Episode 48: Genetics and Universality (part 2): How Our Genes Coerce Us

How do we square genetically influenced mental disorders with the theory of explanatory universality?

In a previous episode, Tracy asked Bruce how to reconcile her experience with mental disorders, like narcissism, with the idea of Universal Explainers. This is part 2 of that discussion.

In the last episode, Bruce introduced the idea that emotions and feelings aren't the same as ideas and go back to an earlier point in our evolutionary history. The genes then use our feelings to try to coerce us or encourage us via pleasures and pain. 

Bruce completes his list of possible ways genes can affect our personality and ideas without violating universality:

1. The genes can control physiology and this in turn can impact our personality and ideas via interaction with existing (sometimes stable) culture
2. The genes can control how we grow the various parts of the cortex and since those parts affect our ability to think, they affect our personality development as well as interests.
3. The genes can control perceptions and this can in turn impact our ideas.
4. The genes control how we’re wired to pleasure and pain centers of the brain and can coerce or encourage us via these feelings.
5. The genes control how we gain ideas via attention.
6. The genes can affect culture via 1-5 above and then let culture do the heavy lifting
7. Humans may be significantly affected by older animal modules of the brain in some cases. We have no reason to believe all knowledge we learn is via ‘the universal explainer’ module.

In addition, we discuss how the existence of insanity, dreams, and people who are extremely mentally challenged prove that there is such a thing as a person that is not a universal explainer but can still reason to a degree. See Steven Peck's "My Madness" for an amazing example.

Then we introduce the strongest problem we currently know of: the extreme heritability of psychopathy in some children.