From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jan 21 2003 - 18:41:44 MST
Following my recent review of Pinker's book in The Weekend Australian
(posted here a couple of days ago), an Aussie commentator fwd'd to the
editor the following article from the New Yorker in rebuttal. I find some of
it congenial and persuasive, and much of it tendentious if not absurd. I do
think it's worth reading closely. It's freely available at
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?021125crbo_books
============================
WHAT COMES NATURALLY
by LOUIS MENAND
Does evolution explain who we are?
"The new sciences of human nature." Well, why not? The old sciences of human
nature didn't have such a fabulous track record. They gave us segregated
drinking fountains, "invented spelling," and the glass ceiling?all
consequences of scientific theories about the way human beings really are.
Possibly, there is a lesson there, which is that the sciences of human
nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime
happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is
treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is
treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as
hardwired. Maybe this is unfair to the new sciences of human nature, though.
It could be that the problem with the old sciences was simply that they
weren't scientific enough?that they were mostly wishful thinking projected
onto dubious data about skull size and the effects of estrogen on the
ability to balance a checkbook. Today's scientists might have the capacity
to get right down there among the chromosomes and the neurotransmitters, and
to send back reports, undistorted by fear, favor, or the prospect of
funding, about what's going on. Maybe the new sciences of human nature are
really scientific. It's worth a look.
Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at M.I.T. and the author of an
entertaining and popular book on language (his specialty), called "The
Language Instinct," and a more wide-ranging volume, also popular, called
"How the Mind Works." His new book, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of
Human Nature" (Viking; $27.95), recycles some of the material published in
"How the Mind Works" but puts it to a more prescriptive use. Pinker has a
robust faith in "the new sciences of human nature" (his phrase)?he was
formerly the director of M.I.T.'s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience?but his
views in "The Blank Slate" are based almost entirely on two branches of the
new sciences: evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics.
These are both efforts to explain mind and behavior biologically, as
products of natural selection and genetic endowment. Unless you are a
creationist, there is nothing exceptionable about the approach. If opposable
thumbs are the result of natural selection, there is no reason not to assume
that the design of the brain is as well. And if we inherit our eye color and
degree of hairiness from our ancestors we probably inherit our talents and
temperaments from them, too. The question isn't whether there is a
biological basis for human nature. We're organisms through and through;
biology goes, as they say, all the way down. The question is how much
biology explains about life out here on the twenty-first-century street.
[etc etc]
===========
I commented in response:
I agree, of course, with much of Menand's commentary; Pinker is a
philistine, for example. But many of Menard's shots are as cheap as they
come. `Either human beings spent ten thousand years denying their own nature
by slavishly obeying the whims of the rich and powerful, cheerfully burning
heretics at the stake, and arranging their daughters' marriages (which would
imply a pretty effective system of socialization), or modern liberal society
is largely a social construction.' Both are likely to be the case; the
phylogenetic history of humans is rather longer than 10,000 years, more than
100 times longer, and it is that dominant environment of evolutionary
adaptation that Pinker and his ev psych associates speak of, as both you and
Menard must be aware. One might argue that we know nothing directly of it,
or that its invocation is an opportunity for Just So stories, etc--but the
scale of the thing *has* to be reckoned with, not dismissed with a (rather
ponderous) quip.
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