mechanisms. We generally manage it – and by ‘we’ I mean just about all breeding entities – but not in a foolproof way, it seems. What interests me is the kind of set process for inbreeding avoidance that we find in chimps, bonobos, Tiwi Islanders and other human societies, which rises to the point of incest taboos in humans. With humans there is knowledge. We know that breeding with siblings and other close kin is problematic, yet we probably didn’t always know that, and our taboos are more about it being ‘icky’ and ‘creepy’ than about giving birth to unhealthy children. What gave rise to those feelings, which seem to be shared by other apes, and perhaps further down the evolutionary bush?
Let’s look at MHC genes, though I don’t think they’re going to provide an answer that satisfies me. Here are the opening lines from a 2008 PubMed article entitled ‘Major histocompatibility complex alleles, sexual responsivity, and unfaithfulness in romantic couples’:
Preferences for mates that possess genes dissimilar to one’s own at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a polymorphic group of loci associated with the immune system, have been found in mice, birds, fish, and humans. These preferences may help individuals choose genetically compatible mates and may adaptively function to prevent inbreeding or to increase heterozygosity and thereby immunocompetence of offspring.
So, yes, I find nothing wrong with this finding, but maybe it’s a bit of a correlation-causation problem for me. I’d like a bit more info on the causal. And obviously all these creatures have no idea whether a potential mate has similar/dissimilar MHC genes, so why mention preference, which is about choice, or intention? But then, doesn’t love, or desire, strike us below the level of awareness? Ain’t love blind? Not to our MHC genes, apparently. And then again, is our preference for sweet rather than sour, or vice versa, really a personal choice or something we find out about ourselves? Do I contradict myself? Very well…
Anyway I’m glad to note the phrases ‘may help individuals choose…’ and ‘may adaptively function to prevent inbreeding…’ here, an acknowledgement, methinks, of the fact that they’ve observed a correlation which hasn’t yet been found as determinative – though probably everyone thinks it is. Meanwhile, we – human and myriad other species – seem pretty good at avoiding inbreeding, mostly, so why worry…
The first time I lived completely away from family, when I was twenty-one, I shared house with two males, an older homosexual who never wore clothes in the house, and a bisexual who was more sexually interested in me than I was in him, so it was a challenging but fascinating environment. The older man introduced me to his subculture, which included a couple of men, quite elderly, at least from my youthful perspective, who wore dresses and had male partners. I think the word transvestite was used. This wasn’t particularly in-your-face stuff, with heavy make-up, flashy jewellery and fake busts, or whatever, though of course I was a bit nonplussed. These guys were softly spoken, feminine in their gestures, simply but femininely dressed, and clingy with their partners. This was all a revelation to me, and I remember being quite moved, even teary about it all. They seemed so quietly defiant, and contented.
I presume there have always been humans who have felt they were born into the wrong gender. Girls who, even before they really gave it much conscious thought, preferred the shapes, colours, textures and activities that we adults or parents associate with boys, and who, over time, became embarrassingly consistent about their ‘odd’ choices. And maybe it’s just a phase, but sometimes not. And some parents might push their kid to behave more ‘appropriately’, and some might not. And maybe science has an answer for all this, but maybe not.
All of this might involve genetics, epigenetics, pre-natal experience, parental treatment or a host of other causal factors I know next to nothing about. We’re surely the most complex species on the planet, which should make us proud but wary.
Transgender stuff is very newsworthy at the moment, with passions running high. My own position would be to accept people’s deeply felt views about themselves and never mind what the science says. But what does the science say? Can biology and psychology be separated? Is psychology a science? Can the brain and the body be seen as separate? (My answer to that last one is no, obviously).
So in exploring this issue I’d prefer to avoid youtube debates and legal decisions. As described in my previous post, I went through a period, particularly in my mid-teens, of what might be called ‘gender uncertainty’, though I found it more thrilling than disturbing, and tended to be proud of my ‘sophistication’. Perhaps ‘gender fluidity’ would be a more accurate term. But this faded over time and I came to be happy to accept that I was a boringly heterosexual male (cisgender, as they now call it). But I also recognised that this had to do with appearance. Fifteen year-old boys become twenty-five year olds, but not in the same way, physically, that fifteen year-old girls do. You could say that it was the ‘feminine’ side of boys that attracted me, which faded as they became ‘masculinised’. Note that there are many descriptions of boy lovers among the ancient Greeks – Achilles derived strength from his love of Patroclus and Aristophanes spoke favourably of ‘hermaphrodites’ in Plato’s Symposium. We’ve become rather more conservative in our sexual outlook since then, methinks. I blame patriarchal religion.
