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Stupid Questions: Nature/Nurture

13 Dec 2025

Nature is just nurture over time, and nurture is far more obviously in charge. The debate is Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless.

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Show Notes

Further reading

References

Pattern

Speechnotes

Intro

Welcome to the btrmt Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing. Patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. That’s what brains do. So let me teach you. One pattern, one podcast. You see if it works for you.

So, we are officially past the introductory lectures and into the full swing of things. This is my shorter intro, I’ll by curious what you think.

Now, to get things on the straight and narrow, I’ll do a series of bits that I have on questions that seem important, but actually don’t really end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way they’re typically deployed.

Typically they’re deployed like stupid questions which make you seem smart.

Let me tell you about one.

Assumption

I have an article called Genetics is Nurture. I say there:

There is a constant tension in any animal science between the impact of nature and the impact of nurture. How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much because of our environment?

But this isn’t just a delicate sparring match between academics. Instagram and TikTok are choc-a-block with people claiming evolutionary motivations for stuff that have been corrupted by or are at odds with our socialisation. The most common one is gender. People love Buss’ sexual selections stuff, even if they always get it wrong. The idea that men evolved to be powerful resource hunters and leaders of the household and women evolved to be homemakers, ready to breed at a moments notice, and the modern world has us all messed up because we’re trying to go against our natures.[^1]

Even if, one finds this kind of fantasy sexy, and I must admit that I do, we should still think that it’s kind of stupid, for three reasons.

Subversion

Evolutionary stories are just stories

Firstly, evolution, as an explanation, is over-rated. I complain about this all the time. Essentially, you can tell any story you like by appealing to evolution. They’re called Just-So Stories for a reason:

Evolutionary narratives often seem to have this … ‘it could be anything’ quality about them. You know, you might ask why giraffes have long necks. It could be because their ancestors found better food higher on the trees. But it could also be that longer necks made them more deadly in the odd combat giraffes get stuck into. And so on.

Evolutionary narratives have a place. We should at least test our theories against an evolutionary perspective so we don’t come up with:

such fantastic dead-end notions as Oedipal desires and death instincts.

But trying to do more than that with them is just story-time. Infinite explanations and no one can go back in time to prove the counterfactual.

Genetics is nurture

The second reason I think nature vs nurture is a stupid concept is because, as I linked up top, Genetics is nurture. Genetic evolution is the product of the environment at different time-points. This is true in two ways actually.

Firstly, obviously genetic evolution is evolving in response to the environment, but it can happen surprisingly fast—in thousands if not hundreds of years. More surprisingly, although I’m skeptical of epigenetics and postgenomics because it seems like it’s just becoming the new evolutionary theory with regard to ‘explaining everything’, the entire body of literature points to genetic changes that happen within one generation, or even within our lifetime.

In fact, if anything, it’s probably even speeding up. Neutral evolution—in which “genetic drift”, i.e. mutation with no selective value, is just left alone—means that all our efforts at health innovation are reducing the evolutionary cost of mutations. Reducing evolutionary penalties increases the amount of genetic drift.

The second way genetics is the product of the environment is actually built into how scientists talk about it. Scientists don’t ever refer to ‘geneticness’ when they’re trying to describe genetic influences. They talk about ‘heritability’. Heritability is a stat that tells us how much of the variation in a trait at a timepoint, within a population, and under certain environmental conditions can be attributed to genetic differences. It necessarily relies on the environment—if the environment changes, the relative contribution of genetic variance can change, even when biology stays exactly the same. For example, the heritability of height increased all over the place in the 20th century, purely because our nutritional environments became better and more uniform (see this for both the theory and a critique). People ate the same, so genetic differences showed more. The point being, that genes don’t have intrinsic effects that are independent of the environment. It depends entirely on the environment, and thus, there’s no reason to privilege some historical genetic story, because it simply may not apply now, under these conditions. The same genes could produce entirely different outcomes.

Genetics is nurture.

