The Splash of Horses

OK, in the spirit of Christmas I have two offerings for you all (three if you count the picture above, which documents a failed Allied plan to blow up German boilers by introducing explosive dead rats into coal supplies in the hopes that they would be absently tossed into the fire). 

First, a short quote from JBS Haldane, the American naturalist who is justly famous for his reply to the question of what might be inferred about the mind of the Creator from examining his Creation ("an inordinate fondness for beatles,") which needs no explanation:

 

To the mouse and any smaller animal [gravity] presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

JBS Haldane, "On Being the Right Size" 

Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1928)

Second, a rather extended quotation from the terminal paragraphs of Richard Lewontin's fourth Massey Lecture, "Science as Social Action," which requires a little bit of explanation.  (I wish I had Marshal Sahlins' The Use and Abuse of Biology with me as well, since I suspect that Lewontin would have had trouble saying what he says without both Haldane and Sahlins, but I don't, and nobody gave it to me for Christmas).  I am not offering this as a citation of authority to quash further comment, but rather to elicit it.  Lewontin is talking about genetic cognitive determinists, with whom I want to stress I am not grouping any of the illustrious contributers to this forum, but he makes two points which I think about a lot, which I find salutory to the line of inquiry under discussion, and which I would like to hear your thoughts on: 1) that what we know from history and biology mainly tells us what is possible for human consciousness and culture, not what its limits are, and 2) (and this is the point on which I think he must be in some way connected to Sahlins) that social reality exists at a different level of causation from the neurophysiological pheomena which can be studied in laboratories.  

It is indeed the case that human social and political organization is a reflection of our biological being, for, after all, we are material biological objects developing under the influence of the interaction of our genes with the external world.  It certainly is not the case that our biology is irrelevant to social organization.  The question is, what part of our biology is relevant?  If one were to choose a simple biological property of human beings that was of supreme importance, it would be our size.  The fact that we are somewhere between five and six feet tall has made all of human life possible as we know it.  Gulliver's Lilliputians, who were said to be six inches tall, could not, in fact, have had the civilization that he ascribed to them because six-inch-tall human beings, no matter how they were shaped and formed, could not have created the rudiments of a technological civilization.  For example, they could not have smelted iron.  They could not have mined minerals, necause a six-inch-tall being could not get sufficient kinetic energy from swinging a tiny pickax to break rocks.  That is why when babies fall they do not hurt themselves.  Nor could the Lilliputians have controlled fire, because the tiny twigs that they could bring to a fire would burn up instantly.  Nor is it likely that they could have htought about mining or been able to speak, because their brains would be physically to small.  It probably takes a central nervous system of a certain size to have enough connections and enough complexity of topology for speech.  Ants may be terribly strong and terribly clever for their size, but their size alone guarantees they will never write books about people.  

The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system whith as many connections as it has  However, there are not enough gnees to determine the detailed shape and structure of the nervous system nor of the consciousness that is an aspect of that structure.  Yet it is consciousness that creates our environment, its history and the direction of its future.  This then provides us with a  correct understanding of the relation between our genes and the shape of our lives.

Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and and physiologies.  In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings.  But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible.  In Simone de Beauvoir's clever but deep apothegm, a human being is "l'être dont l'être est de n'être pas," the being whose esssence is in not having an essence.

History far transcends any narrow limitaitons that are claimed for either the power of genes or the power of environment to circumscribe us.  Like the House of Lords that destroyed its own power to limit the political development of Britain in the succesive Reform Acts to which it assented, so the genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to dtermine the individual and its envirnoment.  They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own natre can be understood explored only through that unique form of experience, social action."

Richard Lewontin, "Science as Social Action"

Biology as Ideology, (1991)

I'll leave it at that for the moment, and await your comments with anticipation.