So, contradicting myself, I want to understand the British Supreme Court’s recent decision on sex and biology and why so many women seem to be very pleased about it – and I’ll start by saying I currently know very little about it. CNN London reports it thus:
The United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is defined by “biological sex” under the country’s equality law – excluding transgender women – in a case that is expected to impact accommodations for trans women in bathrooms, hospital wards, sports clubs and more. The court ruling on Wednesday is limited to defining the term “woman” within the country’s Equality Act 2010, meaning trans women are no longer protected from discrimination as women, although they remain protected from discrimination in other forms.
But, as the reporter points out, this will have wider implications, not only for what trans people will be able to do, but for how they’re perceived.
I note that the reporter puts “biological sex” in quotes, which is as it should be. A legal definition of an essentially biological matter is always going to be problematic. There are those who, from an early age, behave in a way that is seen as ‘gender inappropriate’ to what might be expected by noting their genitalia (see Donna the chimp as described in my previous post). They’re generally not doing it to seek attention, it just comes automatically. You could say their brain makes them do it, and not particularly consciously. And the brain is a 100% biological entity.
But the UK Supreme Court has chosen to consider ‘biological sex’ in a more reductive way, as have many conservatives. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, a science and skepticism podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly over the past 15 years, recently featured an interview with Dave Farina, a popular science communicator on YouTube, in which the transgender issue was briefly discussed. It seems there are some other science communicators, notably Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, who take a strong line on ‘biological sex’, largely based on gametes. And shamefully, I had to look the term up, though I’ve doubtless written about them before. Gametes are the sex cells – ova in females, sperm in males, which combine with their opposites to produce offspring. So, according to Dawkins, Coyne et al, the whole gender controversy can be reduced to these haploid cells (cells containing half the genetic material of diploid cells, the somatic cells of all mammals). You are what your gametes reveal. According to these scientists, this isn’t reductive, but entirely determinative, regardless of thoughts or ‘gender-affirming’ surgery. Farina and the principal host of The Skeptics’ Guide, Steven Novella, firmly disagreed, and more or less dismissed Coyne and Dawkins as members of a ‘passing generation’. We shall see.
So what to do with these trans people, with their wayward thoughts, their fantasies? And why was the Supreme Court’s decision met with such glee, by so many women? A spokeswoman for the campaign to prevent transgender women from being recognised as women, on being interviewed after the decision was handed down, expressed ‘great sympathy’ for their position, but common sense had prevailed, and – what? These people, a tiny proportion of the population, have been left in no man’s land, and no woman’s land either. If this is sympathy, I wouldn’t like to experience her hostility. What solution has been offered, apart, it seems, from forcing them to recognise that they’re deluded?
This is obviously not going to be the end of the matter, and indeed it will create greater acrimony within and between genders than there ever was before.
Meanwhile, I’m still wondering about those unisex toilets. I like the suffix uni-. I like to think it stands for ‘united’.
It’s New Year resolution time, which I try not to pay much attention to, and yet… I’m thinking of/resolving to focus on the biggest issue that bugs me, rather than trying to expand my understanding every-which way (corals, dark matter, Milankovich cycles, the cryosphere…), and that’s our culture and politics, in the broadest sense, including our existence as primates, mammals, forms of life. Dominators of the biosphere.
So that’s why gender is important to me, because one gender, in the sexually reproducing world, nurtures and brings forth life from her own body, and so, it reasonably follows, has a greater regard for life than the other. Yet, reasonable though this observation might be, it often meets with resistance, sometimes mounting to hostility, from members of the other gender. In the case of Aristotle – and no doubt his idea was formed from the ancient Greek zeitgeist – it was the male’s seed that produced the next generation, the female being nothing more than the incubator.
I’m interested in exploring why humanity came to be, by and large, patriarchal, and how we can be less so – much much less so, because I’m deeply convinced that this is our best path to the future. A long and winding road, I suspect.
I’ve retitled this blog a few times, but it has been called ‘A bonobo humanity?’ for some time now. I’ve wondered occasionally about changing the title again, as people have looked quizzical, or chuckled, and even sneered. For those who know at least something about bonobos, the general impression I’ve felt has been – ‘yes, cute, but really what has this got to do with us?’
So yes, bonobos are hairy, more or less ugly (to us), forest-dwelling, sex-obsessed frugivores who will never express themselves in a complex language, never invent a complex device, never play a musical instrument or wonder where those twinkling lights in the night sky came from. They have nothing to teach us.
