ROBOBABY
WHAT ARE WE RAISING HERE? MACHINES?

Miami Herald, The (FL)
April 5, 1992
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Columnist

Babies who aren't cuddled don't grow. They fail to "thrive," as doctors put it. Everyone knows this. It's one of those reassuring True Science Facts that make the rounds periodically. The lesson is that parenting, not merely food and water and oxygen, is what injects life into a child. That we are more than machines. That love matters.

Alas, it's untrue! I have here in my hands The World of the Newborn, a wonderfully unsentimental and scientific book by Daphne and Charles Maurer, and they report that the response to fondling is far more "mechanical" than emotional. For example, premature babies grow more quickly "when they are merely massaged regularly but quite impersonally by the gloved hands of an unseen technician."

What a cold universe it is. Our presumption about a baby's human need for its mother's love is further shaken by the discovery that rat pups also need the stroking of a mother's ratty little tongue -- presumably an act of rat instinct, not emotion. Write the Maurers, "Indeed, rat pups resemble human babies so closely in their need for stimulation that researchers have been able to switch back and forth between studying rats and studying babies, to work out some of the physiological mechanisms involved."

Humans, vermin, they're all the same.

Here's another charming thing I've just learned: My baby's laughter is fake. When I blow on her belly or give her a long kiss to the cheek, she laughs and squeals, and until now I had assumed this was because Daddy is such a hoot. But according to the Maurers, a small baby's laughter is "without humor" and "is merely a reflex at the level of the knee jerk."

It gets worse. She doesn't even know I'm alive! She doesn't yet perceive the world as a series of discrete objects and individuals. I'm no more to her than the educational mobile or the wind-up fuzzy lamb. All those sweet smiles -- they're just reflex. She gives the same smile to the pizza man! According to the Maurers, "Real attachment cannot develop before 7 to 8 months, for the baby must understand that things exist before he can form attachments to them, and he must be able to recollect things that are not in front of him to be able to maintain those attachments from one moment to the next."

Another delightful science fact: Babies aren't cute. This is hard for new parents to accept, particularly those of us with babies who are so "cute" that we fear we will be unable to love our subsequent and presumably less attractive if not actually repulsive offspring. I myself require friends, associates and total strangers at the zoo to comment on my daughter's surpassing beauty if they want to remain in her presence. (Fortunately, everyone obliges, because as a social species, relying on relations among extended kinship groups, humans have developed rules that we call "etiquette," preventing someone from saying, for example, "Excuse me, but I can't help but notice that your child looks like the spawn of a grouper.")

The scientific problem with "cute" is that it has no objective reality, no trustworthy unit of measurement. It is not like the speed of light or the diameter of an electron. According to anthropologist Donald Symons, the belief in cuteness is just a trick that we play on ourselves, an evolutionary adaptation that makes us perceive a certain set of visual images (silky hair, symmetrical face, big eyes, soft skin, puffy cheeks) as an objectively existing phenomenon worthy of adjectival description ("a cute baby").

Says Symons, "The cuteness is an adaptation of the beholder, just like beauty or anything else. There's no such thing as cute out in the environment."

Someone should put that on a Hallmark card.

Biology, biology, biology: It's the science of the 1990s, and it's getting downright oppressive. We seem to be entering a new and disturbing phase in the history of science, an era of biological totalitarianism, when all the foibles and glories of human existence turn out to be predetermined by genes. The secret agents of civilization, we are now told, have nothing to do with the CIA or FBI or KGB; they are protein sequences on strands of DNA. The decisions we thought were made with free will are but the dictates of the biological Thought Police.

Everything in life -- love, hatred, aggression, anxiety -- has been reduced to some biological imperative, some survival mechanism that dates to our tenure on the savanna.

Male philandering? That's a statistically based strategy for optimizing sperm distribution.

Female intuition? Women have more connective tissue in the corpus callosum, linking the hemispheres of the brain.

Male impotence? That's merely an insufficiency of nitric oxide.

