In Nature vs. Nurture, A Voice for Nature

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."

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...

Now that is a part of the constitutional process that is completely left out of ALL the histories I've ever read or encountered. Thanks so much for the link to the excellent article!

It seems as if the Indians' ideas about government were more pertinent than those of the Enlightenment philosophers! (Or the Greeks for that matter...) It's sad that these sort of things are not better known or written about.

But to get back on point, I think this article about the Indian tribes and their constitutional government show something very important: it seems to be excellent evidence in the demonstration that their is an innate desire in all men for 'peace and prosperity,' let alone 'liberty and justice.'

America is successsful in that it has done more than any other nation to recognize this, and to develop it (until lately anyhow). And Founding Fathers didn't even have the scientific insights of Pinker to help them!

However, history also provides tremendous evidence that these innate desires can be co-opted rather easily by evil men. Especially evil men armed with an evil religion, whether that religion be Marxism, Communism, Islam, or even Christianity and Buddhism when they are interpreted badly. The primary goal of both Buddhims and Christianity is greater freedom and liberty for an individual, not submission and control--in contrast, Islam litterally means "submission" and a Muslim is "one who submits."

So where does this 'evil' come from? It's also innate. The desire to control one's surroundings and to gain dominance is so blatantly obvious one hardly needs science to tell us it exists, or to even wonder if it's there. If one can find a way to manipulate and control others so that one can better have their own needs met, then so be it. Both science and religion have been used to this end.

Good religion, when it's working properly, helps one recognize both these innate tendencies in man: the desire for freedom from control and the desire to control; and it helps men to find a peaceful balance within. The only way this balance can be brought into being is by a proper and sober understanding of these innate forces that work within us.

But this process of understanding, then balancing of these innate forces is not easy nor simple. It takes years, if not decades of education and training to be able to get to that place of balance. Christianity has been wildly successful in this regard, because it possessed the 'tools' to bring about this balance in the shortest amount of time with the least effort. And the results, when Christianity was taught properly, were almost always assured.

The 'tools' of Christianity were the person of Jesus Christ and the the person of the Holy Spirit. In other words, the triune God. When all three persons of the Trinity are taught and understood properly, one can achieve tremendous virtue is almost no time at all, sometimes literally within minutes! That sounds incredible, but it was literally true for centuries.

But the trick is, understanding all THREE properly, especially the Holy Spirit--for He's the guy whom a Christian has direct contact with. This contact occurs in the mind, and because it occurs there, it is beyond the ability of natural science to detect. However, one can certainly detect the effects of the Holy Spirit, especially when a person is actively engaged with Him. And yes, one does get to choose whether or not they 'engage' with Him, it's not like being possessed!

So what are the 'effects' of the Holy Spirit on a Christian? An internal peace, joy, generosity and love that surpasses any rational understading. (There are many other characteristics as well, but these are some of the 'core' aspects.) These effects can be had regardless of gender, culture, economic status, education, age, politics, genetic make-up, or any of the other external or internal dividing lines one wishes to apply.

In summary, the Holy Spirit, rightly understood and experienced in a Christian's life, is a "secret weapon" that allows a person to transform in a rather speedy fashion. A person can get an internal balance that would take years, if not decades, through any other religious medium, let alone psychology.

So why has Christianity failed in this regard? Because most churches have abandoned the Holy Spirit. He's still there in the doctrine and dogma, but His ministry and His purpose have been largely forgotten. The emphasis is mostly on Jesus and the Bible, along with living an upright and righteous life that is absolutely impossible without the Holy Spirit's enabling. The Church has been very guilty of teaching the ends without the means.

Why has the Third Person of the Trinity been forgotten? Because he's not very "scientific." In other words, the Western Church has adopted science and education as it's primary means of salvation, and has almost totally abondened its own metaphysics. It may not seem like that to an outsider or atheist, but it is very obvious to one who's been inside the "system" and knows the history of the early church and its teachings.

Where Christianity is growing strongly in today's world is Africa, South America, China, India, SE Asia, and other places that have been resistent to Western ideas, or have not fully digested them. No, Christianity is not "Western." But it mixed with Western culture very easily in the first centuries of it's existance. There is still an Eastern church that's has the same core doctrines as the Western church, but did not swallow Western civilization. And the various Christian forms in the Third World are still very recognizable as Christian, in terms of the importance of the Bible, Jesus, the Trinity, etc. But they do not incorporate the Western philosophical and scientific tradition along with their faith.

This does not mean science and Christianity are incompatible, far from it! But what has happened in the West is that Christianity started moving way beyond it's "core compentencies" and was embarrassed many times over when it was demonstrated how irrational and contradictory many of the church's positions and politics were...and sadly, still are in many cases.

The Western church has been in decline for some time, but Christiainity is actually growing at a rapid rate in non-Western countries, espeically Africa and Asia! And it's transformational power is more evident now than it has been in centuries. The Christianity that is passing away in the West is that form of Christianity that has been teaching form without the substance. But there is a remnant of Christians in the West who have not been content to follow the church down the path of irrelevance and arrogance. They are working, quietly and without much fanfare, to hold on to the core teachings of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

There is not now, nor has there ever been any political system that can accomplish what Christianity can do when properly taught and understood. What men really need is transformation, not more education. If Pinker can give us the means of transformation like Christianity can, I'll be the first to sign-up for whatever ideas he has. But it seems to me he's just now figuring out what the better religions have known for centuries, and so I don't really find anything all that interesting or revolutionary about him or his ideas.

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.

While the idea in that article is conceptually interesting, I pretty much gave up on it somewhere around page 4. Some unwarranted and questionable leaps are made, and while I'm not going to spend the effort to prove it, the construction appears faulty. That may just be the fault of the author, but I wouldn't put too much weight on the concept at this point in time.

Nor may it be necessary, it has been a very good year for fundamental research and I may be able to invoke Occam's Razor on all this. At the very least, new developments reinforce a simpler less exotic model of such things. A lot of the exotic explanations are the scientific equivalent of invoking the supernatural because scientists haven't been able to unravel certain problems (yet) -- it often seems to be a reaction out of frustration with the problem. Relevant points of interest:

1.) We now have a useful predictive model of the brain as a computer, at the individual circuit level. No more blackbox, we can look at the wiring of neurons in the same way we would look at a normal electronic circuit. So far, everything the human mind/brain does can be explained in the context of that model. This was hypothesized from the theoretical mathematics surrounding the model, which I'm sure I've mentioned before, because the proscribed structure looked uncannily similar to biological neural networks (though not traditional artificial neural networks). The relation has now been verified in practice and is predictive in biology. Publication date not yet set.

2.) The strong new theoretical models of intelligence and general AI that were developed over the last few years from first principles that I've mentioned in the past as being a theoretical quantum leap above all previous models, have been experimentally verified to be generally implementable with all the capabilities and properties expected from theory. In other words, practice actually matches theory in all respects for a change, and a lot of insight has come out of this. Easily the most interesting thing to happen in computer science in ages. No publication planned, this will be introduced in the form of a Silicon Valley company.

And not really relevant at all but perhaps of interest to you:

3.) One of THE longstanding unsolved hard problems in biotech and bioengineering has been solved. Not just conceptually, they actually have a demonstrable fully generalized engineering framework as well. It represents a huge leap in human capability, in terms of medicine and biotech. I promised not to say much about it, mostly because it is already in the publishing pipeline and papers/articles will show up in the usual outlets for such news soon.

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