Determinedly Unpredetermined

First of all, let me fix everyone with a steely squint and say, with a dangerous edge in my voice, that when I was very very young—got that? Is that clear?—I read something in a magazine called LIFE about two twins who'd been separated at birth and lived lives far apart from each other. In middle age they encountered each other again, and there were amazing parallels: They had similar jobs, similar-looking wives, and they had both been moved to construct a little white bench around a tree in their yards. I was willing to imagine that identical twins might want to work similar jobs and marry similar women. But how in the hell, I asked myself, do genes know about little benches around trees? If you can have a genetically determined predisposition to build a little bench around a tree, then what isn't determined? Do we have free will in anything? It was disturbing.

And since then, as gene research went on, there's been a steady drumbeat of news about how this is determined by genes and that is determined by genes. Or if not genes, pheromones. Love, beauty, art—it's all coldly chemical. Check back with us some time next week and we'll know exactly why.  We'll explain why you love Sally and not Sue, why you enjoy football but not baseball, why you like the smell of pine woods but not the scent of lilac on a summer evening. Do you like Brahms? Bocce? Fabergé eggs? We'll tell you why. It's genetic. Everything is genetic.

I tried not to think about it. I liked and clung to the idea that we're free to love what our unique individual selves want to love. So I was cheered to read David Brooks saying this morning that actually we're not that close after all to cracking the code and creating a unified field theory of why people do things based on their genes. So you can feel free to, well, feel free. If you love a certain person, or a certain landscape, or a certain piece of music, maybe it isn't because of your genes. Maybe it'll always, as far as we know, be just because. I kind of like that idea.