Homosexuality? It's in the hypothalamus.

Hardly a week passes without some story in the newspaper announcing that researchers are smacking their foreheads and saying, Whoa! We were wrong all along! It's just a gene thing! On Dec. 17 of last year, The Washington Post reported that scientists studying homosexuality among brothers concluded that it must have a strong genetic component after coming up with results that "appear to contradict the widely held perception that sexual orientation is largely determined by a child's early influences, conditioning and environment."

(I read this, and look at my daughter. She's 7 months old. I wonder: Is she gay?)

Biological totalitarianism has been building for about 15 years, following roughly half a century in which a favorite parlor game was arguing over Nature vs. Nurture. That battle is just about over. Nature won.

The question now is, if we're mostly mechanistic, what's left for Mom and Dad to do? Have we been marginalized by biology? Are we just supposed to stand by and clap while the little computers boot up and display their pre-programmed precociousness?

Do parents matter anymore?

Does love?

I look to this kid for an answer, and the first thing I notice is: Damn, she's cute.

Boys Will Be Boys

My job requires me to talk to experts, to get answers to things. Like, why do little boys go "pow-pow" with sticks if they can't get their hands on toy guns? Twenty years ago, the experts would have cited "culture" as the reason. Boys are programmed to be monstrously aggressive. They are forced to emulate G.I. Joe. Little girls are channeled into nurturing roles. Blue rooms, pink rooms.

Today, that's like believing in the flat Earth. Only an old guard still clings to the culture explanation. The new scientific theory -- so obvious to every parent -- is that boys are just that way.

This sea change in scientific opinion has just now percolated through the protective filters of conventional wisdom and reached the mass public. These things become official when they reach the cover of Time, and I see that a recent issue asks, "Why Are Men And Women Different?" The answer, of course, is biology.

The cynics will say it's just political fashion. That this is part of the conservative swing in America. And it's true that science has always been political. Biology has been used as a weapon against women, blacks, Jews, the Irish, the Poles, and on and on. Even today, the people you hear talking about biology most vehemently, most passionately, tend to be radical racists like David Duke and Leonard Jeffries. Biology is a science that makes trouble. It's politically suspect. Talk about biology at a cocktail party and you'll be left alone with the chips and dip.

Forget facts and empiricism; people still communicate at the emotional level. The biology rap sounds hostile. It intrudes upon one's comfort zone.

Consider the reaction to the report last year that certain cells in the hypothalamus are larger in heterosexual men than in homosexual men or in women. I spoke at the time to John P. De Cecco, a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University and editor of the Journal of Homosexuality. He was incensed by the report -- never mind that the author of the study, Simon LeVay, is openly gay himself.

"What this man is claiming is that gay men have malformed brains," De Cecco said. "I'm unwilling to buy gay liberation at the price of being considered abnormal. I think the whole thing is insulting."

He blasted the biology boom in general: "It's reductionist research. It tries to reduce human beings pretty much to the level of rat behavior. It simply is ignoring the fact that we're thinking animals, that we have a whole cortex, and out of that cortex arises a whole civilization over years, and we're no longer just responsive to our animal makeup."

I got a totally different reaction from G. Luther Whitington, an editor for the Advocate, a gay and lesbian news magazine. Whitington said the LeVay study came as a great relief. He had always felt gay. His closest friends had always felt gay, too. The old-fashioned psychoanalytic theories (i.e., domineering mother/absent father) didn't apply to his circle of friends. The LeVay study implied that their homosexuality was natural -- that God made them that way.

"I was very excited," he said. "I feel like in the long run, this type of an argument, or this type of scientific proof, is exactly what the gay and lesbian movement needs to fight right-wing homophobes, to show that being gay or lesbian is not like being Methodist or Presbyterian; it's not a choice."

Even the language of the gay community has become biologically correct in recent years. No longer should one say "sexual preference." Now, you say "sexual orientation."

