Friedrich August von Hayek, Nature v. Nurture Once Again (1971)

Hayek’s review essay examines a central explanatory claim in C. D. Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society: whether genetic inheritance can account for the transmission of human capacities and the historical development of societies as extensively as Darlington suggests. Hayek praises the book’s treatment of cultivation, disease, blood groups, and environmental destruction, while leaving its broader description to Max Beloff’s earlier review. His purpose is narrower: to distinguish inherited capacities from culturally acquired dispositions without denying the importance of either. The essay moves from criticism of Darlington’s conceptual dichotomy through an account of imitation and cultural selection to a demand for evidence capable of distinguishing genetic from cultural inheritance.

Darlington’s emphasis on innate differences offers, for Hayek, a welcome correction to behaviourist claims of original human equality. Yet this corrective becomes misleading when it attributes too much to genes. The decisive error is to treat genetically determined, innate, instinctive, and unconscious capacities as equivalent, opposing them collectively to rational or learned activity. This classification excludes learning that occurs without conscious understanding. Hayek’s objection turns on the difference between the origin of a disposition and the individual’s awareness of how it works:

If so, there is certainly no justification for assuming that what is not rational must be innate and genetically determined.

Here “rational” means purposive action informed by conscious knowledge of causal relations, associated with Gilbert Ryle’s “knowledge that.” Hayek does not dispute that much conduct lacks this character. He disputes the inference that such conduct must therefore be genetically inherited. Transmission from parents is not necessarily transmission through genes: upbringing carries habits, skills, and propensities alongside biological descent. Prolonged human infancy makes this distinction especially important, since dispositions can become firmly established before a child can reflect rationally upon them.

Imitation supplies the missing mechanism. Hayek acknowledges how little is known about early learning and notes the absence, to his knowledge, of systematic research into children’s resemblance to foster parents in unconscious behaviour. His argument is therefore not a claim to have measured the respective contributions of heredity and upbringing. It identifies a process that Darlington’s categories fail to accommodate: the translation of perceived movements into performed movements, through which children acquire patterns of action without explicit instruction or causal explanation.

But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.

This distinction allows genetic adaptation and cultural transmission to coexist. An inherited capacity for learning makes varied acquired conduct possible; it does not establish that each resulting disposition is itself inherited. Nor is learning restricted to what adults deliberately teach. Both the person furnishing an example and the imitator may possess practical “knowledge how” without being able to formulate it. Successful patterns can consequently persist without having been consciously designed for the benefits they produce.

Hayek then broadens the argument from individual acquisition to cultural evolution. Following Alexander Carr-Saunders, he presents customs as grounds upon which individuals and groups undergo selection. Drawing also on Alister Hardy, he allows culturally transmitted patterns to affect the selection of genetic properties. The two processes interact, and their effects may be difficult to disentangle. Similar historical outcomes therefore do not by themselves establish a genetic explanation. Breeding systems, stratification, and the loss of skills within relatively closed groups may involve cultural as well as biological mechanisms.

Cultural transmission has however one great advantage over the genetic: it includes the transmission of acquired characters.

A parent’s skill, developed through prolonged trial and error, can become a child’s unconsciously acquired starting point. Cultural inheritance thus permits cumulative improvement without requiring the genetic transmission of acquired traits. Conversely, skills can disappear when their transmission ceases to matter under existing conditions, leaving a group vulnerable when its environment changes. Hayek’s larger conceptual move is to detach evolution from an exclusively biological meaning: selection can operate upon transmitted customs and practices, and evolutionary reasoning had precedents in theories of language and law.

This alternative explanation raises an evidential question. Darlington, Hayek argues, supplies no adequate criterion for identifying specifically genetic inheritance, such as Mendelian distributions or the exclusion of acquired characters. Resemblances between artistic traditions separated by centuries cannot establish genetic continuity merely because cultural continuity appears interrupted. Hayek leaves open the possibility that particular abilities require special genetic factors, but insists that possibility is not demonstration. The uncertainty also changes the assessment of civilization’s durability:

If we had, it would probably show how precarious the stability of our present civilisation is, precisely because it rests largely on cultural traditions which can be more rapidly destroyed than the genetic endowment of populations.

The conclusion remains qualified. Hayek regards his corrections as compatible with much of Darlington’s achievement and does not suppose that replacing genetic explanations with familial cultural transmission will satisfy egalitarian critics. He retains Darlington’s emphasis on stratification and on the limited importance of environmental factors amenable to deliberate manipulation. His final appeal to Gavin de Beer advocates abandoning the nature–nurture opposition in favour of cooperation whose contributions cannot be precisely apportioned in particular cases. The essay’s significance lies in establishing a third category between innate determination and conscious reason: learned, often inarticulate practices that are transmitted and selected culturally, sustain cumulative achievement, and remain vulnerable to disruption.