Implication and outro

It literally never matters!

Which leads us to my third reason, which I think applies even if you don’t accept the other two: evolutionary stories are fucking boring. They are true Malcolm Gladwell shit—superficially sexy but practically useless. No one has ever come to me with a convincing reason to believe that understanding something as nature rather than nurture helps me meaningfully. Not just because there could be any number of competing explanations, nor because I can’t disentangle them from the environment. It’s because it’s so obvious that the environment matters way more. And if it’s truly immutable, then frankly, I’m not enough of a fatalist to want to believe it.

All in all, why bother asking?

Edited Transcript

Below is a lightly edited transcript. For the article that inspired this one, see Genetics is Nurture.

Welcome to the btrmt. Lectures. My name is Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns to the thing—patterns of thought, of feeling, of action. That’s what brains do. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for you.

So we’re officially past the introductory lectures and into the full swing of things. This is my shorter introduction—I’ll be curious what you think.

And now, to get things on the straight and narrow, I want to do a series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t actually really end up mattering for most people. Certainly not in the way that they’re typically deployed. Typically, they’re deployed like stupid questions that make you seem smart.

And I’m going to tell you about one.

The Gender Essentialist Fantasy

I have an article called Genetics is Nurture. I say there:

There’s a constant tension in any animal science between the impact of nature and the impact of nurture. How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions, and how much is because of our environment?

But this isn’t just a delicate sparring match between academics. Instagram and TikTok are chock-a-block with people claiming evolutionary motivations for stuff that have been corrupted by or are at odds with our socialisation. And the most common one, at least currently, is gender. People love Buss’ sexual selection stuff, even if they always get it wrong. The idea—to be a bit glib—is that men evolved to be powerful resource hunters and leaders of the household, and women evolved to be homemakers ready to breed at a moment’s notice. And the modern world has us all messed up because we’re trying to go against our evolutionary natures in this regard.

Even if you find this fantasy sexy—and I must admit that I do find this fantasy a bit sexy—you should still at least admit that it’s stupid. And I’ll give you three reasons why.

Evolutionary Stories Are Just Stories

Firstly, evolution, as an explanation, is completely overrated. This is something I write about again and again, and I’ll put some links to that in the show notes. But essentially, you can tell any story you like by appealing to evolution. They have this “it could be anything” quality about them. You know, like you might ask, why do giraffes have long necks? It could be because their ancestors had to find food higher on trees—the bed of food was just higher, so their necks grew longer. But equally, it could be that longer necks made them more deadly in the odd combat that giraffes get stuck into when they smash their necks against each other. And so on and so forth. You can come up with any kind of evolutionary story to explain any kind of thing.

And that’s not to say that evolutionary narratives don’t have a place. We should at least test our theories against an evolutionary perspective so that we don’t come up with a bunch of fantastic dead-end notions like Freud’s Oedipal desires and death instincts. These are things that just aren’t contiguous with what we know about evolutionary theory. But trying to do more than just test our theories against them is just story time. You have infinite explanations and nobody can go back in time to prove the counterfactual.

So that’s one reason: evolutionary stories are just stories.

Genetics Is Nurture

The second reason is that genetics just is nurture. They’re very difficult to distinguish.

Genetic evolution is the product of the environment at different time points. And this is actually true in two ways.

The first way is the most obvious one. Obviously genetic evolution is evolving in response to the environment, and it can happen surprisingly fast. We have evidence for it happening in thousands of years, if not hundreds of years. A community of people who spend so much of their time diving in the ocean that their lung capacity has changed within a thousand years.

And more surprisingly, although I must admit I’m pretty sceptical of epigenetics and post-genomics—it really does seem like it’s starting to become the new evolutionary theory with regard to explaining everything, and it’s also very notable that we saw a lot about epigenetics and then all of a sudden it went very quiet. That’s a red flag to me as well. But regardless, there is some tantalising evidence, and indeed the entire body of literature points to genetic changes that happen within one generation or even within our lifetime.

