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Home , Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

The Nature Review ISSN 1476-1084 URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/pinker.html

Human Nature Review 2 (2002) 444-448

Essay Review

Turning the Tables on the

By David P. Barash

A review of : The Modern Denial of Human Nature by 509 pp, Viking, 2002.

First, a confession of sorts: For some time now, cism toward a presumed sociobiologic arriviste, I’ve been suspicious of anyone who comes to I’ve become an enthusiastic student of a newly- some time after their primary train- revealed Master. Pinker’s thinking and writing ing. After all, to paraphrase Winston Chur- are first-rate … maybe even better than that. chill’s observation about the British people and The Blank Slate is much-needed, long overdue the RAF, never have so many said so much and - if you are interested in what might be about something they understand so little! All called the “human nature ” - somewhere too often, born-again evolutionists tend to con- between that old stand-by, “required reading,” form to a bimodal distribution, either disparag- and downright indispensable. It is unlikely to ing evolutionary insights – often without under- change the minds of those who are rigidly standing them, or even trying to do so - or committed to the blank slate perspective, but starry-eyed true believers, whose enthusiasm for anyone whose “nature” includes even a exceeds their common sense. And so, I was modicum of open-mindedness, it should prove initially leery of Steven Pinker, trained as he a revelation. was in visual cognition and the of Sometimes I read the latest book on . His 1994 book, The Language In- human nature simply because I feel obliged to stinct, pretty much dispelled these concerns, do so, arming myself with a response when sufficiently so that I included a selection from it friends and colleagues ask my opinion. But in my reader, Ideas of Human Nature (1998). some books are far more pleasure than obliga- Next, (1997) caused me tion; these I read not only for fun, but also to to switch from judgementalism to being an ea- learn something, if only a nice way of crafting ger recipient of Pinker’s lovely insights and an argument. Pinker is definitely in the latter turns of phrase. category, except that he is not only a master Now, with The Blank Slate (2002), I’ve phrase-turner, but pretty handy with concepts, come all the way: instead of directing skepti- too.

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He has, for instance, a marvelous facil- and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And he ity for explaining things by analogy: isn’t loath to touch the third rail of : intelligence. Consider, for example, If a gear with a broken tooth goes clunk this argument (which I fully intend to steal and on every turn, we do not conclude that the deploy, if only in conversation, as my own!): tooth in its intact form was a clunk- suppressor. And so a gene that disrupts a I find it truly surreal to read academics mental ability need not be a defective denying the existence of intelligence. version of a gene that is “for” that abil- Academics are obsessed with intelli- ity.” Similarly, genes can influence a gence. They discuss it endlessly in con- wide variety of complex traits (altruism, sidering student admissions, in hiring competitiveness, and so forth) without faculty and staff, and especially in their being “for” such narrowly defined pheno- gossip about one another. Nor can citi- types. zens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who There are supposedly sophisticated biologists – say that IQ is meaningless will quickly including even some politically motivated ge- invoke it when the discussion turns to neticists such as – who just executing a murderer with an IQ of 64, don’t get this, and, as a consequence, keep ask- removing lead paint that lowers a child’s ing “Where is the gene for altruism?” trium- IQ by five points, or the presidential phantly proclaiming that without a one gene- qualifications of George W. Bush. one behavior correlation there can be no gene- behavior correlations at all! Haven’t they heard Take that, Howard Gardner! of heritability, of the impact of variations in Even an old veteran of the human nature genotype upon variations in phenotype? Or of wars such as myself, who feels that by this time the observation that when one allele is substi- he has read or heard everything, gained a slew tuted for another, the net result is likely to be a of new , phrases, and even genuine mean arithmetic consequence for fitness and ideas. Thus, thanks to The Blank Slate, I often, for phenotype as well. learned that it was Dryden, not Rousseau, who Another of Pinker’s many neat turns of gave us the noble savage: “I am free as Nature phrase and concept: first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage The megalomania of the genes does not ran.” mean that benevolence and cooperation And consider this rather courageous ob- cannot evolve, any more than the law of servation about rape; namely, that it would be gravity proves that flight cannot evolve. perfectly compatible with supposedly progres- It means only that benevolence, like sive doctrine – which, after all, argues that hu- flight, is a special state of affairs in need man beings are malleable raw material – to of an explanation, not something that just suggest that according to prevailing blank slate happens. , women might be socialized to accept rape! This is, of course, absurd and unimagin- Indeed, a particularly delightful aspect able, and Pinker knows it: His point is that hu- of The Blank Slate is Pinker’s penchant for man beings are equipped with human nature, fresh insights, not to mention suitable and often and that just as part of this nature is that men hilarious quotations dredged up from such “want sex across a wider range of circum- unlikely sources as The Brothers Karamazov stances than women do,” and are sometimes

