Concept

Biological determinism

Overview

Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of their environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. Genetic reductionism is a similar concept, but it denotes the level of understanding, where genetic determinism describes the supposed causal role of genes. Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics, scientific racism, and the debates around the heritability of IQ, the basis of sexual orientation, and evolutionary foundations of cooperation in sociobiology.

In 1892, the German evolutionary biologist August Weismann proposed in his germ plasm theory that heritable information is transmitted only via germ cells, which he thought contained determinants (genes). The English polymath Francis Galton, supposing that undesirable traits such as club foot and criminality were inherited, advocated eugenics, aiming to prevent supposedly defective people from breeding. The American physician Samuel George Morton and the French physician Paul Broca attempted to relate the cranial capacity (internal skull volume) to skin colour, intending to show that white people were superior. Other workers such as the American psychologists H. H. Goddard and Robert Yerkes attempted to measure people's intelligence and to show that the resulting scores were heritable, again to demonstrate the supposed superiority of people with white skin.

Galton popularized the phrase nature and nurture, later often used to characterize the heated debate over whether genes or the environment determined human behaviour. Scientists such as behavioural geneticists now see it as obvious that both factors are essential, and that they are intertwined, especially through the mechanisms of epigenetics. The American biologist and ant specialist E. O. Wilson, who founded the discipline of sociobiology based on observations of animals such as social insects, controversially suggested that its explanations of social behaviour might apply to humans.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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For with the growth of society, the modifying influence of moral force is always increasing, both by larger scope being given to each of its three elements specially, and also by the more perfect consolidation of their union. Robertson has made an important remark on the gradual improvement in the condition of women, which is but a particular case of this sociological law. The general principle on which progress in…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
Close in meaning to Biological determinism; the term itself is not named.
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To conclude: The evolutionary view of history, when it denies the vital importance of individual initiative, is, then, an utterly vague and unscientific conception, a lapse from modern scientific determinism into the most ancient oriental fatalism. The lesson of the analysis that we have made (even on the completely deterministic hypothesis with which we started) forms an appeal of the most stimulating sort to the…
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
Close in meaning to Biological determinism; the term itself is not named.
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Just for this reason England has become a classic land. The scientists of other countries, Germany, for example, have nothing to offer comparable with England in this respect. Moreover, most of the conclusions belong to the last century so that the establishment of the facts presented few difficulties. Darwin found that this artificial breeding produced differences in the species of plants and animals greater than…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
Close in meaning to Biological determinism; the term itself is not named.
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Philosophers who discussed Biological determinism

Petre P. Negulescu

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Abraham Maslow

Place in the tradition

Part of Determinism.

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