Nature versus nurture as a binding problem

Another example of a binding problem is the nature versus nurture question. How do the nature elements inside us get combined with the nurture elements of our environment to produce our total self? The answer, as usual, is that the developmental plan is produced in the process of development as the parts of the system figure out what to do together. It’s not nature, not nurture, and not some interaction between the two, but multicausality, a totally different perspective on how processes occur:

Developmentalists have devoted considerable effort to uncovering the grand ontogenetic plan. The classic "nature-nurture" controversy, a standard in every textbook, is a reflection of the quest for understanding where development comes from. At one extreme, the developmental ground plan is seen as residing entirely within the organism, as a set of genetic blueprints, which contains all the information needed for the final adult form and which needs only to be "read" sequentially over time. At the other extreme, the organism is viewed as containing none of the information for its final destiny, but as absorbing structure and complexity from the order in the environment through experience with the environment.

Surprisingly, several current approaches to development continue to side with either a version of genetic determinism or bald environmentalism. However, most developmentalists at least pay lip service to the view that development is a function of the interaction between genetically determined processes and input from the environment. Interactionism and transactionalism are everyone's comfortable buzzwords, and the proffered "solution" to the nature-nurture dichotomy.

There are several reasons why the commonly accepted interactionist position is inadequate to explain the grand sweep of developmental progress. First and foremost is the serious logical impasse created by seeking the developmental plan in any preexisting agency, a point most recently made by Oyama (1985) in compelling detail. Remember that the premier developmental question is how organic form is createdthe emergence of novelty and complexity in structure and function. Invoking any prior plan within the organism leads to infinite regress. For example, we ask where does the structure of the mind come from? If it comes from the structure of the central nervous system (CNS), where is that encoded? If the structure of the nervous system is entirely encoded in the genes, how does a sequential one-dimensional chemical code lead to an elaborated, three-dimensional and functionally specific structure? Where are the rules that govern this transition from code to organism? Thus, we have to postulate yet another set of instructions, and so on. In essence, genetic determinism just sidesteps the question of origins and dumps the problem onto the laps of the evolutionists, who must account for behavioral novelty. If we propose, in contrast, that the structure of the mind comes from information or knowledge from the world, how is that information evaluated? By what criteria does the organism know what is "good"? What is to be paid attention to and be assimilated into the mental repertoire? Again, this requires another level of representations of the final developmental product.

The dilemma of where the information for the adult resides does not disappear with interactionism. Interactionist positions, as presently formulated, only combine two logically untenable views, without any notion of how their combination resolves the fundamental regressive nature of both of them. Information is both within the organism and "out there" and combines in some unspecified way. The genes alone cannot specify the end-state of the developmental process, as they play out in a continuous, and essential, supporting matrix of the cell, tissue, organism, and environment. Extragenetic factors are themselves also insufficient specifiers of the egg-into-adult transformation. Interactionist positions do not make it clear how combining two imperfect codes creates the complete blueprint. If genes and environment "combine," we must specify how their interactions over time create new forms and new behaviors.

Maturationism, environmentalism, and interactionism are imperfect developmental theories because they essentially prescribe the adult form before it develops. These views take no account of process, of how new form and function are realized over time. Development is not the specification of the outcome—the product—but is the route by which the organism moves from an earlier state to a more mature state. By assuming prescription or teleology, we simply finesse process since the outcome is encapsulated in the plan.

[…]

The grand sweep of development seems neatly rule-driven. In detail, however, development is messy. As we turn up the magnification of our microscope, we see that our visions of linearity, uniformity, inevitable sequencing, and even irreversibility break down. What looks like a cohesive, orchestrated process from afar takes on the flavor of a more exploratory, opportunistic, syncretic, and function-driven process in its instantiation.

—Thelen and Smith, pp. xv-xvi

Binding problems like nature-nurture emerge from the idea that information is stored: placed into a particular location and waiting to be uncovered like buried treasure. In neuroscience, examples of the stored information idea include the both the idea of dedicated circuits for specific psychological processes and the concept of the binding problem in vision, in which information about particular elements of a visual perception are stored in different neurons and have to be brought together somehow. Both ideas create insoluble problems that can’t be addressed by hoping to find some kind of central representation or singular seat of intelligence where everything is magically put together. The alternative, the interoception-and-allostasis theory of everything, describes a general process by which the metabolic processes of the brain and body produce all psychological phenomena as historical events.

In economics, prices don’t store information either. Prices are memories in the sense that they’re the result of a historical process, but memories aren’t stored, they’re used. Information doesn’t get bound together in prices, and prices don’t bind people together to create an economy. Instead, prices serve as abstract pointers that enable coordination through scarce reservoirs.

The economy has neither a nature nor a nurture, and has no ontogenetic plan, so the fact that the economy develops shows that we can drop these concepts and still have a science of development. The question isn’t where the ontogenetic information comes from but how it’s created.

In general, binding problems, whether neuroscience, nature-nurture, or anything else, are a sign of a confused understanding of how psychological phenomena, including development, are produced. The parts and pieces of psychology and development are relationally real: information isn’t stored in any of them because it’s the coordination of the parts that creates the information in the first place.