On Genetics

Written 1 year ago

Every single book on philosophy, politics or business I’ve read, suddenly started feeling like the rind, the shallow skin of all written knowledge about human affairs. Genetics is to social sciences what Assembler is to C++: the underlying code that really makes things happen.

My journey on this field began many years ago on my biology classes when I was in high-school. But it wasn’t until recently that I read a couple of marvelous books, from which I’ll recommend:

• The classic The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkings.
• And a great introductory book for understanding our origins: Before The Dawn by Nicholas Wade.

How is genetics shaping the lines of thought in the political, philosophical or business spheres? Here are a couple of simple ideas I would like to share from these books.

• Private Property as a Disruption for Progress
  Deprecated anarchists of the 19th century and communists constantly fought the idea of private property claiming it was the source for all inequalities found on earth. It certainly has some truth to it; The nomadic hunter-gatherer societies that existed before didn’t had the concept of property and all men within these tribes were equal, without hierarchies and shared their piece of the hunted animal.  
  
  But when human societies settled, and eventually agriculture and trading appeared, the rise of private property enabled for the first time the spread of more intellectual genes: individuals with skills for maths in a society that required surpluses and trade had better chances than those who couldn’t add or substract. It’s very unlikely that the genes for an Einstein or a Newton would appear in a nomadic, hunter-gatherer society were only those genes related for physical action (hunting, running, etc) were required for survival.

• Monogamy as a Disruption for Peace
  It’s a very known fact (but usually a forgotten one) that one of the best strategies we humans have to achieve a large, cohesive and peaceful society, is monogamy. One-woman-for-one-man guarantees that everyone will get their chance for reproduction. In other species, males are in constant struggle against each other to get their piece of the action and hence, condemned to live in small tribes. It’s also interesting to notice that the taboo that all human societies have towards sex are to sustain this monogamous behaviour and to avoid tempting other people into breaking the rules.

• Religion as a Disruption for Altruism
  Just like Chomsky developed the Universal Grammar with all the common traits found on every known language; genetecists developed the idea of a “Universal Society” with all the common traits of every known society. Religion is among those traits and it quite propbaly co-evolved with Language. 
  
  Language, as a new powerful tool for humans, could’ve been used by the freeloaders in a society to pursue selfish goals by deceiving its members (ie: lying). So religion was a strategy to punish those freeloaders that went against the communal principles and brought stability to a society helping the spread of genes that promoted altruistic behaviours rather than selfish ones. Today, unlike any other specie, humans have a default trust for every other human they meet regardless of its gene configuration (if its a family member or not). 

The reason I mention these three subjects (among so many to be discussed through the lens of genetics) is that these are topics I would certainly had questioned in a very different way if I had used other frameworks from the social sciences.

If one thing all the social sciences willing to explain these fields lack, is a structured language, a form of logic that can help us reason in a more detailed way why things are the way they are. I wonder if with the recent breakthroughs on the human genome, we’ll one day be able to create the proper mathematics to describe our history…