Posted on 05/05/2004 11:31:33 PM PDT by tpaine
In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature
By NICHOLAS WADE
Who should define human nature? When the biologist Edward O. Wilson set out to do so in his 1975 book "Sociobiology," he was assailed by left-wing colleagues who portrayed his description of genetically shaped human behaviors as a threat to the political principles of equal rights and a just society.
Since then, a storm has threatened anyone who prominently asserts that politically sensitive aspects of human nature might be molded by the genes. So biologists, despite their increasing knowledge from the decoding of the human genome and other advances, are still distinctly reluctant to challenge the notion that human behavior is largely shaped by environment and culture. The role of genes in shaping differences between individuals or sexes or races has become a matter of touchiness, even taboo. A determined effort to break this silence and make it safer for biologists to discuss what they know about the genetics of human nature has now been begun by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a book being published by Viking at the end of this month, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature," he seeks to create greater political elbow room for those engaged in the study of the ways genes shape human behavior. "If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs," he writes.
A principal theme of Dr. Pinker's argument is that the blank slaters — the critics of sociobiology and their many adherents in the social sciences — have sought to base the political ideals of equal rights and equal opportunity on a false biological premise: that all human minds are equal because they are equally blank, equally free of innate, genetically shaped, abilities and behaviors.
The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues. Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one. Moreover, the blank slate doctrine has political consequences that have been far from benign, in Dr. Pinker's view. It encourages totalitarian regimes to excesses of social engineering. It perverts education and child-rearing, loading unmerited guilt on parents for their children's failures.
In his book he reproaches those who in his view have politicized the study of human nature from both the left and the right, though in practice more of his fire is directed against the left, particularly the critics of sociobiology. They have created a climate in which "discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals," he writes.
He accuses two of them — Dr. Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard, and the late Dr. Stephen J. Gould, a historian of science — of "25 years of pointless attacks" on Dr. Wilson and on Dr. Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene," for allegedly saying certain aspects of behavior are genetically determined.
And he chides the sociobiology critics for turning a scholarly debate "into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel." In a recent case, two anthropologists accused Dr. James Neel, a founder of modern human genetics, and Dr. Napoleon Chagnon, a social anthropologist, of killing the Yanomamö people of Brazil to test genetic theories of human behavior, a charge Dr. Pinker analyzes as without basis in fact.
With this preemptive strike in place, Dr. Pinker sets out his view of what science can now say about human nature. This includes many of the ideas laid out by Dr. Wilson in "Sociobiology" and "On Human Nature," updated by recent work in evolutionary psychology and other fields.
Dr. Pinker argues that significant innate behavioral differences exist between individuals and between men and women. Discussing child-rearing, he says that children's characters are shaped by their genes, by their peer group and by chance experiences; parents cannot mold their children's nature, nor should they wish to, any more than they can redesign that of their spouses. Those little slates are not as blank as they may seem.
Dr. Pinker has little time for two other doctrines often allied with the Blank Slate. One is "the Ghost in the Machine," the assumption of an immaterial soul that lies beyond the reach of neuroscience, and he criticizes the religious right for thwarting research with embryonic stem cells on the ground that a soul is lurking within. The third member of Dr. Pinker's unholy trinity is "the Noble Savage," the idea that the default state of human nature is mild, pacific and unacquisitive. Dr. Pinker believes, to the contrary, that dominance and violence are universal; that human societies are more given to an ethos of reciprocity than to communal sharing; that intelligence and character are in part inherited, meaning that "some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems," and that all societies are ethnocentric and easily roused to racial hatred. Following in part the economist Thomas Sowell, he distinguishes between a leftist utopian vision of human nature (the mind is a blank slate, man is a Noble Savage, traditional institutions are the problem) and the tragic vision preferred by the right (man is the problem; family, creed and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand are the solutions).
"My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the tragic vision and undermine the utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life," he writes.
With "The Blank Slate," Dr. Pinker has left the safe territory of irregular verbs. But during a conversation in his quiet Victorian house a few blocks from the bustle of Harvard Square, he seemed confident of dodging the explosions that have rocked his predecessors. "Wilson didn't know what he was getting into and had no idea it would cause such a ruckus," he said. "This book is about the ruckus; it's about why people are so upset." "It's conceivable that if you say anything is innate, people will say you are racist, but the climate has changed," he says. "I don't actually believe that the I.Q. gap is genetic, so I didn't say anything nearly as inflammatory as Herrnstein and Murray," the authors of the 1994 book "The Bell Curve," who argued that inborn differences in intelligence explain much of the economic inequality in American society.