Human Nature Review, Volume 2, 2002, 445 Human Nature Review 2 (2002) 444-448

despicably willing to use to get it, to this intellectual fashion, as was, to some ex- women abhor being raped. This, too, is almost tent, the culture-is-all school of sociology and certainly part of human nature, and for under- anthropology, which Pinker ably chronicles and standable . debunks. “My goal in this book,” writes Pinker, A cognitive at heart, “is not to argue that genes are everything and Pinker is overwhelmingly concerned with mak- culture is nothing – no one believes that – but to ing sense of the structure of the human mind; explore why the extreme position (that culture by my count, the word fitness only appears is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and twice in The Blank Slate (the book, that is … the moderate position is seen as extreme.” The fitness considerations are all over the pages of result is an impressive extended argument for our actual slates, which, it should be clear, why the blank slate is a bankrupt concept. aren’t even close to blank). This is OK. After As the predictably pithy Pinker points all, Steven Pinker isn’t a biologist. He uses out, “The mind cannot be a blank slate, because evolution to understand the mind, rather than – blank slates don’t do anything.” For this, he like , for example – using his rightly gives Leibnitz due credit (although re- mind to understand evolution. grettably omitting Kant), then goes on to show In the process, he demonstrates effec- how has further elabo- tively how three findings occasionally raised in rated this important insight. In short: People support of a kind of blank-slatism - the com- come pre-formatted, with cognitive organizing paratively small size of the human genome, principles already embedded in their hardware. neural connectivity theory and accumulating Not a ghost in the machine, but some well-oiled evidence for cerebral plasticity - do nothing of gears. Or, at the risk of yet another metaphor, the kind. Thus, to use genome size as an exam- what about a palimpsest? ple, the evident fact that Homo sapiens appears Pinker’s review of the history of blank to boast a mere 34,000 genes has been trum- slate thinking and the struggle over recognizing peted by some as evidence that we must be human nature is admittedly biased, but nonethe- more free and less genetically constrained than less fair-minded, and – to me at least - alto- evolutionary theory demands. How nonsensi- gether convincing, a worthy companion to Carl cal! As Pinker points out, the roundworm C. Degler’s fine historical review, In Search of elegans has a mere 18,000 genes (and only a Human Nature (1991). handful of neurons, not to mention behavior One quibble, however: It wasn’t only that is less than cosmically inspired). Are we to the anti-hereditarians who went “over the top.” presume, however, that because it is outfitted Thus, it would have been helpful – and more with about one-half the human genetic com- balanced – had Pinker also included a discus- plement, C. elegans has twice our , or sion of extremists of the “instinctivist” school, that its behavior is only one-half as “deter- some of whom are still with us. Particularly mined”? under the influence of William McDougall In his relentless pursuit of the blank (who was in turn influenced by the flush of en- slate, Pinker provides a lawyerly analysis of the thusiasm for early Darwinism), " psy- major fears that drive its defenders: fear of ine- chologists" had by the first decades of the 20th quality, of imperfectability, of determinism, and century identified – among others - a parental of nihilism. Thus, without the blank slate to instinct, gregarious instinct, of acquisi- hide behind, we must face the troublesome real- tion and construction, dominance, companion- ity that all people aren’t created equal (not in ship, climbing trees, mating, and "purposive rights, mind you, but in abilities), that we are striving." Behaviorism was, in part, a reaction unlikely to achieve perfection, that we are ge-

