Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
The bedrock of modern Western jurisprudence is the supposition that we are free to choose our actions from a range of choices. Some of these choices are socially acceptable and we deem them “legal.” Other choices made in specified contexts are socially unacceptable, and we deem these “illegal.” For those extremely unacceptable actions denominated as “crimes” we reserve progressive punishments to deter their occurrence. Gratuitous violence is one of the most important of these condemned actions, and we have striven for centuries to overcome this endemic feature of our nature. The basic assumption being that we can deter conduct that is the product of free will by imposing undesirable consequences on the actor. How have we done? I suppose the obvious answer is that despite a multitude of approaches ranging from severe punishment to compassionate rehabilitation, we haven’t yet mastered a way to banish senseless violence from our midst. Perhaps it is time to question that basic assumption that violence is purely volitional conduct.
The philosophical roots of free will stretch back at least to ancient times. Greco-Roman thinkers like Epicurus believed in causal determinism but allowed for an element of chance in the physical world by assuming that the atoms sometimes swerve in unpredictable ways, thus providing a physical basis for a belief in free will. Others like Cicero had doubts about the purity of free will observing:
“By ‘fate’, I mean what the Greeks call heimarmenê – an ordering and sequence of causes, since it is the connexion of cause to cause which out of itself produces anything. … Consequently nothing has happened which was not going to be, and likewise nothing is going to be of which nature does not contain causes working to bring that very thing about. This makes it intelligible that fate should be, not the ‘fate’ of superstition, but that of physics, an everlasting cause of things – why past things happened, why present things are now happening, and why future things will be.
Later, Christianity postulated free will as one of its basic tenets, arguing that grace is bestowed by acting in accordance with the Creator’s will and rejecting contrary temptations. In City of God, Augustine explained that, “For the first freedom of will which man received when he was created upright consisted in an ability not to sin, but also in an ability to sin; whereas this last freedom of will shall be superior, inasmuch as it shall not be able to sin. This, indeed, shall not be a natural ability, but the gift of God.” To depart voluntarily from God was then the foundation of sin.
For two centuries Western law has adopted this basis for meting out punishments as a means of modifying behaviors. Enter then the discipline of neuroscience and the strange case of Phineas P. Gage. Gage was a railroad worker living a peaceful life in late 19th Century New England. In 1848, Gage had the curious fate to suffer an iron crowbar being thrust squarely thorugh his left frontal lobe. He survived but changes to his demeanor and personality were so pronounced that his family and friends began to remark that “Gage was no longer Gage.” Damage to his prefrontal cortex had rendered a once courteous and diligent 25 year-old man unalterably and explicitly anti-social.
His physician John Harlow noted that:
He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation.
What are the implications then for free will in the context of obvious cases of impaired thinking like that suffered by Gage? The law has sought to address “crimes” committed by those without sufficient faculty to appreciate the moral character of their actions or those persons who act through irresistible impulse. The first attempts were the British M’Naghten rule which excused conduct, though volitionally done, which was the product of a diseased or impaired mind and which rendered the perpetrator so impaired as to extinguish his ability to divine right from wrong. The corollary irresistible impulse test sought to mitigate criminal responsibility for one who would have acted through the effects of mental disease or defect even though a constable was at his side at the time of the conduct. Both of these tests have proven unworkable and prison statistics continue to show that the psychologically impaired are statistically more likely to be incarcerated than “normal” persons.
The new challenge for the law is just how to handle the logical implication of Gage’s case. What if all human actions were not simply the product of free will but a resulting phenomena of a host of organic and genetic markers causing conduct that is inevitable? And what if these behaviors are not the product of diease or defect but of predictable stimuli or dysfunction not rising to the level of that required by M’Naghten? Sort of an organic determinism free from the control of human “will,” but flowing not from a diseased mind but a substantially normal one. Not really such a radical position. Albert Einstein considered the question and posed the classic regressive conundrum:
Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).
