In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature
September 17, 2002
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
Yanomamˆ 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."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/17/science/social/17PINK.html?ex=1033242664&ei=1&en=cf942790d87da0c7

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