Meet the Flintstones
Simon Blackburn writes a cogent review of Stephen Pinker's latest, The Blank Slate. Blackburn paints Pinker as being as far on the fringe of the nature/nuture argument as those the book criticizes:
If we imagine a scale from zero (genes have nothing to do with human nature) to ten (culture has nothing to do with human nature), I should guess that Pinker scores about nine. He holds, for example, that the way children turn out is almost wholly unaffected by how their parents bring them up. This is mostly certified by studies of identical twins reared apart, although here he does not refer to Cyril Burt, the British psychologist who wrecked the education system on the basis of such evidence, having made it all up.
Blackburn talks about something called "the demon move" that we see so often in modern discource. Like the straw man argument, it consists of creating near charicatures of those who hold different views than you, of demonizing them, of forcing them into the extreme.
Pinker believes that anybody who scores around five on my scale is in the grip of his demon myths, and really scores zero. So he routinely sets tests for those on the other side and parades their inability to meet them, without revisiting the question of whether his side can meet them. Thus he makes much of the fact that if exposure to the media were implicated in violence, we might expect Canada's homicide rate to be about the same as that of the United States, while in fact it runs at about one-quarter. But Pinker is silent about the fact that if nothing but a shared Hobbesian human nature were the explanation, then we would also expect an identical homicide rate. (To be fair, in a different part of the book Pinker does mention an explanation of the difference in the different history of expansion of the two nations--a geographical and cultural explanation that leaves you wondering about the efficacy of his otherwise cherished biological explanation.) There is also a rather startling absence of countervailing evidence, such as the recent surgeon general's report about media violence, or the well-known meta-study of studies of violence by Haejung Paik and George Comstock, which found in 1994 that media violence affects young people's chance of being violent about as much as smoking affects people's chance of getting lung cancer.
Fascinating stuff. I have really enjoyed Pinker's books, and have this one. But in reading excerpts in other places, and paging through this one, I got the impression that he was playing the demon game. Unfortunate, because I'm not so far from Pinker's thinking myself. I guess I'd place myself at 6 or 7 on Blackburn's scale. At the same time, I think Blackburn is probably too skeptical of the scientific point of view, and perhaps pulls his own demon move a little:
The building blocks of this addition to science are well known. At its simplest, we find some allegedly common human trait, and we explain why we have it by imagining how a propensity to it might have been beneficial in the Flintstone world, or in the Pleistocene conditions in which apes evolved into humans.
Still, this is a cogent paragraph, and echoes what Stephen Gould called the evolutionary "just-so story:"
Pinker rightly notices that if we go in for these stories, we must be extremely careful to distinguish our overt psychologies--which he calls proximate mechanisms--from their underlying evolutionary function. I can illustrate this little trick with the juicy case of sexual desire. The evolutionary rationale is reproduction. But the overt objects of desire need have nothing whatever to do with that rationale: just think of the huge variety of non-reproductive sexual pleasures to which people are so irresistibly drawn, and the precautions that they take in order to avoid reproduction. People want sex without wanting to reproduce, and for that matter they sometimes want to reproduce without wanting sex. We should also notice that the example puts a question mark in front of the idea of a single human nature, since the overt objects of desire are so extraordinarily various. Indeed, evolutionary stories about psychology should embrace this, since evolution can happen only where variation exists and selection works on it, which fits badly with the generally monolithic ambition of finding one "real" human nature within.
What I think is happening is that claims about what the science of evolutionary biology knows, especially claims as made in the popular press, are way ahead of what is actually and truly known. We're still in the infancy of this way of looking at things, and have a long ways to go.
I've mentioned it before, but I enjoy Blackburn's writing. I have Think, too, sitting here. It's really an interesting book; simply and clearly written, but so provocative, it's hard to read more than a few pages at a time.
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