Sound far-fetched and too esoteric? Consider then the studies of Benjamin Libet who “showed that brain activity associated with deliberate decisions can be detected shortly before we are conscious of making the decision. In these studies, participants reported when they first felt the intention to make a spontaneous movement by noting the position of a dot moving on computer screen. They apparently first became aware of their intentions about 200 milliseconds before action execution, which is later than the onset of the so-called readiness potential (or “bereitschaftspotential”) recorded from the scalp prior to movement.” While the studies are controversial they point up a fascinating possibility — that human conduct originates organically from a host of chemical and electrical sources independent of any notion of mind/brain divergence. The mind then is the brain and functions according to incalculable threads of physical causation which we can neither differentiate nor completely understand.
The prefrontal cortex is not the only area of inquiry into brain physiology as neuroscience attempts to understand and explain human aggressiveness. “It has long been known that ablation of the monkey temporal lobe, including the amygdala, results in blunted emotional responses. In humans, brain-imaging and lesion studies have suggested a role of the amygdala in theory of mind, aggression, and the ability to register fear and sadness in faces. According to the violence inhibition model, both sad and fearful facial cues act as important inhibitors if we are violent towards others. In support of this model, recent investigations have shown that individuals with a history of aggressive behaviour have poorer recognition of facial expressions, which might be due to amygdala dysfunction. Others have recently demonstrated how the low expression of X-linked monoamine oxidase A (MAOA)—which is an important enzyme in the catabolism of monoamines, most notably serotonin (5-HT), and has been associated with an increased propensity towards reactive violence in abused children—is associated with volume changes and hyperactivity in the amygdala.”
These studies bring up an interesting derivative question: Are all murderers equal in terms of brain function? The answer is decidely “no.” “Professor Adrian Raine and colleagues reanalysed positron emission tomography data to tease apart functional differences between premeditated psychopaths and impulsive affective murderers. Compared to controls, the impulsive murderers had reduced activation in the bilateral PFC, while activity in the limbic structures was enhanced. Conversely, the predatory psychopaths had relatively normal prefrontal functioning, but increased right subcortical activity, which included the amygdala and hippocampus. These results suggest that predatory psychopaths are able to regulate their impulses, in contrast to impulsive murderers, who lack the prefrontal “inhibitory” machinery that stop them from committing violent transgressions.” For Raine then, free will should be viewed along a “dimension rather than a dichotomy”
An even more intriguing question revolves around whether we can predict anti-social behavior from an analysis of brain dysfunction. If so, would this not dispel notions of pure free will as the moral governor of our actions? “A systematic review of studies examining mental illness in 23,000 prisoners showed that these prisoners were several times more likely to have some form of psychosis or major depression, and ten times more likely to exhibit Anti-social personality Disorder (APD) than the general population. The authors suggest that, worldwide, several million prisoners have serious mental illness. Several studies also show levels of head injury to be higher in violent and death-row criminals, while birth complications, which can often result in neurological damage (e.g., hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy) and parental mental illness, are higher in anti-social populations. More often than not, people with APD and violent behaviour have a history of childhood maltreatment or trauma; having such a history has been linked to anomalous development of regions associated with anti-social behaviour, including the PFC, hippocampus, amygdala, corpus callosum, and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. Early damage to the orbitofrontal cortex in particular appears to result in poor acquisition of moral and social rules, thus showing the importance of the interaction between environment and brain development.”
All of these studies raise serious ethical questions for the justice system. Is the basic premise of pure free will suspect as a producing cause of aberrant conduct? Can we say with certainty that actions are in any meaningful sense volitional if they are the product of immutable laws of science which manifests themselves in a predictable, albeit undesirable, results? Are we punishing for poor conduct choices by individuals or for organic brain function over which the individual has only limited control?
Valid questions that may need answering and soon. In 1995, “Stephen Mobley, 25 with a long and violent criminal record, admitted shooting a pizza store manager in the back of the head during a failed robbery four years before. His lawyers argued he should be spared the death penalty because of a defect in his genetic make-up. Mobley’s family tree is littered with incidents of criminal and violent behaviour. His mitigation focused on a direct chain of antisocial behaviour that could be traced from his great- grandfather.
His lawyers tried to adduce expert evidence to show that a gene mutation had been passed along this line and was ultimately responsible for the disastrous events on 17 February 1991 at the pizza parlour in County Hall, Georgia. As long ago as 1969, genetic evidence was first admitted in a New York court. Lawyers then put forward a genetic-defect defence concerning the XYY chromosome syndrome. They argued that the extra Y chromosome indicated greater “maleness” or aggression. However, it failed to gain widespread judicial acceptance.