You Can't Fool Mother Nature

The Nature vs. Nurture debate first broke out back in the 1920s. Before then, Nature ruled. Nature, it was thought, justified European imperialism and racial discrimination. Then the facts suddenly intruded. For example, tests showed that theories of intelligence were wrong, that economic status (environment), not race or ethnicity or gender, seemed the prime predictor of IQ test performance. The Nature/Nurture debate was resolved, temporarily, with the sensible conclusion that both are major factors in shaping human society.

But starting in the 1930s, and for decades thereafter, social scientists increasingly ignored "the biological side of the compromise," according to Stanford historian Carl Degler in his recent book In Search of Human Nature. Degler's is the definitive account, to my knowledge, of the rise and fall of "cultural determinism." He thinks his generation of academics erred in "arguing by voice and in print against biology as a source of human behavior."

Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, instigated much of the shift toward Nurture. In 1935, after studying several primitive societies in New Guinea, she wrote, "We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions." The sexes had virtually no innate differences, she said: ". . . We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex."

The radicals in the Nurture camp argued that humans were limitlessly plastic, that you could take a baby and make it into a killer, or take the same baby and make it into a saint. It was an intoxicating thought. People could be changed! If human nature was plastic, unfixed, it could be reshaped and manipulated into something better. We could re-create humankind. Patriarchy could be overthrown. Imperialism could be reversed. What a brave new world it would be!

Anthropologist Leslie White, in his 1949 book Science of Culture, wrote, "Much of what is commonly called 'human nature' is merely culture thrown against a screen of nerves, glands, sense organs, muscles, etc."

In 1954, anthropologist Ashley Montagu said that a human "has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture, from the man-made part of the environment, from other human beings."

No human nature. No instincts. This was not the dogma of radicals; this was the argument of the giants of academia. By the 1960s, cultural determinism had become a veritable orthodoxy, and like all orthodoxies, it didn't admit to being orthodox. It was just the truth. Objective fact. End of inquiry.

There was one major problem: Reality wouldn't behave. Babies refused to adhere to the theories expounded in classrooms. Around the world, newly progressive parents were stunned when their gender-neutral child-rearing produced aggressive boys and sweet-natured girls. These kids just wouldn't learn.

Then came E.O. Wilson, probably the single person most responsible for the resurgence of Nature as a valid explanation of human behavior. This Harvard professor's groundbreaking 1975 book Sociobiology was, as it happens, about bees and ants. Only in the last chapter did he address humans, but there he made the not-too-unreasonable assertion that relatively small genetic differences between human groups might predispose human societies toward cultural differences.

The academic community was shocked. Shocked!

Wilson's own colleagues ganged up on him. Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin -- who had said in a 1973 interview that "nothing we can know about the genetics of human behavior can have any implications for human society" -- was one of the group of Boston scientists who formed the Science for the People Sociobiology Study Group. The group all but labeled Wilson a Nazi. Such sociobiological theories, the group said, helped inspire "the eugenics politics which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany." Stephen Chorover, author of the 1979 book From Genesis to Genocide, wrote that "sociobiological falsehoods" reflected an attempt to "justify social inequality."

I spoke to Lewontin last year, and he remains a critic of Wilson and all the other newfangled biological theories. Lewontin's argument is that these theories simply haven't been proven, that the science is flimsy.

"I think it's the same bull it always was," he told me. "It amounts to a large amount of fanciful storytelling with no really solid genetic basis at all."

He does not, however, absolutely reject the role of biology in human society. "Look, some of it's probably right."

It was an interesting concession from a man who co-wrote a book called, quite simply, Not in Our Genes. When I spoke to Wilson, he declined to gloat. He said Nature didn't defeat Nurture, exactly; Nature merely regained permission to be part of the equation. "The Nurture view," he said, "was more ideological. It was insisted upon by people who thought that was the necessary view, the prerequisite view, for an egalitarian political philosophy."

