Why Nature & Nurture Won't Go Away The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Pinker, Steven. 2004. Why nature & nurture won't go away. Daedalus 133(4): 5-17. Published Version doi:10.1162/0011526042365591 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3600799 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Steven Pinker Why nature & nurture won’t go away When Richard Mulcaster referred in that debates over nature and nurture 1581 to “that treasure . bestowed on evoke more rancor than just about any them by nature, to be bettered in them issue in the world of ideas. by nurture,” he gave the world a eupho- During much of the twentieth century, nious name for an opposition that has a common position in this debate was to been debated ever since. People’s beliefs deny that human nature existed at all– about the relative importance of heredi- to aver, with José Ortega y Gasset, that ty and environment affect their opinions “Man has no nature; what he has is his- on an astonishing range of topics. Do tory.” The doctrine that the mind is a adolescents engage in violence because blank slate was not only a cornerstone of the way their parents treated them of behaviorism in psychology and social early in life? Are people inherently ag- constructionism in the social sciences, gressive and sel½sh, calling for a market but also extended widely into main- economy and a strong police, or could stream intellectual life.1 they become peaceable and cooperative, Part of the blank slate’s appeal came allowing the state to wither and a spon- from the realization that many differ- taneous socialism to blossom? Is there a ences among people in different classes universal aesthetic that allows great art and ethnic groups that formerly were to transcend time and place, or are peo- 1 Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: ple’s tastes determined by their era and The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American culture? With so much seemingly at Social Thought (New York: Oxford University stake in so many ½elds, it is no surprise Press, 1991); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002); Robin Fox, The Search for Soci- ety: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University department of psychology at Harvard University, Press, 1989); Eric M. Gander, On Our Minds: conducts research on language and cognition. A How Evolutionary Psychology Is Reshaping the Fellow of the American Academy since 1998, he Nature-Versus-Nurture Debate (Baltimore: is the author of six books, including “How the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Mind Works” (1997), “The Language Instinct” Foundations of Culture,” in The Adapted Mind: (2000), and “The Blank Slate” (2002). Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, © 2004 by the American Academy of Arts and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University & Sciences Press, 1992). Dædalus Fall 2004 5 Steven thought to reflect innate disparities in that infants have a precocious grasp Pinker talent or temperament could vanish of objects, intentions, numbers, faces, on human through immigration, social mobility, tools, and language. Behavioral genetics nature and cultural change. But another part has shown that temperament emerges of its appeal was political and moral. If early in life and remains fairly constant nothing in the mind is innate, then dif- throughout the life span, that much of ferences among races, sexes, and classes the variation among people within a cul- can never be innate, making the blank ture comes from differences in genes, slate the ultimate safeguard against rac- and that in some cases particular genes ism, sexism, and class prejudice. Also, can be tied to aspects of cognition, lan- the doctrine ruled out the possibility guage, and personality. Neuroscience that ignoble traits such as greed, preju- has shown that the genome contains a dice, and aggression spring from human rich tool kit of growth factors, axon nature, and thus held out the hope of un- guidance molecules, and cell adhesion limited social progress. molecules that help structure the brain Though human nature has been debat- during development, as well as mecha- ed for as long as people have pondered nisms of plasticity that make learning their condition, it was inevitable that the possible. debate would be transformed by the re- These discoveries not only have shown cent efflorescence of the sciences of that the innate organization of the brain mind, brain, genes, and evolution. One cannot be ignored, but have also helped outcome has been to make the doctrine to reframe our very conception of nature of the blank slate untenable.2 No one, and nurture. of course, can deny the importance of learning and culture in all aspects of Nature and nurture, of course, are not human life. But cognitive science has alternatives. Learning itself must be shown that there must be complex in- accomplished by innate circuitry, and nate mechanisms for learning and cul- what is innate is not a set of rigid in- ture to be possible in the ½rst place. Evo- structions for behavior but rather pro- lutionary psychology has documented grams that take in information from the hundreds of universals that cut across senses and give rise to new thoughts and the world’s cultures, and has shown that actions. Language is a paradigm case: many psychological traits (such as our though particular languages such as Jap- taste for fatty foods, social status, and anese and Yoruba are not innate, the ca- risky sexual liaisons) are better adapted pacity to acquire languages is a uniquely to the evolutionary demands of an an- human talent. And once acquired, a lan- cestral environment than to the actual guage is not a ½xed list of sentences, but demands of the current environment. a combinatorial algorithm allowing an Developmental psychology has shown in½nite number of new thoughts to be 2 Pinker, The Blank Slate; Gary F. Marcus, The expressed. Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Moreover, because the mind is a com- Creates the Complexities of Human Thought (New plex system composed of many inter- York: Basic Books, 2004); Matt Ridley, Nature acting parts, it makes no sense to ask Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes whether humans are sel½sh or generous Us Human (London: Fourth Estate, 2003); Robert Plomin, Michael J. Owen, and Peter or nasty or noble across the board. Rath- McGuf½n, “The Genetic Basis of Complex Hu- er, they are driven by competing motives man Behaviors,” Science 264 (1994): 1733–1739. elicited in different circumstances. And 6 Dædalus Fall 2004 if genes affect behavior, it is not by tug- there is a widespread desire that the Why nature ging on the muscles directly, but by their whole issue would somehow just go & nurture won’t go intricate effects on the circuitry of a away. A common position on nature and away growing brain. nurture among contemporary scientists Finally, questions of what people in- can be summarized as follows: nately have in common must be distin- No one today believes that the mind is a guished from questions of how races, blank slate; to refute such a belief is to tip sexes, or individuals innately differ. Evo- over a straw man. All behavior is the prod- lutionary biology gives reasons to be- uct of an inextricable interaction between lieve that there are systematic species- heredity and environment during develop- wide universals, circumscribed ways in ment, so the answer to all nature-nurture which the sexes differ, random quantita- questions is “some of each.” If people only tive variation among individuals, and recognized this truism, the political re- few if any differences among races and criminations could be avoided. Moreover, ethnic groups.3 modern biology has made the very dis- This reframing of human nature also tinction between nature and nurture ob- offers a rational way to address the polit- solete. Since a given set of genes can have ical and moral fears of human nature.4 different effects in different environ- Political equality, for example, does not ments, there may always be an environ- hinge on a dogma that people are innate- ment in which a supposed effect of the ly indistinguishable, but on a commit- genes can be reversed or canceled; there- ment to treat them as individuals in fore the genes impose no signi½cant con- spheres such as education and the crim- straints on behavior. Indeed, genes are inal justice system. Social progress does expressed in response to environmental not require that the mind be free of ig- signals, so it is meaningless to try to dis- noble motives, only that it have other tinguish genes and environments; doing motives (such as the emotion of empa- so only gets in the way of productive re- thy and cognitive faculties that can search. learn from history) that can counteract them. The attitude is often marked by words like ‘interactionist,’ ‘developmentalist,’ By now most scientists reject both the ‘dialectic,’ ‘constructivist,’ and ‘epige- nineteenth-century doctrine that biolo- netic,’ and is typically accompanied gy is destiny and the twentieth-century by a diagram with the labels ‘genes,’ doctrine that the mind is a blank slate.