And for anybody who doesn’t know what epigenetics is, I’ll put a link in the show notes, but this is the idea that genetic changes can be passed down from parent to child. And there are some fantastic studies on anxiety in rats where genes related or associated with anxiety—when a rat is anxious and gives birth, that child has those same genes expressed. This is the kind of thing that epigenetics looks at. Within one generation.

And in my article, which I’m speaking to here, I also talk about the phenomenon of jumping genes. Now, jumping genes are these DNA sequences that can move their position, changing the form and the function of other genes. And we don’t really know exactly what they do, what their role in the body is, but there’s heaps of them. There’s this one particular sequence that might make up almost a sixth of the entire human genome. And what we think they probably do is relate to regulation of gene expression. So we know that bacteria use them to develop antibiotic resistance, which is not good for us, but it gives us a clue as to why they’re useful for us.

So epigenetics, post-genomics literature that’s pointing to genetic changes that happen within our lifetime—maybe, maybe not. But certainly in a generation, and if not hundreds or thousands of years, much faster than the millennia that people usually point at.

And if anything, it’s probably speeding up. There’s this concept called neutral evolution or genetic drift. And what it suggests is that most genetic developments really just aren’t substantial enough to be weeded out by natural selection. They’re these sort of random stochastic mutations that aren’t really that helpful. They’re not really that harmful. They don’t do anything for us, but they don’t hold us back.

And what’s really interesting is as we get better at keeping ourselves alive, essentially more of these mutations fall into this category of neutrality. All our health innovations mean that harms that once would have been quite harmful aren’t really that important any more. And this effect is biased in an interesting way. The bigger the mutation, the more likely it is to be weeded out by natural selection. But health innovation is targeted solely at mitigating the costs of these harmful mutations. We do a lot to keep people from getting sick—certainly more so in fact than keeping them from flourishing. And this is for obvious reasons. So reducing these sort of evolutionary penalties is going to increase the amount of genetic drift that evolution allows to propagate in the environment.

So genetic evolution happens pretty fast. And it is a product of the environment that we’re in. That’s what genetics does. It encodes the history of our being in the world.

The second way that genetics is a product of the environment is actually built into the way that scientists and geneticists talk about it. You’ll never hear a scientist talk about the “genetic-ness” of something when they’re trying to describe its genetic influences. What you’ll hear them talk about is this word called heritability.

Heritability is a statistic that tells us how much of the variation in some trait that we have at some time point, within some population, and under certain environmental conditions can be attributed to genetic differences. And all that qualification—I mean, it sounds complicated, but it’s necessary because you can’t study genetics in a vacuum. Genetics necessarily relies on the environment. Because if the environment changes, then the relative contribution of genetic variance can change, even if your biology is exactly the same.

I’ll give you an example. A good example of this is that the heritability of height increased all over the place in the 20th century. And this is probably—at least, people seem to think—not just because our nutritional environments became better, but actually because our nutritional environments became more uniform. So people are eating the same from culture to culture, and as a result you can see more differences in genetic expression. More genetic differences showed up.

And the point of this is to say that genes just don’t have intrinsic effects independent of the environment. Under these circumstances—people eating the same—these genetic differences are showing up. But under previous circumstances when people were eating differently, the genetic differences didn’t show. There’s no reason to privilege some historical genetic story because whatever genetic story you’re trying to tell might not apply now, or might not have applied then under these conditions or those, because the same genes can produce entirely different outcomes.

All of this to say: between just the fact of heritability and the fact that genetic evolution itself is encoding the environment into our bodies and the possible speeding up in the form of genetic drift—genetics is the same thing as nurture in important ways.

Why It Doesn’t Matter Anyway

And that leads us to my conclusion. And my conclusion is easy. It’s my third reason that nature versus nurture as a concept is a stupid question, which I think applies even if you don’t accept the other two.