Mobley’s lawyers introduced evidence of a recent Dutch study, which associated this sort of family aggression with chemical imbalance caused by a mutating gene. Nevertheless, the Georgia Supreme Court held this evidence to be inadmissible on the basis that the theory of ‘genetic connection is not at a level of scientific acceptance that would justify its admission.'”
Now 16 years later science is grappling with proofs that might impress a court with the idea that certain human predispositions exist which bear directly on anti-social conduct. If neuroscience can answer this proposition affrimatively, the larger question will be how will we deal with this knowledge and how then will we deal with the perpetrators.
Sources: The Independent; Plos Biology; Wired; Neurophilosophy; and SamHarris.org
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
My comments here usually put me into a different time-frame than most others. They usually begin about 9:00am and cease around 1:00pm. The rest of the time given over to other pleasures. Therefore, I awake each morning to find a full mailbox of previous comments. What a pleasant surprise to awake today, earlier than usual and find that this most excellent thread has continued at the level I last left it. Buddha’s comments, with which I find much to agree, nevertheless sent me back to the days when I first discovered Fritz Perls, creator of Gestalt Psychotherapy. OS, who is at least my equal in Gestalt, though probably surpasses me in such knowledge, given his advanced scientific training, should feel free to correct me.
Fritz believed that his job as a therapist was to assist the patient (organism) in perceiving and reacting to its environment based on the input actually available to perception, in the moment. As such he felt it necessary to destroy what he called a person’s “character.” Lest one be horrified at the thought of destroying character, which in our language has such positive connotations, I’ll provide a brief paraphrase of what I think he meant by it, or at least how I take it.
Character, as I was taught is the individuals perception of who/she/he is and the guiding principles that the person uses in dealing with life, defined as environment. i.e. A political philosophy let’s say. Character is problematic when dealing with changes in ones’ environment because it leads to pre-programmed responses to the environment that limits the ability to initiate response/action based upon the actual situation.
Let’s take a confirmed civil libertarian dealing with a police stop that is illegal and a LEO who acts abusively. The “character” of many of us committed civil libertarians (moi aussi) could lead us to react to this environment by responding very assertively and angrily. This would be a rigid and foolish manner of response, conditioned by our past and most probably would get us “tased” and/or arrested.
Thus the aim of Gestalt Therapy would be to help us learn to respond to each new environmental occurrence with the ability to choose from a much wider (more appropriate) set of response options, rather than pre-determined and/or pre-programmed responses. When we talk of “intelligence,” to me the ability to perceive one’s environment and to respond to it flexibly, is as important a component of intelligence, as is reading comprehension.
I agree with Buddha, though indeed this may be my own “character” responding, that politically we are plagued by people who due to their rigid belief systems, should never hold powerful positions, simply because of their inability to respond to emergent situations with flexibility.
The Teabaggers, Neocons and Corporatists fill this bill in my opinion.
However, our problem, beyond an inability to legislate this, is how does one make the determination of rigidity? In my activist days I met many close to my own political persuasion who would have been terrible people to have in positions of power, due to their rigid adherence to their particular “party line.”
Relating further to this entire thread, imagine someone engaged in armed robbery of a grocery store, when suddenly a new customer enters the shop, they might well turn and shoot the new customer and then the store owner out of a response born of an abusive childhood, where quick reactions away from the abusers attack could mitigate harm. Thus a potentially non-violent and successful robbery turns into a double felony homicide. Does anyone really think that this is an improbable situation?
Our problem then becomes does the abused childhood, only one of many, many explanatory choices, become mitigating circumstances in trying this case. Notice, I’m avoiding using terms of definite pathology, purposely. This is the conundrum presented in this thread. I don’t personally think that we as yet have the scientific evidence to allow this to serve as mitigation, except as the “Hobson’s Choice” between life w/o parole, or the death penalty.
Morning All,Mespo what FFL said “in spades”
So what are you saying? That the hoi polloi can’t perceive options that “may” pass before them? Like France in 1789, East Germany in 1989, or are you referring to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End Of History And The Last Man which ushered neoliberal thought into mainstream politics eventually giving credence to the philosophical carnage of the neocons?
