What is Biological Luck?
If you’ve followed my blog thus far, you’ll know I’ve started this quest of self-education to improve my ability to critically think, practice intellectual skepticism and to promote conversation. I’m noticing a lacking trend of these qualities in our culture of extreme polarization regarding many issues spanning a broad range of topics and this blog is a chance for me to promote these ideas by practicing them myself. One of the first books to cross my path on this journey was Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky. Robert Sapolsky is an accomplished scholar and intellectual, not only as an author, but he’s also a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. His book opened my eyes in ways I couldn’t have ever thought possible. Robert Sapolsky first came into my radar having heard him on Sam Harris’s (neuroscientist turned philosopher) podcast. I was taken in by how fascinating their conversation progressed, which led to my inspiration to buy his book and learn more about the brain. The other main factor guiding me to Robert’s book was how he was able to clearly explain the complexities of neuroscience in a digestible and understandable way.
The first thing I learned that changed my way of thinking was my miss notion of the relationship between nature and nurture. I always thought they were against each other. People either live on the nature argument for our development or the nurture argument for our development. Here is an example using dogs, more specifically pit bulls. Pit bulls aren’t allowed in some apartment complexes because of their aggressive natures, but pit bull owners often show off photos of their animals being sweet and goofy to help explain how the dog breed matters less than the environment the dog grows up in. However, the true story is nature and nurture are codependent on each other. The environment and culture of a person are greatly affected by the development of their genes, just as the genes, they’ve inherited affect how they interact in their environment.
The second thing I learned was a brain’s development is primarily predicated on the household the person was raised in. In a short recap, the brain has two main centers for behavior, the frontal cortex: the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and making the difficult right choice and the amygdala: which covers anger, aggression and fear responses. A study in the book showed that an overwhelming number of inmates in prisons have shown to have an underdeveloped frontal cortex with an overstimulated amygdala. Other studies show strong links of childhood adversity to anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and depression; child abuse and/or abandonment having the strongest correlations. We have no control over the life we’ll be born into. We have no control over the conditions in which we’ll be raised, which is interesting to think about with science telling us those factors play a significate role in our development. This is where I came to understand the term biological luck.
Biological luck is the concept of acknowledging that because we have no control over our inherited genes nor the environment we grow up in, our life is predicated on the luck of the biological draw. Our actions, passions, drives, emotions and everything else are all boiled down to signals and receptors in the brain and how they build, interact and link together during our journey through development. Understanding biological luck changes the perceptions of everything I once thought to have understood. The court systems, raising children, economics, mental disorders, and most importantly a shift in my philosophy of morality. Through the lens of biological luck, I’ve created my foundation for my arguments against capitalism, the dark side of our politics and most importantly our government's extreme lack of value in education.
Biological luck is simply the lottery of life and how every human being’s introduction to life and progress to adulthood are all affected by the situation of one’s birth. This concept is beyond important when factoring opinions on any given topic relegated to opportunity, suffering and the overall morality of the well being of all humans or am I the only one?
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