And that’s that evolutionary stories are just boring. They’re true Malcolm Gladwell shit. And when I say that, I’m referring to this other article of mine where I talk about what Murray Davis called the sociology of the interesting. What Murray Davis noticed is that what makes an academic theory interesting is the ones that subvert our weakly held beliefs. They’re hot takes on things that we don’t care very much about. So if our strong beliefs are attacked, then we’re likely to resist the attack. But if our existing beliefs are confirmed, we’re likely to do very little but nod and forget. What we find really interesting is if the stuff we don’t care about very much is revised.

That’s what Malcolm Gladwell does in his books. The same, in fact, that I’m using for this podcast right now. And that’s what nature and nurture is often speaking to. They’re superficially sexy because they can revise any belief that you have. There are infinite evolutionary stories, but practically they’re completely useless.

No one has ever come to me with a convincing reason to believe that understanding something as being the product of nature rather than nurture meaningfully helps me. Not just because there could be any number of competing explanations, nor because I can’t disentangle them from the environment. If only it’s because it’s so obvious that the environment matters way more. And if things truly are immutable, then frankly, I’m not enough of a fatalist to want to believe it.

So, all that to say: nature and nurture. Why bother even asking?

Transcript

[00:00] Welcome to the btrmt

[00:11] Lectures. My name is

[00:12] Dr. Dorian Minors, and if there is one thing I’ve learned as a brain scientist, it is that there is no instruction manual for this device in our

[00:19] head. But there are patterns to the thing, patterns of thought, feeling, patterns of action, because that’s what brains

[00:25] do. So let me teach you about

[00:27] them. One pattern, one podcast, and you see if it works for

[00:30] you. So we’re officially past the introductory lectures and into the full swing of

[00:35] things. This is my shorter

[00:36] introduction. I’ll be curious what you

[00:38] think. And now, to get things on the straight and narrow, I want to do a series of bits that I have on questions that seem important but don’t actually really end up mattering for most people, certainly not in the way that they’re typically

[00:50] deployed. Typically, they’re deployed like stupid questions that make you seem

[00:54] smart. And I’m going to tell you about

[00:56] one. I have an article called Genetics as

[01:04] Nurture. I’ll link it in the show

[01:06] notes. But I say there and to quote, there’s a constant tension in any animal science between the impact of nature and the impact of

[01:13] nurture. How much of who we are and what we do is the result of our genetic predispositions and how much is because of our

[01:20] environment. That’s the

[01:22] quote. But this isn’t just like a delicate sparring match between academics,

[01:26] right? Instagram and TikTok are just chock a block with people claiming evolutionary motivations for stuff that have been corrupted by or at odds with our

[01:34] socialization. And the most common one, at least currently, is gender,

[01:39] right? People love buses, sexual selection stuff, even if they always get it

[01:44] wrong. And this is the to be a bit glib, the idea that men evolve to be powerful resource hunters and leaders of the household in women evolved to be homemakers ready to breed at a moment’s

[01:54] notice. And the modern world has us all messed up, right, because we’re trying to go against our evolutionary natures in this

[02:00] regard. And even if you find this fantasy sexy, and I must admit that I do find this fantasy a bit sexy, then you still should at least admit that it’s

[02:10] stupid. And I’ll give you three reasons

[02:13] why.

[02:19] Now. Firstly, evolution as an explanation is completely

[02:23] overrated. This is something I write about again and again, and I’ll put some links to that in the show

[02:28] notes. But essentially you can tell any story you like by appealing to

[02:32] evolution. They have this, it could be anything quality about

[02:36] them. You know, like you might ask, why do giraffes have long

[02:39] necks? It could be because their ancestors had to find food higher on trees,

[02:45] right? The bed of food was just higher, so their necks grew

[02:48] longer. But equally, it could be that longer necks made them more deadly in the odd combat that giraffes get stuck into, right, when they smash their necks against each other and so on and so forth, you can sort of come up with any kind of evolutionary story to explain any kind of

