Turing did not die because he insisted on seeing his homosexuality as a binary decision. He died because his society chose to view it that way. You don’t have to be a homosexual to recognize that what happened to Turing was a tragic and cruel injustice, an obscenity, and that he is not to blame. His society and its views were responsible, and those views were binary.

My way or the highway.

I’ve always been intrigued by the WWII Enigma project. Alan Turing worked on it and was one of those geniuses who could figure out things in ways other people couldn’t understand. He was homosexual and eventually committed suicide because he couldn’t change that. I’ve always thought that if he could have altered his sexuality he would have, and therefore it must be genetic.

There are some traits which are pretty much binary. Whether aggression and violence are included I believe is doubtful. I suspect they are probably shaded, there are gradients, and there is room for environmental factors to influence them.

This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view as well. A tribe of apes needs its fighters and risk takers, its aggressive and violent members for times of conflict and danger. But it also needs caution, reflection, empathy and cooperation; all the opposite traits as well. We are, after all, cooperative, social creatures. If we were all warriors we could not work together, if none of us were warriors we could not survive conflict and adversity. We need these traits in all of us, because the environment is constantly changing and different mixes of these traits in the population may be needed under different conditions and circumstances. Natural selection takes over and makes adjustments.

I’ve often suspected this sort of process has had a great influence in my own life, too. I worked my ass off and got a degree in mathematics, but I was never really any good at it. I loved it, I wanted to do it, but I wasted a lot of time and effort before I realized I would have been better off at doing creative work by directing my efforts elsewhere. I doubt I have a math gene. I speak a foreign language fluently because I was brought up bilingual, but I have studied other languages and gotten absolutely nowhere. I doubt I have a language gene. And I’ve always wondered if my love of music means I have a music gene, or just a music appreciation gene.

When I studied cultural geography a similar debate was raging in the field about whether innovations (like a useful new method of pottery making, or a novel projectile point design) were invented independently in different locations, or were invented once and then diffused to other geographical areas by trade or migrations. I felt this was a needless debate, why couldn’t it be both? Sure, some new inventions probably were propagated over space through time, while others probably were invented independently over and over again. Both processes probably occurred simultaneously. In the biological world, the vertebrate eye was independently evolved by the molluscs.

We seem to want to think that it has to be one way, or the other, we have trouble with both, or a combination of the two. Its the old “my way or the highway” debate all over again. Should we have only one type of political or economic system, or another? What’s wrong with a combination of both, or something in between?

Binary decisions are phoobah.