While making his case, Wright points out that Charles Darwin never bought the free will myth either, although he kept quiet about it. Not surprisingly, however, Wilson and Wright's prescription to abandon free will is a very tough sell, since most of us resent the seemingly drastic drop in status implied by full-bore determinism. Few of us want to concede our souls to mechanism. For example, consider that commentaries on the new genetics often include reassuring references to a human exemption from causality. On these accounts, the environment, or character, or perhaps some non-physical personal essence, gives us a special freedom.
Determinism is restricted to what is clearly biological, leaving wiggle room for the self-made self.
But such determinism is false, he argued, since the environment too contributes heavily to behavior and personality. The soothing implication was that environmental influences are somehow less constraining than genetics. What they can acquire through experience is the ability to control these traits by exercising that intangible part of personality called character. However, it's been clear for some time that environmental influences are no less determining than genetics, and that character is set by circumstances as much as biology. Science holds that we are, in toto , the products of a prodigiously complex dance between nature and nurture, which means that it banishes the self-originating self just as surely as ghosts and goblins.