[03:04] thing. And that’s not to say that evolutionary narratives don’t have a

[03:08] place. We should at least test our theories against an evolutionary perspective so that we don’t come up with a bunch of fantastic dead end notions like Martin Daly Scott said, Freud’s Oedipal desires and death instincts,

[03:23] right? These are things that just aren’t contiguous with what we know about evolutionary

[03:27] theory. But trying to do more than just test our theories against them is just story

[03:32] time. You have infinite explanations and nobody can go back in time to prove the

[03:38] counterfactual. So that’s one reason evolutionary stories are just

[03:42] stories. The second reason is that genetics just is

[03:46] nurture. Like, they are very difficult to

[03:49] distinguish. So genetic evolution is the product of the environment at different time

[03:56] points. And this is actually true in two

[03:58] ways. The first way is the most obvious

[04:00] one. You know, obviously genetic evolution is evolving in response to the environment, and it can happen surprisingly

[04:09] fast. We have evidence for it happening in thousands of years, if not hundreds of

[04:15] years.

[04:15] Right? A community of people who spend so much of their time diving in the ocean that their lung capacity has changed within a thousand

[04:22] years. And more surprisingly, although I must admit I’m pretty skeptical of epigenetics and post genomics, it really does seem like it’s starting to become the new evolutionary theory with regard to explaining

[04:36] everything. And it’s also very notable that we saw a lot about epigenetics and then all of a sudden it went very

[04:43] quiet. That’s a red flag to me as

[04:45] well. But regardless, there is some tantalizing evidence and indeed the entire body of literature points to genetic changes that happen within one generation or even within our

[04:57] lifetime. And for anybody who doesn’t know what epigenetics is, you know, again, I’ll put a link in the, in the show notes, but this is the idea that genetic changes can be passed down from parent to

[05:08] child. And there are some fantastic studies on anxiety in rats where genes related or associated with

[05:14] anxiety. When a rat is anxious and gives birth, that child has those same genes

[05:22] expressed. This is the kind of thing that epigenetics looks

[05:25] at. So within one

[05:26] Generation. And in my article, which I am speaking to here, I also talk about the phenomenon of jumping

[05:35] genes. Now, jumping genes are these DNA sequence that can move their position, changing the form and the function of other

[05:43] genes. And we don’t really know exactly what they do, what’s their role in the body, but there’s heaps of

[05:50] them. There’s this one particular sequence that might make up almost a sixth of the entire human

[05:56] genome. And what we think they probably do and is relate to regulation of gene

[06:02] expression. So we know that bacteria use them to develop antibiotic resistance, which is not good for us, but it gives us a clue as to why they’re useful for

[06:11] us. So epigenetics, post genomics literature that’s pointing to genetic changes that happen within our lifetime, maybe

[06:21] bacteria.

[06:21] Yeah. But certainly in a generation, and if not hundreds, thousands of years, much faster than the millennia that people usually point

[06:30] at. And if anything, it’s probably speeding

[06:36] up. There’s this concept called neutral evolution or genetic

[06:40] drift. And what it suggests is that most genetic developments really just aren’t substantial enough to be weeded out by natural

[06:47] selection. They’re these sort of random stochastic mutations that aren’t really that

[06:52] helpful. They’re not really that

[06:53] harmful. They don’t do anything for us, but they don’t hold us

[06:56] back. And what’s really interesting is as we get sort of better at keeping ourselves alive, essentially more of these mutations fall into this category of neutrality,

[07:07] right? All our health innovations means that harms that once would have been quite harmful aren’t really that important

[07:14] anymore. And this effect is biased in an interesting

[07:17] way. The bigger the mutation, the more likely it is to be weeded out by natural

[07:23] selection. But health innovation is targeted solely at mitigating the costs of these harmful

[07:29] mutations. We do a lot to keep people from getting sick, maybe more so than you know, certainly more so in fact than keeping them from

[07:39] flourishing. And this is for obvious reasons,

[07:41] right? So reducing these sort of evolutionary penalties is going to increase the amount of genetic drift that evolution allows to propagate in the

