The Human 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 Tabula Rasa By David P. Barash A review of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker 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- evolution 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 wars” - 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 psychology of Sometimes I read the latest book on language. 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, How the Mind Works (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. Human Nature Review, Volume 2, 2002, 444 Human Nature Review 2 (2002) 444-448 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 cognitive science: 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 Richard Lewontin – 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 thoughts, 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. ideology, 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 violence 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 reasons. debunks. “My goal in this book,” writes Pinker, A cognitive psychologist 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 Richard Dawkins, 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 cognitive neuroscience 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 free will, or sion of extremists of the “instinctivist” school, that its behavior is only one-half as “deter- some of whom are still with us.