I used to work for Princeton University Press (PUP), and once in a while I go look through their list of new releases. There was a time when I read the whole printed catalog cover to cover in the course of my duties; it always made me want to get hold of the books and become more informed on topics ranging from the geology of South America to… Dining Posture in Ancient Rome.
Now, it’s no different. I see PUP books, I want to learn stuff! A while back I heard about a PUP sale, and made a list of books to be considered for purchase (as ebooks, since I’m out of range of most English-language book supply chains, and the books I can get aren’t cheap). But I don’t like forking over money for ebooks, because I don’t feel like they’re mine, I can’t see them on my shelf, and there’s a limitless supply of public domain ebooks that I can read for free. So in the end, I narrowed the shortlist down to just one book, this one. It purports to answer a compelling question, one that’s addressed to some extent in the twin studies book I read recently: What makes us who we are?
What makes us who we are?
According to Kevin J. Mitchell, the short answer is: our genes, *plus* the process of brain wiring, which is as innate as our genes but isn’t completely genetically controlled, and *not* our environment, since the environments we choose and the ways we respond to them are based on innate tendencies; thus our environment only amplifies differences that already existed.
(This view contrasts, perhaps only in emphasis, with that of Matt Ridley, who wrote in Nature via Nurture, aka The Agile Gene, that genes and their activities can be and are substantially influenced by the environment.)
I feel like a lot of the book is building the scaffolding within which to deliver its main thesis, and this scaffolding involves a lot of caveats, disclaimers, sports analogies (!), and debunking of misconceptions, which I sometimes felt I didn’t need. There’s also some introductory biology, psychology, and statistics background that sounded familiar—and some history of science, some of which I knew and some I didn’t. Thus, because of other reading I’ve done, the book made me feel impatient sometimes.
What did I gain, apart from an earful of this new perspective in the nature/nurture debate? Each chapter comes at the topic from a different angle.
Innate by Kevin J. Mitchell: Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1. ON HUMAN NATURE
Page 9: “In the end, I hope to have convinced you that both genetic and developmental variation contribute to innate differences in people’s natures.”
Chapter 2. VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Twin and adoption studies have shown that people’s psychological traits are largely genetic, not due to parenting differences.
Chapter 3. THE DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE
This chapter contains some background information: What is DNA? What are genes? How do they work in general? How do they produce behavioral traits?
Chapter 4. YOU CAN’T BAKE THE SAME CAKE TWICE
Even identical twins are different because brain development is inherently kinda random.
Chapter 5. THE NATURE OF NURTURE
This chapter makes some subtle and interesting new points. Yes, brains can keep changing throughout life… but parenting, experience, or deliberate action on our part is generally unlikely to alter existing behavioral traits. In fact, nurture/environment amplifies innate individual differences.
Chapter 6. I, HUMAN
Although we have some possible clues about how to connect categories of psychological analysis (like “extroversion”) to their biological basis, in general that’s actually still really hard.
Chapter 7. DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?
This chapter was full of fun factoids about vision and perception in humans and other animals (see below).
Chapter 8. THE CLEVER APE
We are uncomfortable with differences in what we call “intelligence” between people, but the differences are there, and they are, like other differences, genetic/developmental… and they are still to a considerable degree mysterious.
Chapter 9. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS
Male and female humans have behavioral as well as physical differences for evolutionary reasons. A book with a similar theme Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.
Chapter 10. THE EXCEPTIONS
Neuropsychiatric disorders are genetic… but not always hereditary. We all have inherited genes, but also new mutations in our own specific copies, and we all developed a bit randomly, so there are multiple layers or sources of risk.
Chapter 11. IMPLICATIONS
This chapter looks back at the ideas in the book, and forward to possible futures, but most importantly, around to the society we live in, and offers some important advice (see below).
Interesting facts from Chapter 7, “Do you see what I see?”
The topic of this chapter is perception, a fascinating topic. I took a class in college called Photons to Consciousness. In 2006, I read another PUP book, Eye and Brain by Richard Gregory. I’ve also read about vision deficits in The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks.
- Page 132: “Octopuses can sense the polarization of light (the plane of oscillation of the light waves), which allows them to “See” otherwise transparent prey.
- Page 133: “Dogs see twice as fast as us, at 120 Hz (which may explain why they’re so good at catching balls).”
- Page 134: Apparently, “fat” is a separate taste. I was taught sweet, sour, salty, bitter. Then umami came along afterwards, and I’ve never quite accepted it. Now there are six???
- Page 144: Maybe people really do have “auras” as some have claimed; they could be the result of a kind of synesthesia.
- Page 149: “A subset of synesthetes, who were born in the United States in the early 1970s, have identically colored alphabets that clearly correspond to one particular set of such magnets that were a popular children’s toy at the time.”
Important advice from Kevin J. Mitchell
Page 99: “We gradually become ourselves. But at some point we have to stop constantly becoming and just get on with things.” Here in Chapter 5, Mitchell is talking about “becoming” in a literal sense: synapses being modified in childhood and early adulthood. But the statement could be seen as meaningful in a more abstract sense. And indeed he seems to think so: he repeats this point in the final chapter, when discussing the “slightly poisonous” self-help industry on page 267: “[A]t some point the brain and the individual have to stop becoming and just be” (emphasis added).
This idea that we can’t change who we fundamentally are can be very freeing.
It supports the very-intuitive-in-hindsight ideas in a series of books I like on workplace success, starting with First, Break All the Rules. The key insight is that in your career, you shouldn’t worry too much about the stuff you’re not good at; you should instead focus on developing your (innate) personal strengths. This selective investment of time and effort, according to the theory, doesn’t just feel better than spending time and effort spent rectifying faults and shortcomings, it can make you more successful by making your competitive advantage more pronounced, and thus more useful to your clients or employers. Win-win.
When and Why I Read Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are
I'm reading this because the twins book made me want to learn more about inherent differences and similarities between people.
Genre: neuroscience
Date started / date finished: 27-Jan-25 to 07-Feb-25
Length: 306 pages
ISBN: B07CSHZRGN
Originally published in: 2018
Amazon link: Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are