Despite his confidence, Dr. Pinker is explicitly trying to set off an avalanche. He compares the overthrow of the blank slate view to another scientific revolution with fraught moral consequences, that of Galileo's rejection of the church's ideas about astronomy. "We are now living, I think, through a similar transition," he writes, because the blank slate, like the medieval church's tidy hierarchy of the cosmos, is "a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day."
Dr. Pinker is not the fire-breathing kind of revolutionary. He has a thick mop of curly brown hair, edged respectably with gray, and a mild, almost diffident manner. A writer for the Canadian magazine Macleans described Dr. Pinker, who was born in Montreal, as "endearingly Canadian: polite, soft-spoken, attentive to what others say." Teased about this description, he notes that Canadians also gave the world ice hockey. Born in 1954, he grew up in the city's Jewish community, in the neighborhood described in Mordecai Richler's novel "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz." He was caught up in the debates of the 60's and 70's about social organization and human nature, but found his teenage anarchist views of the nobility of human nature dealt a sharp empirical refutation by the Montreal police strike of 1969; in the absence of authority, Montrealers turned immediately to lawlessness, robbing 6 banks and looting 100 stores before the Mounties restored order. Trained as an experimental psychologist at Harvard, Dr. Pinker took up the study of language and became convinced that the brain's linguistic ability must rest on built-in circuitry. This made him think other faculties and behaviors could be innate, despite the unpopularity of the idea. "People think the worst environmental explanation is preferable to the best innatist explanation," he says.
Dr. Pinker first became known outside his specialty through his 1994 book "The Language Instinct," an approachable account of how the brain is constructed to learn language. He followed up that success with "How the Mind Works," in which he shared his enthusiasm for the ideas of evolutionary psychology. "The Blank Slate" further broadens his ambit from neuroscience to political and social theory.
Like Edward O. Wilson, who began as a specialist in ants and mastered ever larger swaths of biology, Dr. Pinker has a gift of summarizing other specialists' works into themes that are larger than their parts. Synthesisers are rare animals in the academic zoo because they risk being savaged by those whose territory they invade. "Everything in the study of human behavior is controversial, and if you try to sum it up you will ride roughshod over specialists, so you've got to have a strong stomach," Dr. Pinker said.
The critics of sociobiology caricatured their opponents as "determinists," even though few, if any, people believe human nature is fully determined by the genes. Could Dr. Pinker's description of the Blank Slate similarly overstate their views? He says he shows at length how critics like Dr. Lewontin have made statements that "are really not too far from the collection of positions that I call the Blank Slate," with Dr. Lewontin and others having even written a book called "Not in Our Genes."
Though Dr. Pinker believes the politics and science of human nature should be disentangled, that does not mean political arrangements should ignore or ride roughshod over human nature. To the contrary, a good political system "should mobilize some parts of human nature to rein in other parts." The framers of the Constitution took great interest in human nature and "by almost any measure of human well-being, Western democracies are better," he says.
Dr. Pinker believes that human nature "will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes and evolution." But if political and social systems should be designed around human nature, won't that give enormous power to the psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists are in a position to say what human nature is?
"It's a game anyone should be able to play if they do their homework," he says, "so I hope it wouldn't become the exclusive province of a scientific priesthood."
You've enhanced my knowledge of Joan, which before now consisted mostly of seeing the Ingrid Bergman movie. The only point I was trying to make -- with which I think you agree -- is that we'll never know, indeed we can't know, if Joan imagined her voices or if something objectively real was speaking to her. That is the nature of subjective experiences. They can motivate us, they can inspire us, but regardless of what we may believe, we can never demonstrate that such experiences have a source which is external to ourselves.
Here is my personal testament in response to your claim, tpaine, above:
Not only is God not an "Indian-giver," but God does not lie.
Here is my personal testament in response to your claim, tpaine, above:
Not only is God not an "Indian-giver," but God does not lie.
Odd reply betty.
I quite clearly wrote that "men" claim, -- thus, -- they can also make a claim revoking such a claim.
You all right? - I'm not challenging your concept of God. Never have. You know better.
So what, PH??? Maybe truth must be validated internally, "subjectively," and not externally, "objectively" -- in the latter case as if Truth could be rationally understood as just any kind of discrete observation being conducted under laboratory conditions, according to the rules of the scientific method.
Truth has a "discrete" nature in that it presents and -- in the longer run -- dominates in particular concrete situations. But Truth would have no power in concrete situations if it lacked universality.