Yeah, I didn’t perceive any of this while it was going down. I just woke up yesterday from a long Rip Van Winkle sleep. The ability to perceive contrasted to the ability to act are very different.
I thought we were talking about free will, oh well. Recognizing new (and possibly unsettling) information is free and requires little beyond the ability to think. However, the ability to act upon new information is typically an economic process that requires capital. Or to quote Warren Zevon requires lawyers, guns, and money; much like TARP and the $9 trillion the Federal Reserve doled out from 2008-2010.
Hubris knows no bounds I guess! You speak of talent of intelligence yet expend many words discussing Lincoln, Bush, and why one shouldn’t represent themselves in court as if I was born yesterday. Spare your words and have some cake.
I agree with this full paragraph. Thanks for acknowledging, “those people who may not be able to afford private schools . . .” I’m so grateful.
It’s very disingenuous of you to refer to my flip of your statement “free will requires choice” to “choice also requires free will” and then reduce “choice” to boolean functions. You know very well my statement was given in the context that this thread proffered – namely encompassing the human concept of free will. Cheap shot, I’m disappointed.
We disagree here, that’s fine.
You are confusing this particular discussion with others as I never said a thing about “leaders,” though I could, but I don’t kick dead horses nor do I stand in the intersection of empires.
Peace
Mespo,
“I’d like to thank You and all of the Commentators here for one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking reads…Bravo, brava, bravissimo!”
Right back at you; as this is a most excellent essay and awesome thread, on what is without a doubt the best blog in the world! Due to all the day in and day out work of our host, yourself, Nal, Elaine, Rafflaw, Mike A, and all the outstanding regulars and quality drop-ins.
Reading this thread and admiring all the wisdom here I am feeling tremendous hope for our future society. Thank-you all again.
This topic reminded me of the work by Dr. Robert Sapolsky “a professor of Neurobiology and Primatology at Stanford University. He travels to Kenya every year to study the behaviors of wild baboons. This is a story on his amazing study of a unique incident that happened with one of his baboon troops from the National Geographic film called ‘Stress: The portrait of a killer.” I hope more people were aware of this and all of his work.
On that note, I would like to thank you all for a lovely conversation which I hope to rejoin tomorrow and I bid you all good night.
I hear pillows and they whisper sweetly the call of Morpheus.
To sleep, perchance to dream . . .
Elaine,
I agree. While education can bolster intelligence, an education alone is not a guarantee of either intelligence or flexibility in thought. Lateral thinking is a skill that can be taught, but in my experience, it can only be successfully taught to those with a predisposition for the talent to begin with.
Blouise,
But a lovely digression it was. My main objection to fundamentalists in leadership roles has everything to do with their abandonment of free will (no matter how much lip service they may pay to the idea) in favor of dogma and literal interpretations of religious texts that are not rational given the historical background and evolution of the texts and the fact that they were written as parables (which have an inherent flexibility in interpretation by their form alone). Fundamentalists abandon the burden of free will – rationality and the thought required to responsibly exercise one’s freedom of choice – for the lesser burden of dogmatically doing what their told a “higher power” wants them to do – freedom from both thought and choice.
Intelligence is a great gift and a powerful tool and like all great powers, it comes with great responsibility.
Fundamentalism, no matter if it’s Christians, Jews or Muslims, is an unreasoning, lazy and irresponsible use of intelligence and an abdication of free will for the comfort of feeling “special”.
So now you have company in your digression.
Buddha,
“All of this being said, I still prefer leaders who can identify as many options as possible and integrate new information (even if it disturbs them personally on some moral level) over one who is locked into rigid thinking by their innate limitations on processing data and, ergo, unable to consider as many options as possible based on reason rather than emotion or instinct.”
