Krishna
He wades into nature or nurture debate in this book, recognizing that any nature argument would delight the legions of people who believe that some folks are inherently inferior to others.
Steven Pinker tackles the nurture vs nature question with his usual methodical way. We have reviewed some books of his earlier. Please see The Better Angels of Our Nature and How the Mind Works for two examples.
He starts with two opposing philosophies of the past. The first one, gentle savage argues that primitive people are guileless and has inspired the practice of encouragement and support to develop – for example – children. The other is that man is inherently bad without control and should be guided, which gives rise to correctional facilities and corporeal punishment for kids.
There is also the ‘ghost in the machine’ theory where many people believe that the ‘mind’ is separate from the body and is not formed just by brain cells. This gets very close to the ‘soul’ argument as they mainly believe that the mind lives on after death in some form or another.
He then explains how the ‘blank slate’ theory – that everything you are is a product of your experiences (nurture) and not anything inbuilt (nature) – has gained ground to the point that even discussing the other view is considered inappropriate.
He talks about some factors undeniably being genetic – this is not about superiority or inferiority of race, he clarifies. For instance, identical brothers, even if brought apart, share many characteristics including some illnesses (physical and mental) and tastes. Two children, one adopted and one natural – the same age – brought up in the same house show no such correlation. Even more strikingly, different types of corn grown on the same field and irrigated the same way grow to different heights. Some environmental factors matter, of course – the same corn grown in different fields (different conditions – wet vs arid for example) grow differently as well.
He then talks about the influence of culture – most of it invented and agreed to by convention by all, and therefore has a value – currency, presidency, national flag and law are all examples.
Like I observed that the books of Richard Dawkins (see the earlier review of The Blind Watchmaker) gives you a lot of interesting facts about the natural world (living creatures), Steven Pinker also provides gems in addition to the central theme of the book. In this book for example, he talks about the evolution of the English language. For instance, children could not remember the odd past tense of some words – like writhe-wrothe or crow/crew and converted them to regular verb method (writhed, crowed) which became the norm in English. Instead of saying ‘I had the house built’ some said ‘I had built the house’, giving English its past perfect tense. Also, mumblers helped convert the old ‘maked and haved’ to ‘made and had’ that is in use today!
He talks about the ‘limited’ plasticity of the brain. The point he makes is interesting. The brain comes equipped with complex form so all that makes you is not fully environmental. There is an undeniable genetic component. But environment plays a part too : for instance, an Asian child brought up in China may speak Mandarin but the same child brought up in England speaks English.
He then describes the vicious attacks and raging insults on anyone who even dared suggest that the mind has no inherent characteristics and everything a mind has is due to environmental factors. (God forbid that inherent characteristics of brain lead to new world of ubermench).
In the seventies, it was fashion among leftist intellectuals that liberalism is for wimps, Marxism was the only truth. When Richard Herrnstein published a paper that pointed out facts which should have been banal, like ‘talent and intelligence tend to be segregated as intelligent people marry intelligent people’ it was interpreted as ‘intelligence is a genetic tendency’ and Hernstein was labeled by Alvin Poussaint as ‘the enemy of black people’ (who are at the poorest end of society on average). Enraged college professors distributed leaflets urging students to ‘Fight Harvard Prof’s Fascist Lies’. Harnstein received death threats and was barred from speaking by chanting and disruptive mobs wherever he went.
Paul Ekman, who found in 1960s that smiles, grimaces, frowns etc were displayed and understood similarly worldwide postulated that humans were endowed with emotional expressions by evolution. (Darwin had said the same thing earlier). And he further postulated that all races had diverged relatively recently from each other. Margaret Mead called Ekman’s work ‘outrageous, appalling and a disgrace’. Stephen Pinker wryly observes that these were ‘some of the milder responses’!
For his pains, Alan Lomax Jr rose from the audience at American Anthropological Association, shouting that Ekman should not be allowed to speak because his ideas were fascist. When neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel published his historic work with David Hubel showing that the visual system of cats is largely complete at birth (so genes had something to do with it) another neuroscientist angrily called him a fascist and vowed to prove him wrong!
When E. O Wilson’s Sociobiology claimed that humans were branches of animals evolved from others and had some innate universals. Anthropologist Marshall Sahins ‘vulgar sociobiology’ negates the theory of superorganism. They seem to be upset that man’s character was derived by needs as opposed to a ‘free floating’ culture that is apart from innate abilities.
A group, including Stephen Jay Gould lumped Wilson with proponents of Eugenics and worse. Some in that group also accused Wilson of ‘debating the salutary advantages of genocide’ and making ‘institutions such as slavery normal in humans because of its universal existence’ when Wilson said no such thing. He was even accused of saying the exact opposite of what he said in the book, namely ‘people were locked into castes determined by their race, class, sex and genome’.
A protestor with a bullhorn called for Wilson’s dismissal and his classrooms were invaded by slogan shouting students. When he spoke at other universities he was disrupted by people who called him ‘Right Wing Prophet of Patriarchy’. (He was a lifelong Democrat!)
In 1978 when he was to speak on American Association of Advancement of Science, a group of people carrying a Swastika and other posters rushed onto the stage shouting ‘Racist Wilson, you can’t hide’. One snatched the microphone to harangue the audience while another threw a pitcher of water on Wilson.
Hamilton and Trivers were also attacked in later years for supporting Sociobiology. Gould and Lewontin carried on fighting against Sociobiology and later evolutionary psychology. Their ire was also directed at Richard Dawkins. They blatantly misrepresented what both Wilson and Dawkins said to promote their case, according to Pinker. They even misquoted Dawkins to buttress their attack. When Dawkins said ‘genes created us, body and mind’ they twisted it to ‘genes control us, body and mind’.
