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."
This discussion is at the outer edges of my understanding, but I'm trying to keep up, so work with me here.
We posit God to be the author of space-time, but outside of it. Still, his existence or presence manifests itself in certain ways. The universe seems to be made up of certain recurring patterns or principles that turn up in the physical realm, in biology, even in language. These patterns are not God, and as others have noted the patterns don't necessarily give you much information about the source of the pattern, but they are a clue.
If I stick my hand into a lake, ripples are set up. These ripples are not me, and they don't tell you much about me, you couldn't tell what color shirt I am wearing by the ripples, but they are evidence of my action.
The apparent universality of the patterns and principles that we observe point to an underlying logic which is imperfectly but progressively knowable, meaning we know a little today and a little more tomorrow.
We usually think of the Logos as being a reference to the Holy Spirit, but I wonder if it is a reference to this underlying logic or principle, perhaps the Grand Unifying Principle, by which the universe is ordered. Learning to comprehend such a Grand Principle wouldn't tell you everything there is to know about God, it by itself might not tell you much about him (although I think it does; a poem isn't the poet, but the poet is revealed in his poem), but it would help you to navigate and comprehend creation. And of course that is where we are heading as we keep tugging at the threads and unraveling the big secret.
That He would be (among many other things) the underlying principle would fit theologically because the Word (Jesus) is the first of all creation and by Him all things that were made, were made:
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. - John 1:14
I like that much better than all those shepherd/sheep metaphors.
Thank you so much for the clarification, beckett. Obviously, I didn't catch your reference re: Jaynes, with whose work I am unfamiliar. I'm grateful for the explanation.
It seems that the story Jaynes is telling here is just another "just-so story." His hypothesis about the social transformation of the tribal chief into omnipotent god at the breakdown of the bicameral mind is, as you say, unproven and utterly unprovable. But it has the virtue (for Jaynes) of making God doubly false, which I gather is what he's going for. First God is identified as a figment of mass hallucination, and then as a divinized man.
All kinds of "just-so stories" work perfectly well -- as long as all questions that can possibly challenge them can be forbidden. Marx insisted that he not be questioned regarding his dialectical materialism. If you're going to be a "true believer," you accept the whole thing exactly as Marx gives it to you, and you challenge nothing. People of the Left -- "progressive thinkers" -- to this day seem to be fastidious about accepting Marx's "advice."
While the Marxist sneers at the "blind faith" of, say, a Christian believer, yet his own "blind faith" in a materialist, determinist universe utterly drained of the sacred is equally unquestioned and sacrosanct.
Many of these same people take great pride in their skepticism about things pertaining to spirit or transcendent reality. I think a skeptical habit of mind is a healthy thing. Yet it's so ironic that such people have a "double-standard" when it comes to skepticism: They can turn it out toward every theory they dislike, but never train it on their own pet theories. Because such theories are never exposed to any kind of serious critical analysis or evaluation, they must remain what they essentially are: opinions (doxa).
But even as opinions it seems to me they are worthless. For we are all entitled to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts. Selecting facts that support our "pre-analytical notions," and suppressing those that tend to contradict them, is not the way an honest thinker works. And a theory produced in that manner simply can't "hold water."
I'm reminded of the Greek word, aletheia, which has the double meaning of "reality" and "truth." The kinds of second realities that "progressive" thinkers (like Jaynes, Pinker, Dawkins, Lewontin, Singer, et al.) are so fond of producing are strictly speaking "unreal," because "untrue."
Talk about "mass hallucination!"
Thanks so much for writing, beckett.
Atheists cannot explain why anything should go right, even observation and deduction, why good logic should not be as misleading as bad logic, if they are both chance movements in the brain of a bewildered ape. Atheists exalt reason, but they cannot account for reason. Neither can materialism account for consciousness, free will, value judgments, and the existence of a unitary self. In a material world such things cannot exist. Matter cannot be free or have a self.
-beckett-
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If you're going to be a "true believer," you accept the whole thing exactly as Marx gives it to you, and you challenge nothing. People of the Left -- "progressive thinkers" -- to this day seem to be fastidious about accepting Marx's "advice.
-BB-
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I find it quite amusing to find true believers using the agit-prop techniques of labeling -all- those who disagee as athiests, marxists, etc..
It particularly irritates me when it happens in a court of law - when the judge or the law itself keeps vital information from the fact finders, the jury.
The same thing happens in the media, politics, education and science. It's as if fraud has invaded our modern culture.
tpaine, you can call it "labeling" if you wish. I think that what beckett and I were really doing, however, is describing actual observations about how some thinkers think. If that's "agitprop," then discourse, becomes impossible.
Intelligent discourse only takes place in the light, where everything is exposed. The Son Light is much better, because every material thing is transparent. Conversely, there is no communication in darkness or where the "light" is a fabrication. ("Hello darkness, my old friend...")
Wonderfully put, marron. St. John's Gospel opens with these verses,
1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
1:2 The same was in the beginning with God.