[07:51] environment. So genetic evolution happens pretty fast,

[07:56] right? And it is a product of the environment that we’re

[07:59] in. That’s what genetics

[08:00] does. It encodes the history of our being in the

[08:03] world. The second way that genetics is a product of the environment is actually built into the way that scientists and geneticists talk about

[08:12] it. You’ll never hear a scientist talk about like the genetic ness of something when they’re trying to describe its genetic

[08:20] influences. What you’ll hear Them talk about is this word called

[08:24] heritability. Heritability is a statistic that tells us how much of the variation in some trait that we have at some time point within some population and under some certain environmental conditions can be attributed to genetic differences and all that

[08:41] qualification. I mean, it sounds complicated, but it’s necessary because you can’t study genetics in a

[08:47] vacuum. Genetics necessarily relies on the environment because if the environment changes, then the relative contribution of genetic variance can change, even if your biology is exactly the

[08:59] same. I’ll give you an

[09:00] example. So a good example of this is that the heritability of height increased all over the place in the 20th

[09:07] century. And this is probably at least, people seem to think that it’s not just because our nutritional environments became better, but actually because our nutritional environments became more

[09:18] uniform. So people are eating the same from culture to culture, and as a result you can see more differences in genetic expression, more genetic differences showed

[09:29] up. And the point of this is to say that genes just don’t have intrinsic effects independent of the environment,

[09:36] right? Under these circumstances, people eating the same, these genetic differences are showing up, but under previous circumstances when people were eating differently, the genetic differences didn’t

[09:48] show. There’s no reason to privilege some historical genetic story because whatever genetic story you’re trying to tell might not apply now or might not have applied then under these conditions or those, because the same genes can produce entirely different

[10:05] outcomes. All of this to say between just the fact of heritability and the fact that genetic evolution itself is encoding the environment into our bodies and the possible speeding up in the form of genetic

[10:21] drift. Genetics is the same thing as nurture in important

[10:26] ways. And that leads us to my

[10:29] conclusion. And my conclusion is

[10:43] easy. It’s my third reason that nature versus nurture as a concept is a stupid question which I think applies even if you don’t accept the other

[10:52] two. And that’s that evolutionary stories are just boring,

[10:56] right? They’re

[10:57] true. Malcolm Gladwell

[10:58] Shit. And when I say that, I’m referring to this other article of mine where I talk about what Murray Davis called the sociology of the

[11:06] interesting. What Murray Davis noticed is that what makes an academic theory interesting is the ones that subvert our weakly held beliefs, they’re hot takes on things that we don’t care very much

[11:19] about. So if our strong beliefs are attacked, then we’re likely to resist the

[11:23] attack. But if our existing beliefs are confirmed, we’re likely to do very little but not and

[11:27] forget. What we find really interesting is if the stuff we don’t care about very much is

[11:33] revised. That’s what Malcolm Gladwell does in his

[11:36] books. The same, in fact, that I’m using for this podcast right

[11:40] now. And that’s what nature and nurture is often speaking

[11:45] to. They’re superficially sexy because they can revise any belief that you

[11:50] have. There are infinite evolutionary stories, but practically they’re completely

[11:54] useless. No one has ever come to me with a convincing reason to believe

[11:59] that. Understanding something as being the product of nature rather than nurture meaningfully helps

[12:04] me. Not just because there could be any number of competing explanations, nor because I can’t disentangle them from the

[12:11] environment. If only it is because it’s so obvious that the environment matters way

[12:17] more. And if things truly are immutable, then frankly, I’m not enough of a fatalist to want to believe

[12:23] it. So, all that to say nature and

[12:27] nurture. Why bother even

[12:28] asking?

Anthologies: Betterment, Thought Architecture, Animal Sentience, Narrative Culture, Neurotypica, On Being Fruitful, On the Nature of Things, On Thinking and Reasoning

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