Unfortunately, there are lots of well-educated people who have never learned to think outside the box–as well as people who can only look at issues/address problems through the lens of their own narrow ideology.
gbk,
“Essentially, what you’re saying is that “smart” people have more “choices” than the hoi polloi”
No, I’m not. The “hoi polloi” may have the same options, but simply not be able to perceive them. We’re talking about perception, processing and the ability to handle new (possibly unsettling) information. This ability knows no economic boundary just as the inability to do so knows no economic boundary. Haven’t you ever given somebody advice that seems perfectly obvious to you only to have that person reply “I never thought of it that way”? It’s the same thing – they haven’t thought of it that way because that can’t for one reason or another. Also, consider that intelligence as a processing ability is a talent like any other talent. Your parents may be rich or poor, but your innate intelligence has less to do with their station than it does with your genetic predisposition (and as Elaine pointed out, informed by how you are raised). Lincoln was an intelligent man, but he came from a dirt poor family that encouraged him to read and learn on his own. George Bush II came from a wealthy family and went to expensive schools and he’s a moron. Created equal is still not the same as equally created.
There are also other mitigating factors that can limit perception of options beside the inability to process complex data and accept new information. One that gets discussed here quite often is found in the idea that it is not a good idea to represent yourself even though it is your right and even if you are a lawyer. Why? Because in that instance, you are too close to the subject matter and emotionalism may cloud your thinking.
There is also, as you rightly point out, limitations of choices present by position of birth and economics. That is why I (and several other regular posters) feel that a quality free public education is not just a good idea, but a necessary idea as it presents opportunities to those people who may not be able to afford private schools. These social limitations of choice like those found in education should be mitigated wherever possible simply as a matter of equity and creating a just society. It is also a wise investment as station by birth is no guarantee of performance later in life. For every Issac Newton, born into a wealthy farming family, there is an Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla – both born into families of modest means. Depriving children of education due to their familial wealth is not just a tool of oppression by the upper class. It is a great disservice to society in that it deprives those with talent for innovation from realizing not just their personal potential but it negates any benefit to society as a whole that person might have had with the choice to pursue their education. While having economic resources may allow you take some options a poor person might not be able to, it does not mean that the poor smart person is incapable of seeing all of their options or a wealthy idiot is able to see all of their options or even choose the best one. But I digress . . .
“Choice also requires free will.”
Actually choice merely require input, criteria and options based on criteria. Machines are capable of making choice from defined options based upon express criteria. That is at its core the idea behind expert systems – they take input, compare it to criteria, and make a choice or present a series of choices that the correlation indicates to be true. Free will is a bit more complicated than that. It not only allows for choosing between options, but for novation of options not readily apparent by the conventionally defined options. A computer will not fully pass the Turing test until someone builds one that can come up with new ideas via synthesis and extrapolation, but an expert system like Watson can make accurate choices.
“Is there free will when choice is limited?”
Yes. But then the question becomes which choice of the limited or even undesirable choices is the right one. For that, I suggest a triage process described in the book “An Elementary Approach to Thinking Under Uncertainty” by Ruth Beyth-Marom and Shlomith Dekel. It was originally written as a training manual for the Mossad to help field agents make decisions when dealing with either incomplete information or an array of undesirable options.
“Perception is a very complex idea, and assumes more than its worth.”
But sometimes – as “An Elementary Approach” recognizes – decisions need to made with incomplete information. In those cases assumptions have to made, but the key is to limit them to assumptions that are necessary and rational and to try to eliminate as many assumptions as possible. And to your next point, I think you are mistaking perception and information processing for cultural mores. “We all assume that there are cultural foundations of perception, of right/wrong, good/bad, yet history and science teaches that this is not true – indeed history and science teach that perception changes as needed.” Cultural mores may influence how one weighs data, but it is not the same thing as the process of identifying options from a given set of data. Perception as a skill – although it varies from individual to individual – does not change in its essential nature. Cultural mores, on the other hand, do change as society changes. For example, let’s look at the idea of Soylent Green. When faced with starvation of a population, eating our reprocessed dead is currently a cultural taboo, however, that does not prevent us from recognizing it as an option. Our mores weight that option with a heavy negative and we pursue other options instead. As population pressures increase though, that social more may change and what society considers now as an “evil/bad/undesirable” choice may become a viable choice even though we would still recognize there are other options (reduction of population, increasing agricultural output, etc.). It has not changed due to our perception of the choice as an option. It has changed because society has revalued human life.