And yet, we study them, just as we study other primates, and mammals, and our own human history, and so on and so forth. To learn about, and to learn from. And in the process, we’ve discovered, as we have with so many species we’ve turned our attention to – complexity. Remember the term ‘bird-brain’? Those brains in those tiny heads that enable their owners to build complicated nests of all kinds, to communicate all sorts of tuneful messages to their kin, to use humans to crack nuts for them, to fashion tools from twigs to spear tasty morsels for themselves and their chicks?
Yes, we’re smart to have uncovered these smarts in other species, which has helped us to respect the cleverness and complexity of life itself, its amazing development from the earliest archaea or whatever. But the neurological developments that led to H sapiens, the massively dominant species on this planet, in destructive as well as productive terms, are of the greatest interest. How is it that this most complex species, which has divided its billions of specimens into hundreds of nations, can allow individuals like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Xinping (and many other repugnant characters) to wield power over millions of their obvious intellectual and pro-social superiors? Why is one gender, the more pro-social of the two, given so much less power than the other? I like to think that the situation is changing, but if this is so, it’s at such a heart-rendingly slow pace that it really is painful to bear.
Even so, I tend towards optimism. We’re programmed to survive, not just individually – no species survives individually – but by working out what’s best for us all. And I do mean all, and that’s an endless learning process.
What I’m doing here, in this first post for the new year, is trying to work out how to put my queer shoulder to the wheel. I’m being inspired by writers such as Frans de Waal, Cat Bohannon and Rutger Bregman, by positive texts such as Glimpses of Utopia by Jess Scully and The Future We Choose (as yet unread!) by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, and by the work of all those in the field, protecting wildlife, providing education, supporting effective solutions, promoting hope and thoughtfulness. But enough of this sludge, it’s 2025, let’s see what we can do!
References
Jess Scully, Glimpses of utopia, 2020
Frans de Waal, Different, 2022
Rutger Bregman, Humankind:a hopeful history, 2020
Christiana Figueres & Tom Rivett-Carnac, The future we choose, 2020
It’s still early days, but gene-therapy modifications of bone marrow stem cells may be the solution to many haematological malignancies
Peter Doherty, An insider’s plague year
something like…
Canto: So we’re going to try and educate ourselves with the help of all these videos out there on the immune system, with hopefully occasional references to the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus. And we’re not going to reference all these videos and websites because it’s just too time consuming and nobody else is going to read this stuff, it’s just for ourselves, mostly much.
Jacinta So in a vid about T-cell development (and they’re a product of the adaptive immune system) we hear that T-cells are produced in the red bone marrow. Why red?
Canto: Bone marrow comes in 2 types:
Red bone marrow contains blood stem cells that can become red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. Yellow bone marrow is made mostly of fat and contains stem cells that can become cartilage, fat, or bone cells.
Jacinta: So it’s not about red bones. So stem cells are like stems, green shoots that can develop into all sorts of different plants?
Canto: Yes and so you can imagine the potential, if we can induce them to specialise in ways that we want. Homo deus and all that. My brief research tells me that they’re found all around the body, not just the marrow. But it doesn’t tell me how they came into being. And there are apparently different types, as in ‘blood stem cells’. So these particular cells are pushed out into the world via sinusoidal capillaries…
Jacinta: Capillaries are the narrowest of blood vessels, I know that much…
Sinusoid capillaries allow for the exchange of large molecules, even cells. They’re able to do this because they have many larger gaps in their capillary wall, in addition to pores and small gaps. The surrounding basement membrane is also incomplete with openings in many places.
Canto: I must say that the number of high-quality, comprehensive videos on immunology, e.g. on YouTube, is such a boon. The comments say it all, ‘if only I had this info available when I was doing my PhD’ etc etc. So back to T cells. They move, I think as precursor T cells, to the thymus, via those capillaries. The thymus is a small gland near the top of the lungs (in the thoracic cavity) which is an essential component of the lymphatic system, itself a part of our general immune system.
Jacinta: It’s described as a primary lymphoid organ – at last I’m going to find out more about lymph! I hope. So the thymus is where T cells develop, and the red bone marrow, another primary lymphoid organ, is where B cells develop.
Canto: And B cells are a ‘type of white blood cell that makes infection-fighting proteins called antibodies’. Whereas T cells fight infections more directly as well as doing a lot of signalling…
Jacinta: Interesting thing about the thymus – it functions mostly through early childhood and adolescence, after which it atrophies, its tissues becoming fibrous and non-functional. So its role in T cell maturation occurs in our early years.
Canto: The thymus secretes different types of chemokines, or chemotactic agents (thymosin, thymotaxin, thymopoetin and thymic factors) which are somehow able to pull these undeveloped T cells in the right direction. This process is called chemotaxis.