Egalitarianism isn't dead. But sameness is. Egalitarianism must now promote itself without staking everything on the belief that each human being starts as an identical, mass-produced blank unit, waiting for Mommy and Daddy and society to transform it into a winner or a loser, a victor or a victim.

It's All In The Genes

Parents can ruin kids. No one can doubt this. On the other hand, there is some consolation in biology for all of us. It is now at least possible that our children's problems -- substance abuse, depression, anger, impotence, sexual deviance -- might not be the consequence of bungled parenting. If my child turns out to be a drug addict, or a manic depressive, or a ne'er-do-well, I won't immediately assume it was my fault. (And if she eventually wins the Nobel Peace Prize? Well, come on, that's the sign of a great father.)

Anyone convinced that parenting is the crucial determinant of how a child grows up should look at the studies of identical twins raised apart. One of the most celebrated cases was that of Jerry Levey and Mark Newman, once united in a single fertilized cell, separated as newborns, reunited at the age of 30. Both had similar mustaches and hairstyles, wore aviator glasses and big belt buckles, and carried oversized, industrial-looking key rings. Both were captains with their local volunteer fire departments. Both made their livings installing safety equipment. Both drank Budweiser, and held the bottle with the pinkie finger stretched along the bottom. If the Bud was in a can, they crushed it.

Levey and Newman were the subjects of research by Thomas Bouchard Jr., a University of Minnesota psychologist. Bouchard's work is perhaps the most dramatic evidence yet of what biology dictates. There was, to take another example, the case of Jack Yufe and Oscar Stohr, identical twins born in 1933 and separated after a few months, the first raised as a Jew, the second as a Nazi. When they met in 1979 for the first time, they slowly realized they had peculiar traits in common: flushing the toilet before using it, keeping rubber bands encircled around their wrists, dipping buttered toast into coffee, issuing loud fake sneezes in elevators to shake people up -- weird stuff!

Bouchard's study of twins concluded that, in a standard middle-class home, genes are responsible for 70 percent of the difference in intelligence among people, 50 percent of the difference in personality, and 40 percent of the difference in job preference.

"I was raised and trained as a psychologist at Berkeley
from an entirely environmental point of view," Bouchard told me. "Ninety-eight percent of my graduate education was from an environmental point of view . . . I didn't perceive it as an orthodoxy. I thought these were the facts."

Then one day he came across evidence that schizophrenia has a genetic basis. He spoke about it in class. He was virtually shouted down.

"I can remember how vehement the other graduate students in the seminar were. It was really quite incredible. I was surprised. That was the point in time when I could see that there was an orthodoxy, and I was attacking it."

My guess is that someday the Nurture argument -- this idea that environment is the primary, overwhelming shaper of the human mind and spirit -- may seem as old-fashioned as the idea that God is an old dude with a high forehead, a white beard and a hair-trigger temper. In both cases the promoters of the belief are engaging in self-importance, putting themselves in the power position, in the role of Creator. The gall! Babies are unimaginably sophisticated organisms by the time they emerge
from the womb, and it's presumptuous to think that the genetic code, which can design something as marvelous as a functioning eyeball, cannot also design at least the rudiments of a personality.

And yet -- there's only so much Nature I can take.

A while back I got an insight into how far some otherwise intelligent people are willing to stretch the proposition. When I asked a researcher why guys watch so much football on TV, she floated this theory: In prehistoric times, men spent a lot of time in the bushes, watching animals. That's correct. They watched wildebeests, let's say. They figured out which
wildebeest was the slowest. Then they ran out and stabbed it. All this interest in watching wild animals somehow became encoded in male genes. Hence, Monday Night Football.

Right.

I have to take issue also with a line in Brain Sex, by journalists Anne Moir and David Jessel, that calls marriage "profoundly unnatural to the biology of the male." They later write, "The very fact that marriage is, for humans, the norm throughout the world -- when, as we know, men are naturally disposed against the institution -- represents a remarkable triumph of the female brain, and will. It is a truly stunning victory for female power and control over the naturally promiscuous biology of the male. In starkly sexual, and evolutionary, terms, there is nothing in marriage for men, given their rooster desire for novelty and the widest possible distribution of their seed."

