There’s a common view floating around that who you are and how you live is almost entirely determined by your genes. That your personality, your habits, your life outcomes, are all inherited. According to this view, being raised “right” doesn’t really matter. The presence or absence of a father is mostly irrelevant. Good or bad environments don’t shape people, they’re just a reflection of good or bad genes from the parents.

They often cite twin studies to support this claim. Identical twins raised apart often grow up to have surprisingly similar traits. That’s true, and worth noting, genetics clearly has a strong influence not just on appearance but on behaviour. But to jump from this to saying environment doesn’t matter is a leap too far.

Yes, genetics play a role. A big one. They set the maximum range of your potential, your physical limits, emotional tendencies, cognitive ceilings. But within that range, where you end up is determined by your environment, your influences, and your personal choices.

Human genetics are adaptive. We are the most adaptable species on the planet. Thats adaptability means changing behavior to match the environment. Without that adaptability our species would have limited to a narrow band in the tropics.

If behavior were fixed by genes, marketing wouldn’t work. But it does. Trillions are spent every year to change habits, desires, and beliefs, with nothing but repetition and suggestion. If human behavior were hard-coded, propaganda wouldn’t work. Cults wouldn’t work. Religious conversions wouldn’t happen. Life-changing books, mentors, and events would be meaningless.

And yet we know they are effective in changing people. They work, because behavior is malleable.

A single meeting can redirect someone’s life. A single influence, good or bad, can reshape someone’s worldview. And nothing has a greater long-term effect than the presence or absence of a strong, wise, loving father. Fatherhood is not just a genetic variable. It’s also a role. And that role is one of the most powerful forces for shaping a human life.

The people pushing the “genes explain everything” line conveniently ignore the role of incentives, too.

We all know incentives shape behavior. You raise taxes, people move their money. You remove punishment, crime increases. You praise weakness, people become weak. You reward discipline, strength increases. Entire societies have been built, and collapsed, on the basis of changing incentive structures. To claim that environment doesn’t matter while incentives clearly do is intellectual laziness.

Analogy: Genetic Expression

Genetics gives us a “language” of sorts. It sets the grammar. It defines what kinds of words can be formed, how sentences are structured, what can and can’t be easily said.

But it doesn’t write the sentences. It doesn’t decide whether you speak truth or lies, love or manipulation, meaning or madness. That’s shaped by parents, by culture, by mentors, by repetition, by the reality you’re immersed in. And most of all by your choices.

And just like natural languages, your genetic language has limits.

Some languages can’t describe certain ideas, not because the people are stupid, but because they’ve never needed those words. A jungle tribe with no word for “snow” isn’t broken. Their language simply never had to account for ice. English speakers borrow Greek words to describe the psyche, because Greek carries a depth, a structure, a clarity that English alone lacks when describing the inner mind.

And that’s the truth most people miss.

Your genes define the range of possibilities. Your genes are fixed, but how you speak them, that’s where environment and choice come into play.

And only those who’ve been fathered, by a man, by a healthy culture, by truth, will learn to speak in the full power of the human tongue to the best of their ability.

And here’s the kicker: behavior, culture, and values change within a single generation, far faster than genetics ever could. The dramatic changes in family life, work ethic, marriage, and responsibility we’ve seen in just 50 years prove that environment and cultural norms have immense power.

You don’t get and sustain good genes in the long term without good parenting. Good genes are a product of good parenting, which in turn reinforces good genes in a virtuous cycle. What’s often missing from the genetics discussion is the issue of dysgenics versus eugenics. If you’re not actively making eugenic choices for your family, choices that improve the quality of your offspring, then you are making dysgenic ones by default. There is no stasis. You’re either going up or down.

Case Study: The Scottish Collapse Post-Anglicization

An excellent example of rapid environmental and cultural change altering a genetically stable population is what happened to Scotland following its anglicization and union with England:

Family Structure Transformation: The traditional Scottish clan-based model, which emphasized strong paternal and kin-based leadership, disintegrated after the 1707 Act of Union. English legal and cultural influence replaced community authority with centralized state influence. This shifted the family from extended and tribal to fragmented and nuclear.

Loss of Local Authority & Father Figures: The Highland Clearances devastated clan structures. Entire communities were uprooted, and intergenerational masculine leadership was lost. Boys no longer had uncles, grandfathers, or elders to guide them. Masculine mentorship was replaced by economic exploitation and dislocation.

Economic Disruption: Industrialization pulled men out of their homes and into cities, away from their families. This widened the gap between fathers and children and reduced daily paternal influence. Young boys were raised without models of daily masculine leadership and responsibility.

Cultural Incentive Shifts: The Scottish identity was gradually subordinated to British imperial and bureaucratic norms. Honor, kinship, faith, and local authority were replaced with obedience to abstract state systems. The incentives shifted from producing men of honor to producing compliant workers.

Social Collapse Indicators: In the 18th and 19th centuries, Scotland saw a spike in alcoholism, vagrancy, urban poverty, and declining birth rates. These are not genetic phenomena, they are results of destroyed family structure and cultural demoralization.

