Sunday
New York Times
The
Evolutionary War By
Robert J. Richards
John Watson, the founder in the 1920's
of behavioristic psychology, boasted that if he
were given an infant at random, he could train him ''to become any type of
specialist I might select -- doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes,
even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies,
abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.'' His dismissal of anything
inborn but a few raw feelings harked back to the philosophical empiricism of
John Locke, who denied that the human mind came equipped with innate ideas;
mind was a tabula rasa, a
blank slate on which experience of the world would write messages. Watson's
kind of behaviorism, amended by B. F. Skinner, dominated American psychology
in the first half of the 20th century. The scientific community's reaction to
the racism of the Nazis re The logic of evolutionary theory, however,
seemed inexorable. Humans are, after all, animals. No magic moment occurs
when souls rain down on waiting primate bodies to wash away all signs of
brute origin. In the 70's, E. O. Wilson developed this logic with the support
of a wide range of animal studies and anthropological reports about societies
still following traditional ways. On this foundation, he constructed
sociobiology, which sought to explain basic human social behaviors and mental
traits largely as preprogrammed products of evolutionary history. Mating
preferences, emotional patterns, intelligence, even
religious convictions became scientifically explicable. The counterreaction
was swift. The biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin
and the anthropologist In ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial
of Human Nature,'' Steven Pinker -- a psychologist at M.I.T. and author of
several popular books on cognition and linguistics -- attempts to shatter
contemporary versions of the blank slate. To this polemical task he brings an
arsenal of scientific research, acute analysis and pugnacious attitude.
Bubbling beneath an affable charm, strong passions, apparently simmering
since graduate school, give some of his arguments a bitter aftertaste. Pinker sees human nature as largely
inscribed by indelible genes. He marshals evidence from empirical studies
showing, for instance, that individuals living in disparate cultures display
the same repertory of emotional expressions. Angry scowls, happy smiles, the
arched eyebrow of disbelief, the wrinkled brow of perplexity and scores of
other facial signs are universal. They cannot have arisen from a common
cultural heritage but must, Pinker argues, stem from the genetic heritage of
a small group of humans that left Developmental linguistics furnishes him
a perspective from which to extend his vision of human nature. Of signal
importance is Noam Chomsky's theory of universal
grammar, of which the grammars of empirical languages are instances. The
theory suggests that this deep grammar lies embedded in genetically
determined brain structures, which form our syntactical abilities. The
language of young children, for example, reveals grammatical regularities
that could not be derived from the speech of parents, but must, it would
seem, have been genetically preprogrammed. Pinker proposes that mental
categories of this kind shape all of our experience. From birth, the brain
begins to organize experience into meaningful patterns whose structures are
most easily explained as the results of natural selection having operated on
the brains of our Pleistocene ancestors. Experiments, for instance, show that
infants as young as 9 months begin reliably to interpret certain behaviors as
intentional (e.g., pointing). Of course, those protohumans
who failed to become adept at reading the intentions of others were quickly
shoved into oblivion. Pinker is mindful that environmental
infusion is necessary to activate or realize every biological trait.
Evolution produces dispositions that expect, as it were, a certain range of
experience. From the point of view of modern biology, this principle of
gene-environment codependence has a perfectly pedestrian ring. What keeps the
sides at war remains: With a given trait, how much can be attributed to genes
and how much to environment? And is it even meaningful to attempt to answer
this question? Pinker concedes that many experimental studies suggest a
surprisingly plastic cerebral cortex, but he short-circuits the implications
of this admission by relocating most hard wiring to the midbrain, from which
basic emotional patterns stem. Yet one would have thought that the
evolutionary acquisitions making us specifically human have a primary locus
in the cortex -- high intelligence and language, for instance. Many battles of the science wars that
Pinker re-enacts were fought over the degree of genetic determination of
intelligence. He contends that individual differences in intelligence have a
strong genetic component, though he is vague about how strong, citing a wide
range of values. He does allow that most intellectual differences among races
are probably due to unequal experience, but maintains that cognitive traits
distinguishing the sexes well up from the genes. In his discussions of
intelligence, two salient questions remain unexplored: Is intelligence a
single trait that can be simply measured? And, if we could gauge it reliably,
can we sensibly parcel out its genetic and experiential components? Any test
calibrated on Pinker sometimes mentions objections
like these, but flicks them away or drowns out their significance in the
monotone mantra of the genes. He focuses on ''dirty tricks'' and political
biases of leftish scientists who reject his genetic
version of human nature. He charges Lewontin with
using a ''doctored'' quotation from an opponent (careless, inconsequential
misquotation, it seems to me) and derides Gould's Marxism -- which most
biologists take to be faux Marxism that merely adds rhetorical flourish to
serious ideas. He is somewhat less irritated by neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Leon Kass and Tom
Wolfe, since their metaphysics has no sting. Pinker's fundamental argument depends on
theoretical suppositions that require closer inspection, but he confidently
rests on this unstable platform what he considers the prescient conceptions
of the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Milton Friedman and Richard Posner. Thus
Hobbes believed that cooperative impulses of individuals would succumb to
innate aggressiveness and selfishness were not those softer inclinations
steeled by the deterrent force of the state. And today free markets have
turned private vices into public virtues. Pinker urges that an appreciation
of a genetically fixed human nature will serve even in the arts, exposing
there the bareness of both the modernist and the postmodern aesthetic.
(Yeats, Eliot and Borges, it seems, are missing from reading lists at M.I.T.)
With the triumph of evolutionary theory, Pinker sees a new scientific, cultural
and political alignment near, one that accepts a more constrained conception
of human nature and adopts corresponding social and economic policies, but
does not neglect the genetically less endowed -- in short, a compassionate
conservatism. Robert J. Richards teaches history and
philosophy of science at the Published: 10 - 13 - 2002 , Late
Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 9 |
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