Use this to end your paper: In closing, you can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill. I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose free will.
Aristotle: "What does it mean to be a good person?" Descartes: "What does it mean to be?" Nietzsche: "What does it mean?" Bertrand Russell: "What does 'it' mean?" C.S. Lewis: "What does it?" Lil John: "What?"
Wolfe's article is pretty dated. His summary of Wilson is pretty simplistic: "Every human brain, he says, is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as "an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid." You can develop the negative well or you can develop it poorly, but either way you are going to get precious little that is not already imprinted on the film." In the first few years of a baby's life, neuron growth and neuron death occurs at a rapid rate. This is because the wiring isn't entirely preplanned. Unused neurons undergo apoptosis while the others are rewarded with life. It's neuron plasticity aided by the environment in preparation for future challenges. Going back to the photograpghy analogy, genes only give a blurry resolution on what things could be. It doesn't mean the negative already had a picture waiting to be exposed. I'm saying what looks like a dog could be a chair. The former presupposes the dog could be a scrawny chihuahua under tough times. Neuroscience is removing boundaries in age old philosophy questions, but it's not definitive to the point where our genes predict inevitability. It marks probability. It's a subtle difference. For now, at least. Here's a snippet of a recent latimes article on the environment's influence. http://www.latimes.com/news/health/la-he-epigenetics-20100503,0,7161969,full.story [rquoter] Your life story depends upon a combination of the DNA you're stuck with plus your environment, including all the little choices and events that happen over that lifetime. But in recent years, researchers have discovered that, while DNA lays out the options, many of those life experiences — the foods you eat, the stresses you endure, the toxins you're exposed to — physically affect the DNA and tell it more precisely what to do. The cause: a kind of secondary code carried along with the DNA. Called the "epigenome," this code is a set of chemical marks, attached to genes, that act like DNA referees. They turn off some genes and let others do their thing. And although the epigenome is pretty stable, it can change — meaning lifestyle choices such as diet and drug use could have lasting effects on how the body works. .... The epigenome can also be altered after a person is born. For example, researchers from McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal found that child abuse can affect DNA referees. In a 2009 paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the authors report that 12 people who were abused as children, and later committed suicide, had different DNA referees on a gene needed to cope with stress, compared with 24 people who were not abused. The research implies, although in no way proves, that diminished ability to cope with stress might have been a factor in the suicides. Adult epigenomes are still somewhat malleable, but they are stable compared with those of developing fetuses and infants. So there's no need to worry that every little action will alter it. But there are also short-term referees that jump on or off the DNA at a moment's notice. Many scientists consider these refs to be outside the classical definition of "epigenetics," but those chemical changes do affect genes in similar ways. They may change in response to what you had for breakfast today, or the stress you feel after a tough day. Genes are not just "on" or "off." They can be on just a little bit, on a lot and everything in between. So referees, both the short-term and long-term types, tune genes up or down, rather like the dimmer switch for a lamp. And many genes can be turned up or down by changes in behavior and environment. For example, researchers at the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif., studied 30 men with prostate cancer. These men declined traditional medical treatment and instead underwent a three-month program that included a healthy diet, moderate exercise and daily stress management. When the researchers examined gene activity in the men's prostate biopsy samples, they found that 48 genes were turned up and 453 were turned down, compared with gene activity at the beginning of the study. The authors noted that the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, was small and needs to be repeated to be sure of the effects. They also suggested that similar changes might happen in healthy people too, when they alter their behavior. Though the science of epigenetics is young, scientists think there's good reason to think about how lifestyle choices may affect the epigenome. It's known already that some referees can be inherited from human parent to child. Praeder-Willi syndrome, for example, is caused when some of Dad's DNA referees or genes are missing. Among other symptoms, people with the syndrome have an overactive appetite that can easily lead to obesity. And though it hasn't been proved, some scientists suspect that DNA referees laid down generations ago — in your grandparents, for example — are still active in your body today. That is, the epigenome may "remember" the environment Grandpa grew up in and set your genes to match it, even if you have different foods and activities than he did. Such control over one's DNA is a double-edged sword, Jirtle says. Healthy choices, such as eating right, could lead to helpful referees, but unhealthy activities, such as smoking, could have a negative effect on you — and your descendants. [/rquoter]