This all occurred within a genetically homogeneous population. The people didn’t change. The environment did. The incentives did. And the result was cultural degradation, disconnection, and generational suffering.

Yes, your genes do matter. But if you want to become the best version of what your genes allow, You need to be raised right, incentivized wisely, guided with strength, and loved into maturity.

Otherwise, all you’ll ever be is wasted potential.

🧠 Psychological Reasons People Cling to Genetic Determinism

A careful look at the interplay between genetics and environment shows just how vital both are when trying to understand human behavior, whether at the population level or in the individual.

It’s not one or the other. It’s both.

It takes a great deal to form a mature, productive, fully developed adult. Genes alone won’t get you there. Neither will the environment on its own. You need both.

The old blank slate theory claimed that genetics didn’t matter. That view has already been debunked, and thoroughly. No serious researcher still holds it.

But in rejecting that error, many people have embraced a new one: genetic determinism. The pendulum simply swung too far the other way.

That’s common. When a theory collapses under the weight of its own lies, people tend to assume its opposite must be true. But the opposite of a falsehood is often just a mirror-image error.

That’s what we’re dealing with now.

And while genetic determinism feels true to many, for different reasons on both the left and right, it’s still false as we discussed above. Why is genetic determinism so attractive to so many people?

1. Avoidance of Responsibility (Low Agency Thinking)

If your life outcomes are determined by genes, you’re not responsible for how things turned out. You’re just “wired that way.” This is deeply attractive to the under-fathered, under-mothered, and immature, because it removes the burden of self-reflection and accountability.

“It’s not that I was lazy, or poorly raised, or made bad choices, I just didn’t win the genetic lottery.”

This mindset is anti-agency at its core.

2. Justification for Resentment or Inaction

If others are more successful than you and you believe it’s because of genes, you don’t have to confront your envy, laziness, or lack of effort. Likewise, if someone is struggling, you don’t have to help, because they’re just “genetically doomed.”

It creates a permanent victim/oppressor dichotomy that requires no moral engagement or effort to change the status quo.

3. Excuse for Cultural Decline

People don’t want to admit that fatherlessness, weak institutions, and cultural sabotage destroyed multiple generations. Why? Because that would imply we need to restore strong culture, rebuild families, and take hard, disciplined actions to recover.

It’s easier to say:

“Nothing we do will help, they’re just genetically defective.”

This absolves both parents and institutions from responsibility. It’s an ideological white flag.

4. Pseudoscientific Elitism

Some high-IQ individuals adopt genetic determinism as a reaction to blank slate ideology.

They correctly rejected the claim that environment alone shapes behavior. But instead of restoring balance, they embraced the opposite extreme, that genetics is everything.

In doing so, they dismiss the importance of culture, motherhood, fatherhood, education, and moral formation. If all outcomes are genetically fixed, then mentorship is unnecessary, tradition is irrelevant, and parenting is reduced to reproduction.

This view appeals to those who want the appearance of rationality without the burden of responsibility. It allows them to avoid the work of legacy-building while preserving a sense of superiority.

Rejecting the blank slate does not justify abandoning the moral and cultural structures that form a complete human being. One error does not excuse another.

5. Revenge of the Broken Family

Many who promote strict genetic determinism were hurt by their own upbringing and are now emotionally defensive.

They say upbringing doesn’t matter because admitting it does would force them to re-experience the pain of not being raised right.

“If parenting matters, my parents failed me, and that’s too painful to face.”

So instead, they declare parenting and environment irrelevant, which numbs the wound… temporarily.

6. It’s Easier Than Change

The idea that “genes are destiny” lets people believe they don’t have to do the hard work of transformation. It’s a shortcut narrative:

No need to heal trauma.

No need to confront bad programming.

No need to cultivate the Meta Father within.

This is deeply incompatible with what I’ve seen over decades of coaching. I’ve worked with hundreds of men and women who transformed their lives, not because of their genetics, but because they chose moral agency, personal responsibility, and truth-telling, even when it was uncomfortable.

I’ve watched people change the trajectory of entire families through difficult, deliberate action. The idea that outcomes are fixed by birth ignores what is possible when a person chooses to grow. In short: Genetic determinism is the perfect ideology for people who want to avoid responsibility, justify failure, and reject hard truths.

It’s not that genes don’t matter. They do. But the overemphasis on genetics is, itself, a symptom of a culture that has rejected Natural Law, fatherhood, and the long, hard work of building character across generations.

Disagree with me?

Now’s your chance to argue.

I’m on vacation, so replies will be occasional, and entirely at my whim.

But if you do agree, feel free to tell me why I’m right. That’s always welcome.

But more importantly, I want to hear from those of you who’ve changed your path through willpower, and maybe with the help of mentors, faith, philosophy, brotherhood, or love. If you are living proof that genetic determinism doesn’t have the final word, I’m listening, tell us how.

That kind of story is worth more than any study.