This is absurd. You want a natural explanation of marriage? Why not just admit that men get married because it is useful for them to pair-bond. It's a classic case of Darwinian natural selection. Children who have caring fathers are more likely to survive and prosper and pass on their genetic code, half of which comes from Daddy; thus, over millions of years, natural selection rewards men who resist their rooster impulse.

The real horror of the male situation emerges when you realize how twisted is Nature's sense of humor. Daddy is a victim of his own perverse biology: Sure, he wants to stay at home with the wife and kids, this feels natural to him, but at the same time he is fascinated by . . . the Swedish Bikini Team! Donald Symons, the anthropologist, agrees with Moir and Jessel that men suffer from a "roving eye" that is genetically driven. Biology dictates that women have a greater investment in their offspring, and have to be more selective about their mates, while a man can theoretically sire thousands of children. Figure it out logically, Symons says: "If you've got two men, they're both married, they're both investing in their wives and in their children, and one man has a roving eye, and the other doesn't -- one man is disposed to capitalize on low-risk opportunities and the other isn't -- which one's genes do you think will predominate in the next generation? Wouldn't you expect that a roving eye will win out over a lack of roving eye? Being a loving father and having a roving eye are not incompatible psychological characteristics."

My tip to guys out there is that this is a really ill- advised line of reasoning to pursue at the dinner table. And it's not a license to cheat. The danger with taking the biology line too far is that it suggests that people aren't in control of themselves, that we are complete slaves to the unseen genetic code. In fact, humans have choices that rats don't have; humans can say no. "It's like any other desire," as Symons himself points out. "The desire exists, but human beings, a choice- making animal, can choose to do or not do things."

The Rolex Of The 1990s

Free choice or no, however, this remains the new Golden Age of biology, and our burden is to get comfortable with it.

I find a few general thoughts helpful, things we know today, which were rejected a century ago: the fact that there is no hierarchy in nature; that there is no such thing as "inferiority" or "superiority"; that "races" are the arbitrary inventions of the colonialist era; that women are not "the weaker sex."

And that truth is important for its own sake, regardless of whether it makes us feel good or bad.

I no longer doubt, for instance, that women love their babies more than men do. My wife has a subverbal bond with the baby that I can never penetrate. In fact, I didn't really love my child at first, at least compared with how I feel now. Initially she was just a strange, fascinating object.

Yet the fact that my bond to this child has deepened is something I can thank culture for. Culture taught me that fatherhood is good. Friends and family were encouraging. People told me, one way or another, that I was supposed to love my kid. "It's the most wonderful thing that will ever happen to you!" they said. So as I changed diapers, studying the subtleties of poop, wondering why it starts out green for a week or so and then turns mustard yellow, I would tell myself, "This is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me!"

Television helped. On TV, professional men carry babies around as props. Babies connote status. A baby in a harness is the Rolex of the 1990s.

My favorite TV ad is for McDonald's. A young guy is wandering around a playground at dawn. He then goes into a McDonald's and orders an Egg McMuffin. The pretty young woman behind the counter asks, "Is that for here or to go?" She smiles flirtatiously. We are trained by years of TV watching to assume that these two young people will, at some point, have sex. Instead, the guy says, "To go. I'm meeting my daughter for breakfast." Cut to a hospital room, a sleeping woman, a baby in a bassinet. The lad beams. He's a hero! Because he's a dad! (The wife is irrelevant, of course: She merely screamed in agony for about 18 hours, but he gave up a chance to make it with the cute babe at McDonald's.)