Jacinta: A chemical taxi system, how cute. So we mentioned the two primary lymphoid organs, and there are secondary lymphoid organs – the lymph nodes (found in a number of bodily locations) and the spleen (on your left side, just around the bottom of your rib-cage). Just on chemokines – we’ve heard of cytokines, and the worrisome ‘cytokine storm’ that was oft-mentioned during the Covid period. Chemokines are a subset of these cytokines, which are –
‘an exceptionally large and diverse group of pro- or anti-inflammatory factors that are grouped into families based upon their structural homology or that of their receptors. Chemokines are a group of secreted proteins within the cytokine family whose generic function is to induce cell migration’.
Canto: So now we’re looking at these precursor T cells arriving at the thymus. So the thymus has a heap of thymic, epithelial cells which secrete the above-mentioned chemokines, which stimulate certain genes within the T cells to produce two enzymes (proteins), RAG1 and RAG2 (RAG stands for recombination activating gene – the genes encode the proteins). These are types of recombinase…
Jacinta: Think of genetic recombination, or mixing:
Recombinases are a family of enzymes having functional roles in homologous and site-specific recombination. It’s an event in organisms that involves DNA breakage, strand exchange between homologous segments, and ligation of DNA segments using DNA ligase.
Canto: So in this T cell context the gene ‘shuffling’, as it might be called, produces different protein types to deal with different antigen types. For example they produce T cell receptors (TCRs) designed to recognise and ‘receive’ differently-shaped antigens.
Jacinta: So getting back to those chemokines, they’re inducing other genetic activity to produce CD (cluster differentiation) proteins, of which there are various conformations, such as CD4 and CD8. These proteins form on the outside of the T cells, where they, hopefully, bind to MHC (major histocompatibility complex) proteins on the thymic cells. And of course there’s always more complexity – ‘a human typically expresses six different MHC class I molecules and eight different MHC class II molecules on his or her cells’. For now just think MHC-1 and MHC-2. Recognition of the appropriate MHC molecules by the CD4 and 8 proteins is called ‘positive selection’. If positive selection doesn’t happen the T cells will die (apoptosis).
Canto: The next step, assuming T cell survival, has to do with the previously-mentioned TCRs. The MHC molecules on the thymic cells carry a ‘self peptide’, and just to show how complex and relatively recent our immunological knowledge is, here’s a quote from a Pub-Med abstract from late 2001:
Twenty years ago, antigenic and self peptides presented by MHC molecules were absent from the immunological scene. While foreign peptides could be assayed by immune reactions, self peptides, as elusive and invisible as they were at the time, were bound to have an immunological role. How self peptides are selected and presented by MHC molecules, and how self MHC-peptide complexes are seen or not seen by T cells raised multiple questions particularly related to MHC restriction, alloreactivity, positive and negative selection, the nature of tumor antigens and tolerance.
So, if we could imagine ourselves as upper-class kids who entered university in the late 70s, (instead of working in factories or bludging off the dole as we were doing), none of this would’ve been known to anyone and we could’ve helped make the breakthrough…
Jacinta: Woulda-coulda-shoulda. Back again to those T cell receptors (TCRs), which apparently are not supposed to recognise or connect with the thymic cells’ self or antigenic peptides, as that would lead to auto-immune complications. So they’re ‘designed’ for that purpose, so that they don’t recognise those peptides, and don’t connect with them. This is called negative selection. If for some reason recognition does occur, apoptosis will result. That process occurs by the release of FAS (aka APO-1 or CD95 – don’t ask) from the thymic cell to a receptor in the T cell.
Canto: So, up to this point, if the T cell has come through alive, it’s TCR-positive, CD4 positive and CD8 positive. Its CD4 molecule may interact fortuitously with the thymic cell’s MHC2 (but the CD8 doesn’t interact with MHC1). In that case, there will be gene up-regulation of the cell’s CD4 molecules and down-regulation of CD8. That’s to say, CD4s will increase and CD8s will reduce, and it will present other TCRs. This turns it into a ‘T helper cell’. On the other hand, if the cell’s CD8s connect with the MHC1, there will be up-regulation of CD8, down-regulation of CD4, converting it into a cytotoxic T cell. Some of these helper and cytotoxic T cells can further develop into T regulatory cells, aka T suppressor cells, important for auto-immune disease suppression. This is promoted by molecules such as CD25 and interleukin 2.
Jacinta: Ok that’s enough head-spinning for one post, except perhaps just to say that interleukin 2 is ‘a protein that regulates the activities of white blood cells (leukocytes, often lymphocytes) that are responsible for immunity’. And we might find out more about what ‘cluster differentiation’ actually means….
