The idea of “biological determinism”—that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty—and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould’s dichotomy would seem to leave “biological potentiality” as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is “capable of a full range of human behaviors” is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the
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