Screen Science

The Adjustment Bureau– Do we control our own destiny?

Conspiracy theories about who really controls civilisation range from the plausible to the downright crazy. From chief executives of banks and large corporations meeting in smoky rooms, or suspicious meetings of global leaders, to microchips being implanted in people’s brains and chemicals being put in our drinking water. It’s all there folks.

I don’t buy any of it. I find it hard to choose what pants to wear from day to day and sometimes wish some greater force might make the decision for me. But it never does.

The Adjustment Bureau, a recently released movie with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, will add to the already long list of conspiracies about controlling human behaviour. With its mixture of politics and science, the story reveals the existence of a bureau determined to guide the decisions made by ordinary people so as to further its own ends.

In science a similar debate continues to occupy our time. The discovery of the human genome and its implications for free will have left some asking whether we control our own destinies at all. Research carried out in Trinity College Dublin has found variations with the dopamine receptor gene that suggest risk-taking traits are seen in some more than others. “People with a longer dopamine receptor gene are more likely to be risk takers than those with an average-sized gene,” explains Aoife McLysaght of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at TCD and Bang writer. “People with the longer gene can be prone to thrill seeking and may be more likely to take risks for these reasons – be they financial, physical, drug taking, political choices or anything else.”

Does McLysaght believe our genes determine our destiny outright? “There’s good, solid science out there showing that genes contribute to our behaviour but they don’t determine it completely,” she says. “Many factors determine our behaviour: upbringing, culture, life experiences. You may have gotten your fingers burnt as a child, which puts you off fire when you’re an adult.” Scientists at TCD have found that some people with the long dopamine receptor gene don’t consider themselves to be risk takers. On the contrary, some see themselves as rather cautious. “Free will is a combination of factors,” says McLysaght. “We all make decisions but there are constraints on those decisions – social norms, what’s acceptable by our peers, the law. It is within such constraints that we are free to make decisions. We’re not slaves to our genes or anything else.”

That is unless, of course, you are in fact a slave.