Canto: So we haven’t focussed on bonobos for a while – I’d love to be able to answer the question, How did bonobos become female dominant?
Jacinta: Yes, were they always that way? That would mean, presumably, that they were female dominant at the time of their split from chimpanzees, somewhere between one and two million years ago (a rather vague time-frame, for me), which would then raise the question – how did chimps become male-dominant?
Canto: Haha, a question we don’t ask ourselves, we’re so used to being male-dominant. I seem to recall that one reason, or theory, is that bonobos have evolved in a region that’s densely vegetated, plenty of fruit and nuts, not so much hunting as gathering, which doesn’t require so much physical strength and aggression.
Jacinta: Which is interesting – we humans are evolving, at least in the WEIRD world into a post-industrial species, where manual labour is being replaced by mechanisation, robotics and such, requiring less of the physical strength of old-fashioned factory work. Australia, for example has become, internally, a service economy, exporting raw materials such as iron ore and coal, and importing finished products. There are few labour-intensive jobs these days, and testosterone levels are dropping, happily.
Canto: Yes, if we can take the long view – a very difficult thing for humans – we can see that only a couple of centuries ago women couldn’t get a decent education, couldn’t participate in government or be workplace bosses – though there were always the rare exceptions – but now the gates are opened and the trickle to the top is happening. In a thousand years or so – not so long in evolutionary time – we might have achieved a bonobo-style humanity.
Jacinta: Well on that sort of happy note, let’s see if research has told us anything about bonobo femdom. The quickest click-research brings up this, from the Max Planck Institute:
Some researchers suggest that bonobo female dominance is facilitated by females forming coalitions which suppress male aggression. Others think of an evolutionary scenario in which females prefer non-aggressive males which renders male aggressiveness to a non-adaptive trait.
That’s from ten years ago, and I doubt if we’ve gone much beyond those very reasonable speculations, with both of those developments, female coalitions and less aggressive males, creating a synergistic effect.
Canto: Well, looking more closely at that fairly short article, they suggest that female attractiveness – by which they don’t mean looking like Taylor Swift or FKA Twigs, but displaying sexual receptivity through behaviour or sexual swellings, seems to soften up the males somehow:
If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
Which is the opposite of male chimp behaviour, so why, and when, the difference?
Jacinta: Well, the article mentions two changes – subtle differences, no doubt, in female sexuality and in male mating strategies over a million or two years. And, okay, that doesn’t tell us anything much. As to when, obviously these are changes that developed gradually. Emory University, in Atlanta Georgia, which has done a whole-genome comparison of chimps and bonobos, makes a more specific claim for the divergence:
Chimpanzees and bonobos are sister species that diverged around 1.8 million years ago as the Congo River formed a geographic boundary and they evolved in separate environments.
Canto: But is it likely that genomic comparisons will tell us much about these subtle – or, ok, not so subtle, differences in behaviour? I mean, comparing the genes of Taliban Afghans and Aussie radical lesbians isn’t going to tell us much, is it? It seems to me to be largely a cultural shift.
Jacinta: Well, the Emory website, I must say, has the most interesting little article I’ve found for a while, and it relates to diet, which we’ve looked at before, and hormone production, which we haven’t, because it’s a bit sciencey for us dilettantes. Let me quote at length from the site, as I think this will provide us with a sense of direction for our own future research, if you can call it that:
The whole genome comparison showed selection in bonobos for genes related to the production of pancreatic amylase — an enzyme that breaks down starch. Previous research has shown that human populations that began consuming more grains with the rise of agriculture show an increase in copies of a closely related gene that codes for amylase.
“Our results add to the evidence that diet and the available resources had a definite impact on bonobo evolution,” Kovalaskas says. “We can see it in the genome.”
Compared to chimpanzees, bonobos also showed differences in genetic pathways well-known to be related to social behaviors of animals — as well as humans. Bonobos had strong selection for genes in the oxytocin receptor pathway, which plays a role in promoting social bonds; serotonin, involved in modulating aggression; and gonadotropin, known to affect sexual behavior.
“The strong female bonds among bonobos, in part, may be mediated by their same-sex sexual behaviors,” says co-author James Rilling, professor and chair of Emory’s Department of Anthropology. “Our data suggest that something interesting is going on in the bonobo pathways for oxytocin, serotonin and gonadotropin and that future research into the physiological mechanisms underlying behavioral differences between bonobos and chimpanzees may want to target those specific systems.”
Canto: Yes, that’s a most interesting finding, and one to follow up – pathways for serotonin, oxytocin and gonadotrophin, think SOG. And think not testosterone. And of course it’s not about opening up these pathways artificially, with, I don’t know, hormone supplements and such, but engaging in and encouraging behaviour that takes us along those pathways….