All of this being said, I still prefer leaders who can identify as many options as possible and integrate new information (even if it disturbs them personally on some moral level) over one who is locked into rigid thinking by their innate limitations on processing data and, ergo, unable to consider as many options as possible based on reason rather than emotion or instinct.
Buddha,
I suppose I was thinking more along the lines of responsibility for actions within a court of law.
However, when you mention religious fundamentalist then the subject of “free will” within the theological setting becomes murky. So much of our immediate history in this country has been influenced by the perverted notion of free will -v- predestination through the Second Great Awakening and the Revivalist movements (Camp Meetings etc) that began to take shape after the Revolutionary War.
The Calvinist tradition had emphasized the deep depravity of human beings who could only be saved through the grace of God. The evangelical movement stressed the individual’s assertion of Free Will which opened the door to salvation for all.
This fervor pushed the westward movement as many believed that God himself blessed the growth of the American nation. The Native Americans were considered heathens to be saved. Manifest Destiny had many elements of which the new evangelical definition of Free Will was one.
I strongly suspect we are still on that perverted Free Will path in the Middle East.
But I digress …
Essentially, what you’re saying is that “smart” people have more “choices” than the hoi polloi. While this appears true one should question why this is and contemplate the possibility that the “choices” presented to the strata of classes are highly determinant from an economic perspective; a position of birth.
Choice also requires free will. Is there free will when choice is limited?
Perception is a very complex idea, and assumes more than its worth. We all assume that there are cultural foundations of perception, of right/wrong, good/bad, yet history and science teaches that this is not true – indeed history and science teach that perception changes as needed.
Off to the transport job,see you folks during the week,the reason I posted the story of the pharmacy massacre,here’s one of the over 4,000 comments on the story.
“beckistani
0 Fans
08:28 PM on 6/23/2011
Your deflective odds-making does not disguise the facts. This particular crime was committed by a perpetrator whose profile fits exactly those of many of the gun rights posters on this site. He was a white veteran of the armed forces, a legal, law-abiding citizen with no criminal background whatsoever, and, not incidentally, an obsessive gun hobbyist. Your inability to rationally marginalize him must be causing you all a great deal of frustration “
“no matter how
personallydisquieting the information may be personally.”Pardon my sloppy editing.
He started his twin studies in 1970. The Twin Registry was created until 1983. That was after it was clear there needed to be a central repository of data, and a place twins could be registered.
He died in 2006 at the age of 78.
Blouise,
“[D]o we punish the mute for not being able to thrill us with an aria?”
Not per se, but by the same token, do we make them a vocal coach?
Given the challenges of leadership in an ever more complicated and complex world, I don’t think it is punishment to keep inflexible thinkers out of leadership positions. To me, it’s just common sense. I don’t know about you, but when presented with an international crisis, I don’t want someone who is going to fall back on to rote and ideological dogma to find the best solution because they are lacking in fundamental ability to absorb new data and formulate novel solutions. I want the person capable of making the best informed decision possible no matter how personally disquieting the information may be personally. In that respect, that automatically rules out neoconservatives as acceptable leaders as it does religious fundamentalists. Both are rigid thinkers. Rigid thinking in the face of rapid change is the antithesis of adaptation. And while the first rule of successful evolution is “Pay attention”, the second rule is “Adapt”.
Otteray,
When did Lykken publish his findings–before 1981?
Elaine, I believe Farber relied heavily on the seminal research of David Lykken and his colleagues, who conducted the biggest longitudinal series of studies on the subject of any research team.
“By analogy, like all people have vocal chords, all people have free will, but their ability to express through it runs the gamut from mute to opera singer.” (Buddha)
There you go … summing it all up quite nicely … but do we punish the mute for not being able to thrill us with an aria?
Buddha,
Exactly! I was thinking of PTSD too. My daughter is a social worker who deals with troubled adolescents. They rarely have tranquil home lives and parents like June and Ward Cleaver
Otteray,
You may find the following article interesting. It is a bit dated though.
NATURE VS. NURTURE: A NATURAL EXPERIMENT
By HOWARD E. GRUBER; Howard E. Gruber, director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, is the author of ”Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity.”
Published: March 1, 1981
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/01/books/nature-vs-nurture-a-natural-experiment.html