1:3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
1:4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
1:5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
The Greek logos means "word" with the connotation of truthful word. In the context of John, the Word refers both to the creative Word spoken by God that "begot" and "began" the universe (which I tend to associate with the Big Bang), and to the Son of God, the Logos, Jesus Christ, Who was with the Father in the beginning. The Logos of God is divine as the Father is divine. So in a certain sense we can say that God is "in" the world, for His Word -- in the first sense of the laws of the universe -- is in the world.
Your analogy of the poet/poem is most apt, IMO. The poet is not "in" his poem in any kind of literal sense. But the poem can tell us something about the poet. Similarly, we can know something about God who spoke the Word, even though God the Father is not in the world, nor in any way subject to the constraints of its laws: God is not contingent being, as all creatures manifestly are.
The mystery for me is the Holy Spirit -- who is "in" the world, yet somehow not of the world. This is the Third Person of the Holy Trinity -- that is, God.
I continue to meditate on that issue. Ronzo has had some wonderful things to say regarding the Holy Spirit recently. Maybe he can shed further light -- and also you, marron, and Alamo-Girl.
IMHO, the best Scriptures to understand the Holy Spirit are the entire Gospel of John, Romans 8 and I Corinthians 2.
Then in John 15, Jesus describes the indwelling further explaining that He (Jesus) is the vine and we are the branches, that we can do nothing apart from Him. We must dwell in Him and He in us. At the end of that chapter and in the next, He explains that when He leaves to go to the Father, He will send the Comforter (Holy Spirit):
Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. – John 16:7
But of everything the Gospel of John has to say of the Holy Spirit and the mystery of the Trinity, the most overwhelming to me is in John 17 where Christ prays for us and explains the significance:
In Paul’s testimony we can see the ministry of the indwelling Spirit:
For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. – I Corinthians 2:9-16
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. – Romans 8:1-5
But darkness is not, and never will be, my friend. I choose to abide always in the Light.
Exactly, Alamo-Girl. There can be no light shed where there is intellectual cheating of the kind I outlined in an earlier post. We live in an age where the Sophists seem to be ascendent. Outright public lying no longer shocks or disturbs us; the miscreants always seem to get a "pass," whether they're politicians, publishers, journalists, priests and churchmen, corporate board members and senior executives, et al. They might have to sacrifice, say, a Martha Stewart every now and then; but for the most part, these meretricious falsifiers of reality feel quite safe in each others' company, for there's "safety in numbers."
And so the inmates are running the asylum.
In John's Gospel, we are told that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. We might say this means that the darkness does not understand what light is. On the other hand, we might say that "to comprehend" also carries the sense of surrounding or enveloping something, of restraining its further development. But I happen to think that darkness has no power over light. But darkness can help us to understand what Light is.
It may be premature to talk about this because I haven't got it sorted out yet, but it seems the world of our knowing really does have a kind of "dialectical" quality to it. If the dialectical model is Plato's mextaxy, that would be one thing. If it is Hegel's mutilation of the mextaxy, that would be quite another.
Today, Hegel is celebrated and aped: His epigones are legion. Plato is reviled as a communist. What a topsy-turvey world we live in!
Alamo-Girl, it seems there are a number of very great mysteries in the world. To me, the greatest is that God loves us so. Only slightly less baffling is that He desires communication with us.
I got to thinking about this in reading your post of the other day, about engaging in meditation, and asking a question, and getting an answer: Paul Simon's "The Sound of Silence." And then, in transcribing the lyrics, to see that you received exactly what you needed.
I have had similar experiences. At such moments, I have an uncanny feeling of having been helped from a source that is not me. (So to speak.)
There are people out there with a vested stake in saying that persons who experience such things are hallucinating and should probably be locked up.
But then as I said, the inmates are running the asylum these days....
- But darkness is not, and never will be, my friend. I choose to abide always in the Light.
533 Alamo-Girl
Fine sentiment, but I see spam in the darkness of atheist/marxist namecalling.
Betty answers:
Conversely, there is no communication in darkness or where the "light" is a fabrication. ("Hello darkness, my old friend...")
Exactly, Alamo-Girl. There can be no light shed where there is intellectual cheating of the kind I outlined in an earlier post.
Betty, are you referring ~again~ to your completely unfounded charge that Pinker lies about his politics? - Can you post ANY proofs?
We live in an age where the Sophists seem to be ascendent. Outright public lying no longer shocks or disturbs us; the miscreants always seem to get a "pass," whether they're politicians, publishers, journalists, priests and churchmen, corporate board members and senior executives, et al.
You just can't stop with the generalized spam, can you? Have you lost any sense of fairness in discourse? Do you really think this type of tactic is the way to win debate? -- I reiterate. This is poor form, imho.
They might have to sacrifice, say, a Martha Stewart every now and then; but for the most part, these meretricious falsifiers of reality feel quite safe in each others' company, for there's "safety in numbers." And so the inmates are running the asylum.
