My eyebrows nearly shot off the top of my head at this, because:
This. Do you imagine that if you swapped American babies with European ones for a few years, the American obesity problem would resolve itself? The fact that there’s a difference between Americans and other OECD countries in this regard is evidence that environmental effects are more powerful, at least in aggregate, than any individual capacity to make choices.
“Making choices” always turns out to be without any explanatory power, and the reason it has no explanatory power is that it is an incoherent idea. My behaviour is the product of the operation of my brain, which is a complex electrical circuit, basically. Where in this am “I” and what is this “making choices”? Am I some kind of ghost in the machine who can prod electrons as they whiz past and thus alter the result of the electrical activity in the brain?