INHERITABILITY OF PERSONALITY VERSES CULTURE

I am in the process of reading +Edward O Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of the Earth (2012).  In the book, he refers to the inheritability of personality traits and talks about the accepted standard of five broad domains of personality, which are five broad extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.

As a veterinarian, I recognize four of the five, with conscientiousness limited to chimpanzees, bonobo apes, and people. He states that there is “substantial inheritability mostly falling between one-third and two thirds”. The numerical reference is to the tried and true approach of partitioning variance, which means scientists can mathematically attributed the variability of each of the five “domains” of personality to different factors such as genetic verses family verses, peer groups, etc. For example, one study estimated the influence of genetics to be extroversion 54%, agreeableness 42%, and conscientiousness 49%, neuroticism 48%, but did not mention openness to experience.

Wilson cites a study 2005 study conducted by 87 spanning 49 cultures, which found essentially the same result across all these cultures. Scientists interpret these studies to mean that our genes only account for those percentages of our behavior with learning counting for the remainder of the variance. In terms of our behavior, we are about half-genetic robots and half from what we have learned. Because so many scientists looked at so many cultures, other scientists treat the results as being irrefutable. The facts are verifiable facts; however, the interpretation is refutable.

Implying we are not genetic robots, which is presumable done to sooth our egos because studies show our personalities are only 50% inherited points out that switching from behavior to personality is too big a switch. I look at +Dr. Donald Brown’s list of cultural universals and see something different, a different message—only where there are geographical differences in cultures (behavior) are they learned the rest is in the genes. Looking at the big picture created by a the two research efforts, I see inheritability of behavior as being far above 50%, more like something approaching 100% but of course not 100%.

Keep in mind that chickens act like chickens, dogs act like dogs, and humans act like humans but only humans have culture. As any pet owners will tell you, animals have personalities. In contrast, cultural anthropologists will tell you that, with few exceptions, only humans have culture. As an aside, the orangutan is the lowest ape deemed by scientists to have the first signs of culture. The point of this post is that human personality is only a very small part of our culture. Therefore, the idea that researchers finding the “partitioning the variance of personalities,” at for example 50% inherited and 50% learned, means a somewhat smaller part of human overall behavior is learned. Obviously, there is a lot more to culture than personality.  Culture is the characteristics of a particular group of people: racism, religion, politics, barter, and folkways such as family structure, sports and entertainment activities, language, food, and social habits while personality if the characteristic of only one person in that culture. Like it or not, we are essentially genetic robots.

URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated