Monday, January 3, 2022

Individuality Falsifies Total Genetic Determinism

In an era where fallible sensory perceptions, appeals to authority, convenience, and ever-shifting subjective persuasion are erroneously thought of as being superior to or even synonymous with logical truths, it is not out of place for an irrationalist to assume that genetics creates a very limited range of possible personality traits for each person.  This is, even if it was not falsifiable, an assumption.  If you know something, you are not assuming it, and yet a great number of things that so many people seem to take for granted as true are unprovable, including the idea that hearing information from others one subjectively trusts means that information is true or that the external world has the same appearance and laws of physics that appear to be there.

Genetics is, like all other aspects of science beyond the conceptual side as revealed by rationalistic analysis, always up in the air.  No one who truly understands scientific epistemology thinks it amounts to anything more than sensory perceptions that might or might not be misleading.  When it comes to genetics and personality, though, anyone can see by watching parents and children interact that family members are not fated to have identical personalities, ideologies, or habits.  In fact, it is not even necessary to observe anyone to know it is possible for children to scarcely be similar to their parents beyond being human and being incapable of metaphysically violating the laws of logic.

It would not even be conceptually/logically possible for children to not have all of their parents' psychological traits if family history truly dictated personality and worldviews; if it was truly impossible, the concept itself would be incoherent, a self-contradictory idea that undermines itself.  As anyone who thinks without making assumptions for just a few moments could easily see, it does not logically follow from the a person being born to someone with a certain behavioral characteristic, worldview, or set of desires that they will or must have the same traits as their parents.  For those who are too philosophically inept to even reason out a logical fact that has such practical (and abstract) ramifications as this apart from examples in their lives, there is always the fact that families almost never share the same personalities, and wildly differing claims and actions of family members can be easily observed.

It is thus both logically and experientially clear that family line does not determine everything about a person, or else it would logically follow from someone having children that their children will be psychological clones of them and that no one would ever observe outwardly expressed differences of belief, personality, or preferences.  This issue does not in any way need years of social examination or back and forth thought.  Like many things, these facts can be immediately, fully known just by letting reason reveal what does and does not follow.  Logical facts do not change because what must and what cannot logically follow from something is a matter of necessary truths and not shifting variables.

Genetics simply cannot dictate all personality traits or all predispotitions to behaviors if logical necessity contradicts it.  Different people inherently have the capacity to differ in psychological traits, and it would be impossible to have even the capacity for this if people were fated to have the opposite.  Of course, on the level of both logical proof and everyday experiences, family descent does not dictate a person's talents, moral standing, rationality, or spectrum of desires and aspirations, so even mere perception-based evidences that fall short of logical proof contradict the idea that people literally inherit every mental characteristic from their parents.

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