One man emancipated a Nation and the other slaughtered millions. Did the eyes make a difference?

Freud, referring to the impact of anatomy on gender identity, framed the concept of "anatomy as destiny" in his 1923 work on the subject of penis envy. While the notion of penis envy strikes most of us (especially women) in the 21st century as absurd, the notion that physical attributes may presage your future was a youthful revelation to me. The sum total of the physical self ; movement, expression, posture, and dress, clearly impacts the responses of those around you in a distinctive way, often after mere seconds. Those responses, in turn, directly affirm or refute your ever evolving sense of self; the doors you see open and the risks you believe worth taking. The detective, the dancer, the doctor, and the priest may so often look the part because of this continuous cycle of cause and effect between the arbitrary virtues of anatomy and the continuum of responses from our world, culminating in the stereotype.

No one is surprised by lithe dancers and burly lumberjacks. What is far more interesting to me is the notion that this process may extend to more subtle elements of personality, behaviour, and moral destiny. All other conditions unchanged, would the young Stalin and Gandhi have gone down the same divergent paths with another mans face, voice, or walk? Would a taller Napoleon or more cherubic Hitler have travelled the same path though history? Tiny differences in initial conditions predict huge differences in distant outcomes. This we all understand. But to what extent does the length of your nose impact the size of your eventual kingdom?

We all look to genotype and circumstances to explain history, but a focus on phenotype may hold the key. We may be pre-sorted, like Mendel's peas, but it is the tall and short rather than the dominant and recessive that determine which will be picked for supper. This distinction is not artificial. Look only to your children to see that they are more than the sum of both parents. Those very small untraceable differences may change their trajectory completely. Change the timber of a voice, the curl and caliber of the hair, or the lordotic curve of the spine and a different destiny will unfold.

ACROCINUS