Jacinta: Haha I think oxytocin comes first, even if it wrecks the acronym. Looks like we need a crash course in endocrinology.
Canto: Or a crash course in how to raise our levels of, or expression of, those hormones? Over the next million years or so? With lots of orgasm-inducing touchy-feelies?
Jacinta: Well I can’t see that happening for as long as we have anti-sex religions dominating many nations. I seem to remember there were a few ‘free love’ cults back in the hippy days, but things have dulled down since then. You’d think there’d be a return, what with the mechanisation of labour, and the growth of the service economy. What better service can we offer our fellows than body rubs? Mind you, the Japanese seem to be leading the way there – a notably non-religious people. And yet, still far too patriarchal….
Canto: Interesting that Japanese teams have led the way in bonobo studies. Let’s hope they’re spreading the news among their countrywomen.
Jacinta: Well the sex video industry in Japan, and its sex industry generally, is enormous, though doubtless very exploitative. I presume it’s being driven by men rather than women – not exactly the bonobo way. A country that forces its few female politicians to wear high heels is far from being female-dominant. At least that was the case in 2019, when there was a backlash against this grotesque policy. I presume it has changed, but it isn’t clear.
Canto: Well, this has been interesting. We need to look more at endocrinology and happiness, or at least pleasure-inducing practices, in future… meanwhile, Vive les bonobos!
I’m still feeling anger, after all these years, at the free will proponents who, I feel, have benefitted from a cushy upbringing and have no idea what it’s like to have had nothing like the opportunities they’ve had. Of course, it’s always a worry that we can just attribute our relative failure to that lack of opportunity, but facts are facts, and it’s simply a fact that our macro world is determined.
And so to Steven Pinker, who, in his 2002 book The blank slate, ventured a few remarks on free will. I’ve written about Pinker before, and I consider it amusing to compare my life with his. We were both born in the mid 1950s’ – he’s a bit older – but that’s just about where the similarities come to an end (though I, too, have quite a big personal library – just saying). On the free will issue, I’d be inclined to make the small point, and I think Sapolsky makes it too, that successful career people would be more inclined to believe in free will than more or less abject failures – which of course isn’t saying anything about me.
Chapter 10 of The blank slate is titled ‘The fear of determinism’, and in it he starts looking at determinism from what I would call the wrong end – what he calls ‘molecules in motion’. My own thinking on this always starts from ‘thrown-ness into the world’, at an unchosen time and place, and as an unchosen living specimen. From there we get to our own parentage, our genes and our pre-natal and antenatal development, and their epigenetic effects.
Pinker also jumps quickly into the confusion I always find when I speak to people about this topic – that between determinism and predeterminism/fatalism:
‘All our brooding and agonising over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains’.
Pinker highlights the fear of determinism for a reason, claiming that ‘it is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time’, though it seems to me that few people suffer such fear – and this appears to be borne out by experimental evidence. When we’re primed by tricky lab-coated types to reflect on ‘victims of circumstance’, there is an effect, but it appears to be minimal and short-term.
Of course, it isn’t the fear of determinism that concerns me, but the lack of acknowledgment of its factual basis. Pinker goes on a long and rather facile discourse about lawyers, medicos and neurologists seeking to get wrong-doers off the hook on the basis of defective genes and/or brain processes. Note that Sapolsky admits to having offered his services in this way, generally to no avail. I would note, just in passing, that the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the WEIRD world, by a huge margin. It’s the land of free will after all. No excuses.
Some of Pinker’s ‘analyses’ here really miss the mark badly. For example, he references Dennett, who…
points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn’t hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behaviour….
And so on. But this is obvious bullshit – even if you fully believed in free will, the threat of imprisonment would be a massive deterrent, especially given the horrific private prisons of the US. And so would the opprobrium directed at you for your wrong-doing, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet. Others’ opinions of us massively matter. Free will doesn’t preclude a sense of right and wrong. It should also be obvious that we are determined, by evolution, to survive and thrive as best we can – so in a world of severe punishments, such as exists in the USA, we’ll obviously be determined to avoid such punishments as best we can, even given a deprived background or a shrunken amygdala.
But where Pinker goes wrong in a way that is, to me, more offensive, is in his mockery of what he calls environmental determinism. It’s the typical upper middle class response, I must say:
The most risible pretexts for bad behaviour in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores….