The genes that will turn my baby into a human being haven't quite kicked in yet (though in the time it took me to write this she's gone through several major phases and is currently learning "separation anxiety"). What makes humans special, scientists say, is the ability to manipulate language, and perhaps even consciousness, the perception of oneself in time and space. The baby, by these criteria, is still basically a lower order of primate. She has the language skills of your
average lemur. She and the cat are just now bonding; I think it's because they both like to shred toilet paper and periodically vomit in a sudden theatrical fashion.

I sometimes wonder: Is my daughter merely similar to a subhuman creature at this stage, or is she literally a subhuman creature? In the womb she had a tail at one point, so you couldn't say that she merely resembled a creature with a tail. She had a tail! True fact! So I don't see why she couldn't literally be a lemur, only less furry.

But of course, a lemur would not be so helpless. Humans emerge in a strangely fetal condition, unable to so much as lift the head or roll over, and human childhood is absurdly long. Complete maturity takes a couple of decades, including the bizarre post-pubescent period we call "adolescence," which no other animal experiences and which, quite frankly, may be some kind of factory error. The teenage period is so awful that, if humans were cars, they'd be recalled.

Biology makes mistakes. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's good. There are species of insects in which the mother literally explodes because her offspring are genetically designed to erupt from the viscera without the more delicate procedure of birth. From my standpoint, much of the food chain looks morally indefensible. Think of all the creatures that find themselves being eaten alive. Chewed up. The screams. A world of agony. Can't there be a better way? Like, everything comes from a store in a package?

On the other hand, you have to applaud the subtle brilliance of human design. When she falls backward, the baby doesn't topple like a tree but neatly folds at the knee and sits on her diaper-padded rump, head never leaving the vertical. My wife, when pregnant, developed a powerful aversion to cigarettes, car exhaust, sausage and any other unhealthy food; one theory now is that morning sickness is actually good for you, a control mechanism to ensure a bland and healthy diet and prevent the introduction of toxins. This is the new biology -- don't fight nature, appreciate it.

We are biological machines, this I don't doubt. The baby is never more like a machine than in the middle of the night. The baby's cry is obviously designed for maximum listener discomfort. Her decibel-to-pound ratio is astonishing, but the real genius is in the pitch, the tone, the treble, which is the auditory equivalent of a blinding flash of light. Is it something in her vocal cords, her trachea, her supralaryngeal structure? Or is it all in the listener's head, detected by a special receptor for baby screams, like the gadget up there that detects yawns even over the telephone and induces an immediate counter-yawn?

Anyway, I'm staggering around in the dark, careening into dressers and door jambs, arms outstretched like The Mummy, and my one goal in life is to get the little critter to stop crying. It's a mission exactly like fixing a flat tire on the side of the road, or changing a light bulb, or realigning a bike chain. A mechanical procedure. My tools are fresh diapers, baby formula, and Tylenol as a last resort. Or does she need decongestant? Whatever it takes to shut her up, that's what I want to do, to find that knob in there that needs a quarter-turn to the left.

Inevitably I end up carrying her around the apartment, trying to lull her back to sleep, pacing, bobbing up and down, squinting at the green digits on the VCR informing me that it is 3:24 a.m.

Given such outrageous circumstances, I should be more than a little annoyed. Instead, as the sleep fog retreats before the baby's howls, it is replaced by a rush of love.

Perhaps the positive feelings come from knowing that I can satisfy this little girl's needs through nothing more than my love and attention; there's an efficacy, a power in that. Maybe any parent, and maybe a man in particular, enjoys the sense of having conquered mortality, of passing on the genes, a fairly competitive and aggressive thought in a way, but happily coinciding with good parenting.

Or maybe she's just lovable.

But the question of motivation doesn't seem to trouble my daughter. In a matter of minutes she quiets, then sleeps against my shoulder.

It's a good time to wonder: Am I really a marginal part of her life? Not at 3:24 a.m. At that hour, her daddy is more than just a 30 percent factor in some gene-dominated equation. The answer to my original question is "no": Parents haven't been marginalized. Parenting is still the job it has always been. Parents matter.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 16
Copyright (c) 1992 The Miami Herald