In John's Gospel, we are told that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. We might say this means that the darkness does not understand what light is. On the other hand, we might say that "to comprehend" also carries the sense of surrounding or enveloping something, of restraining its further development. But I happen to think that darkness has no power over light. But darkness can help us to understand what Light is. It may be premature to talk about this because I haven't got it sorted out yet, but it seems the world of our knowing really does have a kind of "dialectical" quality to it. If the dialectical model is Plato's mextaxy, that would be one thing. If it is Hegel's mutilation of the mextaxy, that would be quite another. Today, Hegel is celebrated and aped: His epigones are legion. Plato is reviled as a communist. What a topsy-turvey world we live in! Alamo-Girl, it seems there are a number of very great mysteries in the world. To me, the greatest is that God loves us so. Only slightly less baffling is that He desires communication with us. I got to thinking about this in reading your post of the other day, about engaging in meditation, and asking a question, and getting an answer: Paul Simon's "The Sound of Silence." And then, in transcribing the lyrics, to see that you received exactly what you needed. I have had similar experiences. At such moments, I have an uncanny feeling of having been helped from a source that is not me. (So to speak.)
There are people out there with a vested stake in saying that persons who experience such things are hallucinating and should probably be locked up. But then as I said, the inmates are running the asylum these days....
Betty, perhaps you should take a break. -- NO ONE is -- "out there with a vested stake in saying that persons who experience such things are hallucinating and should probably be locked up."
But having seen the darkness, we know what it is and we move into the Light.
No doubt, many will think we are merely hallucinating. But for those of us who live in the Light, we must listen and obey.
There can be no light shed where there is intellectual cheating of the kind I outlined in an earlier post. We live in an age where the Sophists seem to be ascendent. Outright public lying no longer shocks or disturbs us; the miscreants always seem to get a "pass," whether they're politicians, publishers, journalists, priests and churchmen, corporate board members and senior executives, et al. They might have to sacrifice, say, a Martha Stewart every now and then; but for the most part, these meretricious falsifiers of reality feel quite safe in each others' company, for there's "safety in numbers."And so the inmates are running the asylum.
I really try hard to insulate myself from that sort of nonsense, for the sake of my own sanity. But every once in a while you run into a group of these yahoo's, and there's no escape. Such was my unfortunate circumstance this evening....
I will not go into details about the event, but I'll just say that I was amongst a group of people where the leaders were working in complete, open collusion to get those around them to believe the lies they have been telling themselves. I watched helplessly as these master manipulators attempted to indoctrinate the benighted morons gathered 'round. Some of the benighted morons would not play the game, and tried to resist, but never very successfully. It was one of the saddest things I've ever witnessed.
What was so amazing to me was that the agenda being pushed so very flawed, so filled with holes and absurdity, that I wondered how the leaders could possibly believe it themselves, let alone push it on someone else! It was an excercise in control, manipulation, and indoctrination in raw form. Anyone who did not agree with the leader's agenda to the letter, was belittled and made to feel ashamed, like the benighted morons they were.
If you can imagine a violent rape of the mind, that's probably the best way I can describe it. And those doing the raping were only too happy when one of the benighted morons jumped in to help belittle someone else. As a matter of fact, it was openly encouraged.
Anything anyone said smacking of real reality was belittled. No real solutions were allowed either, only those that fit the agenda of false reality.
It's one thing to know the darkness out there, it's another to watch it being poured into the souls of hapless men.
I'm sooooo thankful I have that little light of Jesus within. The darkness cannot overtake it. Now, I just need to find a way to increase it's intensity, so that I can be used to pull some out of the darkness, and into the wonderful light of God.
Forgive my senseless ramblings, I wish I could go into more details...but right now I'm so upset I need to go pray this through...
Well, they're not saying they should be locked up, their just locking them up....
Goes back to a theory I've had for a long time about extremists of both political stripes.
For the extreme Right, it is some iconic 1950's world where everyone was clean-cut, dressed at all times in their Sunday best, and everybody prayed all the time.
For the Leftists, it is some world in which it is the responsibility of all successful people to support those who are not, out of the goodness of their hearts if possible, but force if necessary.
The short-circuiters and the extremists are either too lazy to do the work required, or their message is rejected by too many, and so, in their respective ways, they decry the process, along with inconvenient Rights that get in the way.
What it DOES need is to be protected from its enemies, like those we face now, who would take all that we are and have and trample it into the Earth.
Longcut
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I find it quite amusing to find libertarians using the agit-prop techniques of labeling -all- those who disagee as extremists, extreme Right, Leftists, enemies, etc..
tpaine, your friend's proclivities to make generalized comments about those you oppose on these threads is bad form, at best.
Intelligent discourse only takes place in the light, where everything is exposed, when exactly who you are labeling as extremists, extreme Right, Leftists, etc., is made clear.
Or perhaps this only applies to "true believes," and not libertarians... ________________________________
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
- Thomas Paine
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