This little parade of glibness doesn’t, of course, begin to address any real issues. Firstly, there’s little real difference between biological and environmental determinism. Our biology evolves in adaptation to changing environments, as every evolutionary biologist knows, and, to be fair to Pinker, there has been a revolution in our understanding of environmentally-induced gene expression (epigenetics) in the two decades since The blank slate was published. Even so, my experience of growing up in a profoundly working-class environment, in which classroom illiteracy was commonplace, as well as vandalism, neglect and police harassment, makes me flare up when I hear the life-shattering experiences of kids in the street where I lived being dismissed in terms of ‘the abuse excuse’. I also note that in mocking these ‘excuses’ his target is invariably the lawyers (his own class) that bring these claims, rather than the accused themselves, about who’s background he appears to be indifferent. It’s the same clubbish elitism that I found in the dated Berofsky collection I re-read recently, but more focussed on law than philosophy.
Another of the irritations I found in revisiting Pinker’s determinism-free will piece, is that he focusses almost exclusively on crime, ignoring the much larger issues of lives lived in struggle because of determining forces beyond their control – a Palestinian in modern Israel, a woman in Afghanistan, a Dalit in India, an Australian Aboriginal at the time of the British colonisation of that island, a Jew growing up in Germany in the 1930s, the Tainos visited by the Spanish horror in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the Scots massacred in the reign of Edward I, the East Timorese massacred by Indonesian forces, the isolated old women burned as witches… millions of people who found themselves members of the wrong gender or ethnicity at the wrong time – murdered, raped, enslaved, or simply deprived of the means to live a life in which there’s some hope of an upward trajectory. None of us got to choose our ethnicity, our class (yes it does exist), our early upbringing, our parentage, even our level of intelligence, and this is so obvious, and so overwhelming a fact, that it seems to me almost embarrassing to have to point it out. And all of this is profoundly determining. That’s why reading history, as I often do, can be such an affecting experience. It is so full of innocent victims. And of course it continues….
So, finally, it isn’t the fear of determinism that should concern us – it’s the very fact of determinism.
I’ve been lucky, on balance. I was brought, as a five-year-old, to live in one of the richest and most peaceful nations in the world. I can’t praise or blame myself for this. Certain aspects of my treatment both at home and at school resulted in, for me, a fairly extreme anti-authoritarianism, and something of an over-self-reliance, which has its positives and negatives. But I benefitted from a world-full of books in our house, which took me to places of wonder outside myself. And I’ve benefitted from a nation with a strong social safety net, a minimum wage which is the highest of any nation outside of Luxembourg, a justice system that eliminated the death penalty nationwide almost 60 years ago, and a political system that was the first in the world to grant votes, and the right to stand for parliament, to women. It also rates as one of the least religious nations on earth – which for me is a godsend.
More on determinism from me, no doubt, as I plough into the second half of Sapolsky’s Determined.
John Hospers (1918 -2011), US philosopher and first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party
The philosopher John Hospers lived to the ripe old age of 93 and died in 2011. His essay “What means this freedom?” was published in a 1961 philosophical compendium, Determinism and freedom in the age of modern science, edited by Sidney Hook, and reprinted in Free will and determinism, edited by Berofsky. I haven’t been able to ascertain exactly when the essay was written. The internet tells me Hospers was strongly associated with libertarianism, and was once a good friend of Ayn Rand, which strikes me as bizarre considering that the above-mentioned essay presents an argument against free will. Perhaps a closer study of the essay will clarify the apparent contradiction.
Hospers brings up the concept of unconscious motivation in his first paragraph. He reflects on a ‘criminal act’:
The deed may be planned, it may be carried out in cold calculation, it may spring from the agent’s character and be continuous with the rest of his behaviour, and it may be perfectly true that he could have done differently if he had wanted to; nonetheless his behaviour was brought about by unconscious conflicts developed in infancy, over which he had no control and of which (without training in psychiatry) he does not even have knowledge. He may even think he knows why he acted as he did, he may think he has conscious control over his actions, he may even think he is fully responsible for them; but he is not. Psychiatric casebooks provide hundreds of examples. The law and common sense, though puzzled sometimes by such cases, are gradually becoming aware that they exist; but at this early stage countless blunders still occur because neither the law nor the public in general is aware of the genesis of criminal actions.
The conscious/unconscious division, born of psychoanalysis, seems dated now, but there’s plenty of evidence of retarded neural development in childhood, and of the epigenetic effects of early developmental experiences, both pre- and post-natal. It’s also worth noting that Hospers here confines himself to ‘criminal actions’, without seeming to recognise the much wider implications of the determinist world we live in. Our deterministic world is massively more encompassing, something that perhaps remains hidden to many of us because of the more or less infinite variety of human individuals the chains of cause and effect produce. And, of course, because of the modern WEIRD emphasis on human freedom.