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netically influenced in what we do, and – fashioned in the likeness of god, or thoroughly heaven forbid – that our lives lack intrinsic despicable and sin-soaked, as claimed by the meaning. likes of John Calvin, how can we simultane- Despite my strong enthusiasm for The ously be blank? Blank Slate, I don’t agree with everything But this is beside the point, which is that Pinker proposes. For example, he asks “Why Pinker has done us all a great service by identi- do secular thinkers fear that biology drains life fying these three … and then of meaning?” and then goes on to claim that demolishing them. evolution is compatible with a non-nihilistic Steven Pinker’s not-so-blank slate is full view of personal meaning. I think he’s wrong of indomitable optimism, from Chekhov’s here, and that biology does in fact tell us that “Man will become better when you show him there is no inherent meaning to our lives. We what he is like” (unless perhaps he will become arise following a junction between egg and depressed!) to the author’s own cheery – and sperm, no more “meaningful” than any other probably correct – assertion that “our under- such conjunctions, on the part of any other spe- standing of ourselves and our cultures can only cies, and, like it or not, we are nothing more be enriched by the discovery that our minds are than the accumulated products of competing composed of intricate neural circuits for think- alleles jousting to get ahead. But for me, at ing, feeling, and learning rather than blank least, this isn’t a for despair, but for slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.” achieving meaning – as the existentialists have B. F. Skinner once wrote that a theory long suggested – via how we choose to live our cannot change what it is a theory about. In lives (Barash, 2000). Existence may not actu- some cases, this is true. It didn’t effect the orbit ally precede essence ( “human nature,” after all, of Jupiter, for example, whether people be- is merely a nucleic acid-based way of talking lieved in the Ptolomeic or Copernican versions. about the latter), but there is plenty of room for But our theories of human nature have the each human existence to establish his or her power to affect, dramatically, the way we relate essence. to each other. And maybe even to ourselves. In addition to the concept of the blank Thus, Pinker points out that George W. slate itself, The Blank Slate characterizes two Bush’s benighted policy on stem cell research other components of the modern human nature derives from an archaic conception of the Ghost mythic pantheon: the myth of the Noble Sav- in the Machine, the notion that “ensoulment” age, and of the Ghost in the Machine (or, re- occurs when sperm meets egg, thereby pre- spectively: empiricism, romanticism and dual- sumably rendering each fertilized zygote a hu- ism). Along the way, Pinker makes an ingen- man being. And there are implications here for ious argument that these three concepts are in abortion policy, child-rearing, even for politics fact mutually compatible. Here again, I don’t and the arts. In this regard, I especially appre- agree. If the human slate is blank, then com- ciated Pinker’s lucid exposition of how evolu- mon sense suggests that we can’t also be noble tionary biology and the humanities may yet savages at heart, since our heart is supposed to lead to mutual illumination, a connection long be blank. (By the same token, blank slate-ism overdue, for example, in the field of literary is incompatible with the Hobbesian alternative criticism (Barash and Barash, in press). to our noble savage icon.) A similar incom- One last confession: While finishing patibility exists, I would argue, between the The Blank Slate and preparing to write this re- silly, soul-y Ghost in the Machine and any pre- view, I succumbed to multi-tasking and listened tensions at being a blank slate: if we possess with mounting aggravation to the US Congres- immortal souls, whether benevolent because sional “debate” about George W. Bush’s de-

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mand for authority to go to with Iraq. In somewhat congenial to Pinker, to myself, and the process, I heard Saddam Hussein repeatedly to other sociobiologic debunkers of the myth of described as “evil,” and once, as “the perfect infinitely perfectible human nature. Its almost embodiment” thereof. Not surprisingly, these enough to make one yearn for a whiff of the sentiments – for sentiments they certainly are, blank slate once again. not empirical conclusions – came almost en- tirely from politicians on the political right, the References same group of individuals likely to oppose the blank slate doctrine, disinclined to believe that Barash, David P. 1998. Ideas of Human Nature. people are noble savages, and prone to cherish Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ. a faith that divine ghosts somehow, somewhere, Barash, David P. 2000. Evolutionary existen- reside in our bodily machinery. (Just not in tialism, , and the meaning Saddam’s!) of life. BioScience 50(11): 1012-1017. Perhaps Saddam Hussein really is a Barash, Nanelle and David P. Barash. In press. psychopath, less a product of his upbringing Darwinian Lit Crit: a modest proposal. than of a regrettable assemblage of nasty al- The Chronicle of Higher Education. leles; most likely, of course, he – like everyone Degler, Carl. 1991. In Search of Human Na- else – is a result, however regrettable, of the ture. Oxford University Press: New interaction his genes and his environment. York. Much as I am pained to acknowledge it, those Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. Congressional war-mongers, White House W. W. Norton: New York. chicken-hawks, and other heroic desk-jockeys Pinker, Steven. 1994. . take a perspective on the blank slate that is William Morrow: New York.

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