Last week I asked...

...if your political views were determined by your genes. 

This week I saw Michael Gazzaniga, a psychology professor, say on Charlie Rose that "free will is an illusion." 

And today, Michael Kinsley writes that success may be due in part to luck or circumstance (my emphasis): 

Maybe your success is due to something you got from your parents. This could be money, or good manners. It could even be a quality like determination. Evolutionary psychology is teaching us that huge chunks of personal characteristics, good and bad, derive from our genes. The full implications of this have not sunk in, but one of them surely is that "rewarding success" is more futile and more difficult than previously thought. 

 Maybe your success is due to something you got from the government, like a broadcast license, or a new freeway through your property, or a special tax break. Maybe it's due to having been educated at a public university, or having had your education financed through federal student loans. Maybe it's just because you're an American. The average American baker earns more than twice what a baker earns in Poland and five times what a baker earns in China (and I imagine the bread and the working conditions are better too). What's true for bakers is true for bankers: Operating in a rich country is more lucrative than operating in a poor one. And this is for reasons having nothing to do with admirable personal characteristics. 

And let's not forget simple luck. All the factors discussed above boil down to good luck: whom you're born to and so on. But the residual, unexplained differences in how people succeed or don't also are mostly luck. 

Is that true? Is it all luck? Is it all genes? Is it all just circumstance? 

After my father died two years ago, I asked myself: What would my life have been like if he had died when I was two, instead of 51? Would I have graduated from college? Would I have even gone to college? 

Taken a step (or two) further, what if I had been born in a poor neighborhood in the city? Would I have gotten involved in drugs or a gang and ended up in jail? What if my ancestors had never immigrated to this country in the first place? Would I be speaking today with a funny accent? Or writing with a completely different perspective? And what if I had been born in the Middle Ages? Would I have even made it to age thirty? 

I find that most people, when asked, attribute their successes to hard work or good choices, but think that their setbacks were due more to bad luck or circumstances beyond their control.