A problem with Hospers’ argument is that, as he claims above, it supposedly relies on ‘training in psychiatry’. In a marginal note to Hospers’ analysis of Hamlet’s inability to act, due to an unconscious ‘Oedipal conflict’, I wrote this, more than 40 years ago:
I can’t accept this – it suggests that someone else knows my motives better than I do. This is the insidious power structure on which psychoanalysis is built.
Of course it’s true that if you want an accurate description of a person’s character, you ask those who know her well rather than the person herself, because for sound evolutionary reasons, we emphasise our ‘best’ qualities and minimise our worst. However the psychiatric view misses a great many other factors in determining character – genetic, epigenetic, cultural, hormonal, traumatic, dietary, and probably countless others still insufficiently researched. All of these factors create a self, which, according to many ‘compatibilists’, including Sidney Hook in Berofsky’s collection, is the agent which ‘freely’ acts. What means this freedom, indeed!
It’s hardly Hospers’ fault that he didn’t widen the determining factors I’ve just mentioned, as so little was known about them, mid-twentieth century. And yet, much further along in his essay, he makes this extraordinary claim:
I want to make it clear that I have not been arguing for determinism.
And much of what follows makes little sense to me. The philosophical language, it seems to me, gets in the way of basic reasoning (not only here but in most of the essays in the Berofsky volume). For example, much is made of the question ‘Are our powers innate or acquired?’ This is a non-issue. We acquire certain ‘powers’ or skills or world-views or whatever because of the family we’re born into, the zeitgeist that surrounds that family, and particular mentors or events that have influenced us, particularly at an early age. We have no control over our early brain development, over whether we’re attractive or ugly by our community’s standards, whether we’re short or tall, ‘black’ or ‘white’ skinned, or introduced as babies into the English or Tagalog language. And these factors and a thousand others heavily influence what we will become. To sort them into innate or acquired characteristics is largely a mug’s game.
Essentially the reason Hospers and others are fearful of the determinist label is the idea that all is ‘fixed’, that nothing could have been otherwise, or can be otherwise in the future. So what’s the use of trying? What I do tomorrow is already set. No need to think about it, to worry about what to wear to work, what to prepare for tomorrow’s lesson – it’s already taken care of. But that’s not how things work. What’s missing is the complexity of interacting determining factors that make us, the most hyper-social mammalian species on the planet, want to survive and thrive within the social web that has created us. Some of us, largely due to the luck of our early years and environment, are very good at doing this, sometimes to the detriment of others, sometimes not. Others are overwhelmed and seek to withdraw into a more ‘safe’ and static environment. In any case, things are not fixed, due to the dynamic, albeit determined, world that we have to negotiate constantly throughout our lives. A determined world is far from being predictable, because we’re constantly encountering unexpected events, conversations, challenges, requests, crises, accidents, insights, and so on. They often come at us thick and fast, and we must deal with them, determined though they be. And our own dealing with them has always been determined, because we dealt with them in this way and not that. How we deal with a situation in the future isn’t yet determined – nor is it entirely predictable, because the elements of that future situation are always unique, and complex.
To return to Hospers, let me analyse some remarks towards the end of his essay:
What of the charge that we could never have acted otherwise than we did? This, I submit, is not true. Here the proponents of … ‘soft determinism’ are quite right. I could have gone to the opera today instead of coming here; that is, if certain conditions had been different, I should have gone. I could have done many other things instead of what I did, if some condition or other had been different, specifically if my desire had been different.
Hospers goes on to examine ‘could’ as a ‘power word’, but in my view that is beside the point. The point, as Sabine Hossenfelder bluntly states in her video on free will, is that, given all the things you could have done in response to situation x (which are virtually infinite), you did y. And this decision was the result of all the impinging circumstances of the moment together with the character you have become due to a virtually infinite combination of historical events, neural connections, hormonal flows, genetic inheritances and so forth. Hospers mentions desire, as if this is something we have control over. I can attest that, when young, I became pathetically sick with desire for certain young women while unmoved by others who seemed equally attractive by general standards. I felt like the plaything of strong emotions which I wasn’t sure whether to feel proud of or ashamed of. I’ve also felt extremely violent emotions towards people who mistreated me, in my view, such as an old headmaster, but also toward long-dead dictators and war-mongers I’ve read about. None of these feelings are under my control. Nor is it really under my control that I haven’t acted on my violent or libidinous passions. My desire not to go to gaol or make a fool of myself, which are pretty commonplace desires, shared by the vast majority of people, have kept me well out of the spotlight. That desire is, of course, the result of experiences that have befallen me, and shaped me. Not of my own free will – whatever that means.
References
Free will and determinism, ed Bernard Berofsky, 1966
