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 are in a better field to be sure, but nevertheless you are also in a container, in my view, and cannot “read the label” from inside information theory alone. IOW, if you wish to “read the label” - suggest sociological cause/effect and solutions from the aspect of A.I. - you’d need to get outside the container as well. And I believe you would.
For instance, you may construct the most marvelous of all strong artificial intelligence – to the point even where the thing does not even know it is alive. But it is nevertheless a simulation and there is no context for information in the universe itself or in biological systems. Yet they are there and IMHO, you would rigorously pursue such things and more before suggesting how the strong A.I. should alter our collective worldview.
I can just see you saying “context, context, context!” or whatever the equivalent is in your jargon.
Nevertheless, even if superposition were ruled out as a factor - it would still leave non-locality and dimensionality/relativity squarely on the table. To my knowledge, these have not been addressed at all in this context. After all, there is not a wall around the physical brain that causes physics to function differently within the boundary...
I was pleased to see that it came out of UofI, but I'll need to spend more time with it, though, to work through all the shorthand.
Please allow me to return the favor by offering this fascinating article on Decoherence, Quantum Zeno Effect and the Efficacy of Mental Effort. I'm pinging tortoise as well, because he might find this interesting wrt information theory.
These are all relevant to seeing the big picture (outside the coke can).
No, just that they were definately NOT active pariticipants in our great democratic/republican experiment we call the USA. More like vicitims...(though not all tribes were such...)
You have strange views on being 'enlightened', Ronzo.
Not when compared to those views of Pinker...though I do agree with some of his stuff, just not the political ramifications of his "discoveries."
Are you claiming that non-christan native americans are incapable of honoring our constitutional principles?
No, just that they were definately NOT active pariticipants in our great democratic/republican experiment we call the USA. More like vicitims...(though not all tribes were such..
Wrong again. Many native americans abandoned tribal life and 'participated'. Many still do. They simply leave the reservations and join our general population.
Citizens of the USA do NOT have to have "the same basic ideas about sin, morality, family, government, etc", for the system to 'work'.
We just have to honor & obey the same rule of constitutional law.
This is not to say that environment does not play a significant role in how we develop our respective innate personalities. But it is only that--a factor which determines what we do with who or what we are. It does not determine the individual's personality or his aptitudes.
To return specifically to the Nazis. They used "race," not as any serious physical anthropologist used it. They used it with the same fake relationship to a serious disciplined study of human biology, in the exact same way that the Communists used "economics" in relation to any serious disciplined study of economics. In short, each group of collectivist, totalitarian Socialists, politicalized and propagandized their subjects, and gave almost no credence whatsoever to serious scholarship, or any concern for actual truth. For more on this, see The Lies Of Socialism.
What is tragic about the way so many Conservatives today accept some of this propaganda, which has its roots in the various Socialist movements, is that it covers up what is the true Achilles Heel of the Left--the fact that all their notions are based upon what is demonstrably untrue. There is not the slightest evidence of their contentions. All they have ever been able to do in two centuries of postulating theories offered to support the absurd notion of human equality--and the idea that the successful need to exploit the failures (the nonsense of victimization)--has been to cast doubt on this or that piece of evidence of the importance of nature, and the profound differences between people. They have never--not in two centuries--produced any affirmative evidence. On the other hand, the underlying compulsion has led to some examples of real victimization--see Compulsion For Uniformity.
It is the classic example of the effect of the "Big Lie," and one of the saddest aspects is that the victims, usually tend to be the very people that the Academic sycophants, who go along with this nonsense, think they are benefitting. Why? Because programs premised on a lie are not ever going to help people who have real personalities that do not fit the lie.
William Flax
Motivation is certainly a factor in how anyone applies his nature. But motivation, itself, has several facets; some of which are clearly nature driven, as are some of the factors that will tend to externally motivate different individuals.
For example, you can expect a person with great physical skills to be more motivated--all else being equal--to develop those physical skills. You can expect a person with an analytic mind bent, to be more motivated towards intellecutal self-education, than one with other tendencies.
But there is also the factor of external motivation, and here the nature aspect takes on a somewhat different thrust. Certain peoples, for example, are much more internally motivated than others; but the value systems that may come to drive those internal motivations, may well be externally provided--as by parents, in early childhood. Other peoples are more externally motivated, and will respond far more readily to their social associates at any given time in their lives, than to a lifetime value system.
I am keeping this very general, but the points should be obvious. If someone wants to challenge this, however, I can give examples. This is far more than conjecture.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
If think motivation is picked up from one's family and peers. One may have abilities that allow an interest in certain areas.
But considering the importance of motivation to the development of one's potentials, if motivation is genetically determined, then the liberals are right, and where a person is is not his fault but formed beyond his choice and control.
I think you are confusing different personality traits with each other and with personal value systems. Yes we all know of people who successfully compensate for infirmities. Indeed, history is full of instances where a physical infirmity inspired a driven individual to great things. That is really off the subject that I was addressing.
Motivation and ambition are closely related in one sense, particularly with the self-driven individual, as opposed to the more social, group-driven individual. But there are many forms of motivation that are not ego driven, certainly not in the sense of reflecting personal ambition.