Patrick, seemingly all your favorite biologists say that all of life (and human living) really is completely "objective," or at least ought to be. On this view, biological existence is subject to the laws of chemistry and physics. What we know as Life is constituted solely, exclusively of very "clever" matter (there is nothing else). It operates according to determinist rules. It has absolutely no purpose in view beyond executing a Random Walk through space and time. Darwin tells us that it will present a very fine spectacle in passing.
But let's play turnaround here, and imagine that "the subjective" is the actual test of the truth of reality on the very largest scales, propagating downward from there. In that context, "objective tests" would only be useful ways of validating particular questions relative to concrete existents, with a view to probing their real nature. That is, they would be useful tools that man can use to extend the range of his observational powers.
What they would not be, however, is any kind of Rosetta Stone providing the key to the interpretation of the entire range of human knowledge and experience taken as an historical whole. That seems to be a project entirely outside or beyond the reach of science altogether.
On that note, I must say good night, Patrick!
"Men" can claim whatever they want to claim, or think they can claim and get away with. However, my sense is: When it comes to claims, Reality is a very exacting and uncompromising "editor" of gratuitous human wishes, hopes, and dreams.
On the other hand, God does not play "footsie" with his creatures.
If He says something, He MEANS IT.
And it won't be a "different story" next week, when the "situation is different," or visions of personal advantage in the minds of the "powerful" shifts the "equation" in favor of their own personal gain....
Good night, dear tpaine! I've got to turn in for now....
What they would not be, however, is any kind of Rosetta Stone providing the key to the interpretation of the entire range of human knowledge and experience taken as an historical whole. That seems to be a project entirely outside or beyond the reach of science altogether.
A most interesting individual.
You dismiss the whole topic with "so what?" I guess we ought to drop it. I see a gigantic chasm between objectively verifiable facts on the one hand and subjective experience on the other. Gigantic. You seem not to see this, or if you do see it, you regard it as no big deal. I think we'll just have to let the subject go without agreement.
Patrick, seemingly all your favorite biologists say that all of life (and human living) really is completely "objective," or at least ought to be. On this view, biological existence is subject to the laws of chemistry and physics.
I don't really know if they all say that. That is, if they embrace what we've been discussing as "metaphysical naturalism" and would thus assert that nothing exists which cannot be objectively verified. Maybe they all believe that, maybe they don't. I don't, and I suspect they don't -- not all of them. But like all scientists in any field, their work is only with things that can be objectively verified. They use procedural materialism when doing science, whether they're metaphysical naturalists or not. That what makes them good and successful scientists.
But let's play turnaround here, and imagine that "the subjective" is the actual test of the truth of reality on the very largest scales, propagating downward from there.
I don't know how that could work in practice. What if my subective voices tell me something very different from your subjective voices?
In that context, "objective tests" would only be useful ways of validating particular questions relative to concrete existents, with a view to probing their real nature.
That would mean any a scientific finding that contradicted a "subjectively determined" truth would be invalid. It would make science subservient to mysticism. We've been there. I don't want to go back.
Of course I see this. Why should I regard this as a "big deal?" It is part of the structure of life. You seem to think that subjective experience is somehow beyond the pale. Well, it is beyond the pale -- of science. Not every question is a scientific question, with a scientific answer. That doesn't mean that what science cannot address does not exist, or has inferior status. Perhaps science, for you, is the key to certainty. But life is uncertain, through and through. That's not a scientific observation; but I do believe it is a truthful one.
We agree.
That doesn't mean that what science cannot address does not exist, or has inferior status.
Agreed. Unless one is a metaphysical naturalist, which we are not.
Perhaps science, for you, is the key to certainty.
For scientific questions, it's the best way yet found for gaining knowledge. There ain't any certainty in this world, except in subjects like geometry.
But life is uncertain, through and through. That's not a scientific observation; but I do believe it is a truthful one.
Indeed.
It certainly was for Joan. Don't forget Joan so-called "subjective visions" were a part of Reality.
Because I think this is an important issue, and because we're trying to be philosophically precise in this thread, I would word that slightly differently in order to preserve the very important distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. I'd say that what was verifiably real -- objectively real -- was a woman named Joan who seemed to be sincere, and who said she was having a subjective experience which she said were voices, and she acted in accordance with what she said her voices told her. We can never objectively verify the truth of her claims about hearing voices, but we certainly can verify her actions -- to the extent that anything can be historically verified. It certainly seems as if she sincerely believed she was hearing voices, and maybe she was; but we will never know.
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