the blank slate

Steven Pinker, “the blank slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” Viking, 2002, 440 pps plus 20 pages of notes

Another book well worth reading. The author states that the goal of this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing—no one believes that—but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme (p ix).

The book establishes that, contrary to Christian belief, humans are not naturally good. They are born with innate abilities and personalities. Differences in intelligence, scientific genius, sexual orientation, and impulsive violence are not entirely learned (p. 44). Instead genes play a major role in who we are. Despite its popularity among intellectuals during much of the twentieth century, Pinker argues, the doctrine of the Blank Slate may have done more harm than good. It denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces rigorous analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of government, violence, parenting, and the arts. What is genetic is the fact that people live in groups, form societies, and build on the experiences of those societies.

My Notes:
Pg. viii: When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think

Pg. 1: For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from religion. The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by biology and psychology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals. Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by them. The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body dies. (According to recent polls, 76 percent of Americans believe in the biblical account of creation).

Pg. 10: The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine—or, as philosophers call them, empiricism, romanticism, and dualism—are logically independent, but in practice they are often found together.

Pg. 19: William James (1842-1910) had been inspired by Darwin’s argument that perception, cognition, and emotion, like physical organs, had evolved as biological adaptations. James invoked the notion of instinct to explain the preferences of humans, not just those of animals, and he posited numerous mechanisms in his theory of mental life, including short-term and long-term memory. But with the advent of behaviorism they all joined the index of forbidden concepts.

Pg. 50: Psychologists have discovered that our personalities differ in five major ways: we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected. All five of the major personality dimensions are heritable, with perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a typical population tied to differences in their genes.

Pg. 68: Eurasia runs in an east-west direction, whereas Africa and the Americas run north-south. In the east-west direction, crops and animals that are domesticated in one region can easily be spread to others along lines of latitude, which are also lines of similar climate. But they cannot be spread as easily along lines of longitude, where a few hundred miles can spell the difference between temperate and tropical climates. So Eurasia conquered the world not because Eurasians are smarter but because they could best take advantage of the principle that many heads are better than one. Britain is in fact a greatest-hits collection of inventions assembled across thousands of miles and years. The collection is made up of cereal crops and alphabetic writing from the Middle East, gunpowder and paper from china, domesticated horses from Ukraine, and many others. But the necessarily insular cultures of Australia, Africa, and the Americas had to make do with a few homegrown technologies, and as a result they were no match for their pluralistic conquerors.

Pg. 103: By the middle of the second half of the twentieth century, the ideals of the social scientists of the first half had enjoyed a well-deserved victory. Eugenics, Social Darwinism, colonial conquest, Dickensian policies toward children, overt expressions of racism and sexism among the educated, and official discrimination against women and minorities had been eradicated, or at least were rapidly fading, from mainstream Western life. As the new sciences of human nature began to flourish, it was becoming clear that thinking is a physical process, that people are not psychological clones, that the sexes differ and that the human brain was not exempt from the process of evolution. (Note: I believe this book makes quite a case in favor of eugenics, despite the author’s disclaimer.)

Pg. 157: Marxism and Nazism, allegedly opposite philosophies, came to similar conclusions. Marxism proposed that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. The ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It does not matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar outcomes of Marxism and Nazism.

Pg. 166: Acknowledging human nature is compatible with social and moral progress; it helps explain the obvious progress that has taken place over millennia. Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory—slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women—have vanished from large parts of the world.

Pg. 235: High school and college education should put a high priority on economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics. This will provide the young with the cognitive tools most unlike those they are born with but are very important in modern society. Unfortunately, most curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable because something else would have to be given up and this is too political. We are born with minds adapted to a world that no longer exists; minds prone to mis-understandings correctable only by arduous education.

Pg. 286: The Right-Left Axis aligns an astonishing collection of beliefs that at first glance seem to have nothing in common. If you learn that someone is in favor of a strong military, for example, it is a good bet that the person is also in favor of judicial restraint rather than judicial activism. If someone believes in the importance of religion, chances are she will be tough on crime and in favor of lower taxes. Proponents of a laissez-faire economic policy tend to value patriotism and the family, and they are more likely to be old than young, pragmatic than idealistic, censorious than permissive, meritocratic than egalitarian, gradualist than revolutionary, and in a business rather than a university or government agency. The opposing positions cluster just as reliably: if someone is sympathetic to rehabilitation offenders, or to affirmative action, or to generous welfare programs, or to a tolerance of homosexuality, chances are good that he will also be a pacifist, an environmentalist, an activist, an egalitarian, a secularist, and a professor or student.

The point is that traditional political alignments ought to change as we learn more about human beings. The ideologies of the left and the right took shape before Darwin, before Mendel, before anyone knew what a gene or a neuron or a hormone was. Every student of political science is taught that political ideologies are based on theories of human nature. Why must they be based on theories that are three hundred years out of date?

Pg. 356: The sexes have identifiable differences in preferences even when ability is the same. Women are generally more interested in people, social values, and humanitarian and altruistic goals, whereas boys are more interested in things, theoretical values, and abstract intellectual inquiry. This may very well be the explanation of why women are “underrepresented” in math, etc. It is not ability but preference that yields many of the observed disparities.

Pg. 362: The author believes that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Pg. 372: The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to grips with them, and most intellectuals do not understand them. This failure is because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate is so entrenched that many intellectuals cannot comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or wrong. Here are the three laws:
• All human behavioral traits are heritable. *
• The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
• A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families. (Peers have an extremely large impact).

*The author feels this “all human behavioral traits are heritable” may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Concrete behavioral traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture are, of course, not heritable at all: which language you speak, which religion you worship in, which political party you belong to. But behavioral traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments are heritable: how proficient with language you are, how religious, how liberal or conservative. General intelligence is heritable, and so are the five major ways in which personality can vary (summarized by the acronym OCEAN): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism.

A conventional summary is that about half of the variation in intelligence, personality, and life outcomes is heritable—a correlate or an indirect product of the genes. The heritability of intelligence increases over the lifespan, and can be as high as .8 late in life. Forget “As the twig is bent”; think “Omigod, I’m turning into my parents!”