But you really misconstrue the "Liberal" position. The "liberal" position, in the sense of using the term to describe the Socialist position today, is not to accept that those who fail usually fail because of personal limitations. Rather it is to impute blame for failure on those who succeed, or on the system, or on the results of economic freedom, etc., and to seek to intervene in the working of the economy and society, to reverse the results that historically obtain. It is precisely because of the importance of nature, that no form of such "liberalism" is logically maintainable.
Of course, the converse is not true. One can oppose Governmental--Collectivist--intrusion into the lives of a people, and still believe that human traits are environmentally determined. That concept, alone, would not entitle the Government or the Collective (the group) to play God with the lives of individuals, or to take away the achievements of some to confer unearned achievements on others. But my point, again, is that understanding the enduring quality of human personality traits, the lack of plasticity, is to understand the Achilles' Heel of the Left. It is precisely because they are so vulnerable to such an understanding, that they scream like Banshees, whenever anyone challenges their environmental hypothesis.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
The issue, I think, to the libs is responsibility. If in any way the responsibility for his situation is lifted from an individual's shoulders then socialist programs have to exist to level the playing field.
To say that motivation (and by extension, ambition) is genetically determined, wouldn't that also release the individual from responsibility for his life, giving us maybe another flavor of socialism, but socialism nonetheless?
It seems to me that personal responsibility and socialism are mutual exclusive. Where there is not one, there is the other.
And, here, there is and always has been a societal component in the motivation factor. Every healthy society imposes negative motivational forces, to help people discipline themselves; provide incentives against criminal and other anti-social behavior. It is typical of the victimization culture of the Left, however, that they confuse the one area where social environment has always played a major role--that is in the criminalization and stigmatization of anti-social behavior--by providing excuses for misconduct, even as they blame other failures of the miscreants on third parties.
No whatever your innate characteristics, you are personally responsible for what you do with what you have. Any any dilution of that concept is counter-productive to the true interests both of the individual and his society. The strength of any society will be measured to a major degree, by the extent that it succeeds in instilling the concept of personal responsibility--and accountability--in its members.
The slide show that you provided at post 53 and your previous posts - along with the Tegmark study mentioned in the link I provided at post 65 - all point to an instance. IOW, the significance (or lack thereof) in a discrete quantum event in the physical brain.
The thrust of the Quantum Zeno link I provided is the propagation (mental effort - concentration - the mind) - which I shall refer to as a "ripple effect" (if we continue to discuss it) - to keep this in easier lingo rather than the von Neumann-Wigner theory.
A quantum ripple effect within the physical activity of the brain underscores the relevancy of time (intervals and therefore space, wave functions) independently of my previous mention of geometric physics.
Just more food for thought...
Any any dilution of that concept is counter-productive to the true interests both of the individual and his society.
Yes, and dilution of that concept can ether be by means of incorrect weighing of the environment or incorrect weighing of genetics.
The monsters are waiting to devour us if we overcompensate either way.
No, I'm claiming that there were NO native americans present during that great constutional convention we had in Philadelphia some 200+ years ago. As far as I'm aware, the entire convention was made up of white European theists and diests. I don't believe we asked any native tribes for their input into the make-up of our Constitution...
God is much more important to me than advancing human liberty or anything or anyone else, including myself.
Are you claiming that non-christan native americans are incapable of honoring our constitutional principles?
No, just that they were definately NOT active pariticipants in our great democratic/republican experiment we call the USA. More like vicitims...(though not all tribes were such..
Wrong again. Many native americans abandoned tribal life and 'participated'. Many still do. They simply leave the reservations and join our general population.
Citizens of the USA do NOT have to have "the same basic ideas about sin, morality, family, government, etc", for the system to 'work'.
We just have to honor & obey the same rule of constitutional law.
-- I'm claiming that there were NO native americans present during that great constutional convention we had in Philadelphia some 200+ years ago.
So what? Why do you think we would invite part of the enemies arrayed against us?
As far as I'm aware, the entire convention was made up of white European theists and diests. I don't believe we asked any native tribes for their input into the make-up of our Constitution...
We should have, as many tribes were not friends of the British either.. And some tribes also had rudimentary democratic forms:
"The The Iroquois League was a confederation of upper New York State Indian tribes formed between 1570 and 1600 who called themselves "the people of the long house." Initially it was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. After the Tuscarora joined in 1722, the league became known to the English as the Six Nations and was recognized as such in Albany, New York, in 1722.
They were better organized and more effective, especially in warfare, than other Indian confederacies in the region.
As the longevity of this union would suggest, these Indians were more advanced socially than is often thought. Benjamin Franklin even cited their success in his argument for the unification of the colonies. During the U.S. War of Independence a split developed in the Iroquois league, with the Oneida and Tuscarora favoring the American cause while the others fought for the British...
I'm very skeptical about this paper. His operator P is unphysical; instantaneous change is impossible in q.m., because of the uncertainty relationship between energy and time. He claims this is solved by non-locality, but I don't see how.
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