Either we must be ‘genetic determinists’ or we believe in ‘free will’; we cannot have it both ways. But—and here I presume to speak for Professor Wilson as well as for myself—it is only in the eyes of Rose and his colleagues that we are ‘genetic determinists’. What they don’t understand (apparently, though it is hard to credit) is that it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden, or reversed by other influences. Genes must exert a stastical influence on any
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