| September
17, 2002, Tuesday
SCIENCE DESK 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.'' There is evidence that some universal human social behaviors and
faculties are innate, and presumably shaped in part by the genes. In ''The
Blank Slate,'' Dr. Steven Pinker lists some behaviors of political
consequence which he considers may fall in this category. *Primacy of family ties, making nepotism and inheritance appealing.
*A propensity to share based on reciprocity where nonrelatives are
concerned (within the family, it is free).
*A drive for dominance and a willingness to use violence to attain
goals.
*Ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility.
*Variation in intelligence (leading to inequalities) and in
conscientiousness and antisocial behavior (leading to punitive
constraints).
*Self-serving biases that deceive people into thinking they are freer,
wiser and more honest than they are.
*A moral sense, biased toward kin and friends, and linked to ideas of
purity, beauty and rank. *An intuitive physics, used to keep track of the ''oomph'' of objects
as they fall, bounce or bend.
*An intuitive biology, used to understand the living world by imputing
an essence to living things.
*An intuitive engineering, used to make and understand tools.
*An intuitive psychology, used to understand others by imputing to them
a mind with beliefs and desires.
*A spatial sense and a dead reckoner tracking the body's motions.
*A number sense, based on ability to register small numbers of things
(1, 2 and 3) exactly and to estimate larger ones.
*A sense of probability, used to estimate uncertain outcomes by
tracking how common one event is in relation to another.
*An intuitive economics, used to exchange goods and calculate favors.
*A mental database and logic, used to represent ideas, associate one
thing with another and devise causal explanations.
*Language, the gift of sharing ideas from the mental database with
others.
CAPTIONS: Photo: In his new book, Dr. Steven Pinker is
trying to create more political elbow room for those studying the way that
genes shape human behavior. (Rick Friedman for The New York Times)
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