James Neel, a geneticist and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon came under virulent attack for suggesting that primitive societies (they studied Yanomamo tribe of Amazon forest) can be inherently violent. This upset the applecart of ‘Noble Savage’ that they all believed with a rigor bordering on religious fanaticism, it appears to me.
Terrence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, as recently as 2000, spewed a vituperative attack on Neel and Chagnon. They accused Neel of fabricating the evidence and also deliberately infecting the tribe with measles to study the impact. (The measles were, according to Neal, given to the tribes earlier, probably by proselytizing priests who had arrive earlier, and most of the attackers were either religious folks or churchgoers.)
Turner and Sponsel were brazen enough to admit that their charge ‘remains only an inference and there is no smoking gun of evidence’. When these charges were demolished, within a few years, point by point by many scholars who had direct knowledge of the events, Tierney lamely explained ‘Experts I spoke to then had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing in public now”.
He argues brilliantly that both the left and right are allergic to the scientific fact that genes inherently determine some intellectual abilities with the mistaken belief that it will lead to Social Darwinism or assumptions of differing abilities of sex and races. He convincingly demolishes such (angry, raging) denial of such scientific assumptions and why that particular argument that there are no differences at all among people (‘the blank slate’) is the one that will lead to dangerous conclusions and tolerance of inhuman treatment of the disadvantaged. (‘Everyone has equal ability; so the poorest must be lazy or indolent because there suffer from no disadvantage at all’ is the extreme argument if you really believed in the Blank Slate theory).
He talks of the implications of both blank slate and the gene theory of behaviour on the justice system and the arguments in court.
He talks about the fear of both the left and the right to accept that some of the genetic functionality could determine some fundamental characteristics, for opposite reasons. The extreme version of gene determinism theory is the Nazi version of supermen and extermination of ‘lower people’. The extreme version of the blank slate theory is communism where anyone can be molded into the utopian socialistic society.
Then he goes into an amazing discussion of the concept of soul. The genius of Pinker is to argue a point without taking sides (left or right) and explain the issues. The discussion of a soul is so great. The Christian opposition to abortion rests on the fact that a soul is formed in an unborn instant and therefore any abortion is murder. Fair enough. Pinker shows that science seems to differ or at least pose problems : for instance, several membranes could penetrate the outer membrane of the egg; it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes. (What and where is the soul in this interval?); Even when a single sperm enters the egg, its chromosomes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more. (Does the soul form a day to two days after conception?) Many of those conceptus never become a baby; between two thirds and three quarters do not stick to the uterus and are spontaneously aborted (What happens to those souls?)
It gets more complex, identical twins and triplets are formed from the same conceptus when it divides. Do they then share portions of the soul? If not, where do the additional souls come from? Any of the cells in an embryo is potentially able to form a full human being if they separate. So does a fetus have numerous souls within it? When the fetus no longer can so divide, where do those extra cells go?
Fascinating. Rarely a person has two different genomes in a body. A person – rarely – has different genomes (usually two) in different part of the body. This happens when what is supposed to be a fraternal twin merges into the body of the other child. So dos she have two souls?
He also shows that the belief on the other side that cloning duplicates the body and the mind (‘or the soul’) is also wrong. Hitler’s clone will not necessarily become a dictator or even know the ‘original’s’ thought process. Einstein’s cline will not necessarily continue his work or even understand the Theory of Relativity.
He takes to task the blind terror of the unknown – including the genetically modified food, the fear of flying, many others – that are caused by not understanding the risks or probabilities of things going wrong.
As awe inspiring the argument is, it is enhanced by the cultural references (to pop singers, movies, cartoons) that he sprinkles throughout the book and also his anecdotes. He talks about how, when Norman Mailer came across a convicted killer (who had committed other crimes) he was so taken in by his intellect that he got his diary entries (including a piece where he describes the sublime experience of stabbing someone to death) published; got him out on parole and had the literary world swoon in adulation. Abbot was compared to Solzhenitsyn among others and interviewed by People magazine and Good Morning America.
For two weeks this went on until Abbot got into an argument with a waiter and stabbed him to death.
He talks of human nature that does not want to even consider anything less than total cleanup/ improvement in some sacred subjects (oil spills, chemical pollution cleanups) that distort public policies and ultimately provide more harm than a more balanced policy that used the money for ‘enough’ cleanup and the rest for equally urgent measures elsewhere.
When he talks about gender, he talks about rational feminism which he labels equity feminism – where people argue for absence of discrimination by gender – and the radical feminists whom he calls gender feminists. The latter are so defensive that they even refuse to either accept that there could be genetically induced differences between male and female capabilities (and definitely not to imply that one is superior) and / or even there may be some career interests that may be different. Their theories have been proved time and wrong again as Steven Pinker shows at length but they are blind to counterarguments and even call those who call for a discussion as either anti feminists or misogynists.
He then discusses the role of children and whose influence shapes their behaviour (ie, after accounting for the genetic inheritance).
He talks about the arts and how the modern and postmodernism went overboard by creating a shared value that is totally imaginary and how it lost its way and unsurprisingly, declined.
He ends brilliantly with a plea to not deny fundamental scientific truths in a misguided attempt to promote equality and oppose bias but to work with scientific truths to achieve the same effect. He recalls both Mark Twain’s and George Orwell’s satire about the extreme forms such ‘simple minded attempts to do good’ can take, defeating the very happy world that these theories are attempting to create.
Another thought provoking book that is fascinating to read and also provides a very unique and different view of looking at things.
8/10
== Krishna