THE MISMEASURE OF MANanswer to it is yes." As evidence, Wilson cites the prevalence of
warfare in history and then discounts any current disinclination to
fight: "The most peaceable tribes of today were often the ravagers
of yesteryear and will probably again produce soldiers and mur-
derers in the future." But if some peoples are peaceable now, then
aggression itself cannot be coded in our genes, only the potential
for it. If innate only means possible, or even likely in certain envi-
ronments, then everything we do is innate and the word has no
meaning. Aggression is one expression of a generating rule that
anticipates peacefulness in other common environments. The
range of specific behaviors engendered by the rule is impressive
and a fine testimony to flexibility as the hallmark of human behav-
ior. This flexibility should not be obscured by the linguistic error
of branding some common expressions of the rule as "innate"
because we can predict their occurrence in certain environments.
Sociobiologists work as if Galileo had really mounted the Lean-
ing Tower (apparently he did not), dropped a set of diverse objects
over the side, and sought a separate explanation for each behav-
ior—the plunge of the cannonball as a result of something in the
nature of cannonballness; the gentle descent of the feather as
intrinsic to featherness. We know, instead, that the wide range of
different falling behaviors arises from an interaction between two
physical rules—gravity and frictional resistance. This interaction
can generate a thousand different styles of descent. If we focus on
the objects and seek an explanation for the behavior of each in its
own terms, we are lost. The search among specific behaviors for
the genetic basis of human nature is an example of biological deter-
minism. The quest for underlying generating rules expresses a con-
cept of biological potentiality. The question is not biological nature
vs. nonbiological nurture. Determinism and potentiality are both
biological theories—but they seek the genetic basis of human nature
at fundamentally different levels.
Pursuing the Galilean analogy, if cannonballs act by cannon-
ballness, feathers by featherness, then we can do little beyond con-
cocting a story for the adaptive significance of each. We would
never think of doing the great historical experiment—equalizing
the effective environment by placing both in a vacuum and observ-
ing an identical behavior in descent. This hypothetical example
illustrates the social role of biological determinism. It is fundamen-