> This notion that characteristics can be primarily attributed to genes or
> the environment is exactly the mistake I'm talking about! I agree
> with Lewontin and Gould: the effects of genes always emerge in an
> environment, and individual development always occurs in an
> environment, so both environment and genetics must always
> interact to produce any specific traits.
Of course "both environment and genes must interact to produce any specific traits." It's not like you could clone me by extracting some of my DNA and placing it in a vacuum. NO ONE OVER THE AGE OF FIVE HAS EVER HAD SUCH A HORRIBLY CONFUSED UNDERSTANDING OF HOW GENES WORK (at least in recent times). Please be more charitable.
Perhaps it helps to have a bit of philosophical training here. When I (or someone else) says something like "My genes made me five inches taller than my sister," we should read such statements as being counterfactuals. We might imagine a confused Lewontinian (such a person, like your straw genetic determinist, could exist only in imagination) who would reply that I couldn't possibly know this; after all, I consumed Coke and Big Macs while my sister avoided sugars and fats. Such a difference in respective environments strikes the confused Lewontinian as important--maybe my sister would've grown to be 7 feet tall if she'd shared a similar diet. But this is clearly wrong. From what we know of our own world, we can safely conclude that in the close possible worlds where my sister and I shared the same diets (or even swapped diets) we still ended up growing to roughly the same heights. Of course, in more distant possible worlds where my sister e.g. takes growth hormones, she sometimes ends up taller than me. But such worlds are implicitly excluded from consideration.
Do you also see illusory confusion in my first claim (i.e. Americans are taller today than they were last century due to environmental differences)? After all, this isn't a twin study--there are surely small differences in the populations' respective gene pools.
-- Luke