It's the central intellectual debate of our time. It is also among the most bitter. And at the heart of it is one of the most brilliant scientists Montreal has produced.
Steven Pinker left the city in 1976 after attending Wagar High School, Dawson College and McGill University.
He took a PhD in psychology at Harvard and went on to become a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the 1990s, his books The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works built his reputation as a popularizer of science as well as a researcher.
Now - metaphorically speaking - Pinker has stepped into the fire. His new book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is explicitly polemical. In it, he takes on the old and still powerful notion that environment matters more than genetics - that we are born without innate qualities in the mind, and that we acquire most of our character as we grow and develop.
This idea, he believes, belongs in the intellectual garbage heap. The book's aim, in Pinker's words, is "to explore why the concept of human nature and biological approaches to the mind in general are seen as so politically suspect. Why do they arouse so much emotion?"
Pinker is a Darwinist: he's convinced that the only sane explanation for the origin and character of our species lies in the impersonal force of natural selection. In his eyes, it's absurd for thoughtful adults to believe in a soul.
Where he goes further than many scientists is his insistence that feeling, thinking and imagining are all forms of information processing - and that "every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of the brain."
Moreover, Pinker suggests, scientific knowledge about the brain has now reached a point where many of our most cherished beliefs must be revised or discarded.
Not only do we lack an immortal spirit; we may also lack much influence over our offspring. "Much of the advice from the parenting experts," Pinker cheerfully writes, "is flapdoodle."
How mothers and fathers choose to raise their children, for example, usually has less impact on those children than what is in their genes. Identical twins raised apart turn out to be far more similar than unrelated children raised together.
The effect on Pinker's readers can be bruising. Last summer, the New York Times ran a feature on "Books to take to the beach." One woman told the paper that her husband had admired How the Mind Works so much, he convinced her to bring the book with her on vacation.
But, as Pinker ruefully admits, "she felt dizzy and despondent upon starting it - like drinking turpentine," she said.
It's not his style that depressed her, for Pinker is an eloquent storyteller with a ready wit and an apparently endless fund of telling anecdotes. (He is also generous and courteous in person.) Underneath his jaunty prose, however, are ideas that not only depress vacationers but upset fellow researchers.
In the Boston Review, for example, Robert Berwick and Jeremy Ahouse accuse him of "promiscuous adaptationism" (among scientists, those are fighting words).
They say that Pinker mixes "Darwinian fundamentalism" into his cognitive science, ending up with "a credulous conception about how the mind works (misrepresented as scientific consensus), an uncritical genetic determinism, and a borrowed evolutionary biology used not to generate hypotheses, but to rationalize Pinker's own opinions."
Despite some key differences, Pinker does borrow much from evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson - the leading proponents of a materialist approach to life that often claims to explain vast amounts in the social, political and even artistic spheres.
Whatever you think of Pinker's ideas, nobody can accuse him of being short on chutzpah. By his own account, the doctrine of the blank slate governed much of intellectual discourse over the past century. Now, if his admirers are to be believed, it lies in ruins - one writer, Matt Ridley, even calls The Blank Slate "the best book on human nature that I or anyone else will ever read."
In it, Pinker ventures beyond the areas of his academic expertise, pronouncing on everything from gender parity to ghetto violence. He says that "political alignments ought to change as we learn more about human beings;" he attacks the entire modernist and postmodernist movements in 20th-century arts. His cultural frame of reference is overwhelmingly American.
Still, he has become an intellectual superstar in Britain as well as the U.S. On one visit, he and the eminent English neurobiologist Steven Rose engaged in a public debate co-sponsored by The Times of London. Over 1,000 people attended the debate, which took place at London University; the tickets sold out in three days.
Rose is among the villains in The Blank Slate - one of a group of scientists on the political left who, Pinker charges, "deny human nature and also deny that they deny it."
These scientists - the late Stephen Jay Gould among them - prefer what Rose calls "an alternative vision of living systems, a vision which recognizes the power and role of genes without subscribing to genetic determinism."
Pinker, it should be noted, rejects the suggestion that his work is deterministic. He says that nothing in biology entails a denial of moral choice. Genes eat nobody's homework.
The arguments sometimes get fierce and dirty. Pinker accuses his enemies of name-calling and misquotation. Yet in the debate with Rose, a socialist, he brought up genocides in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia on the apparently flimsy ground that such atrocities are "clearly related to the idea that opinions are a product of one's social class."
Pinker spends less time in The Blank Slate on the concept of "the ghost in the machine" (the notion, often linked to the political right, that we are spiritual beings independent of biology) than on the doctrine of "the noble savage" (the idea, often associated with the left, that people are born innocent and get corrupted by modern society). The United States, he points out, has far lower rates of violence than almost all pre-technological cultures.
In his fast-growing role as a public intellectual, Pinker often ends up defending and justifying his adopted country. In The Blank Slate he casts doubt on the value of gun control, and he explains the globalization of Western music, movies and visual art by calling them "a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic."
Discussing the arts and politics, Pinker may be somewhat out of his depth. But he makes a shrewd point when he notes that "in today's intellectual climate, novelists may have a clearer mandate than scientists to speak the truth about human nature."
Sophisticated readers sneer at Harlequin romances; they accept a harsher vision. "Yet when it comes to the science of human beings," Pinker writes, "this same audience says: Give us schmaltz!"
If we really look to science as a source of sentimental uplift, Pinker means to disappoint us.
… and just for a little Virian laugh, here is a response I got when I posted the above article to another mailing list. When you read the response think about Pinkers reply to the following question from EDGE:
EDGE: What questions are you asking yourself, and what do you hope to accomplish by going after the intellectual establishment in terms of their denial of human nature?
PINKER: The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
OK – now for this little gem, bear in mind this guy only exposure to Pinkers ideas are from the article posted by David!!:
I find the views of this guy completely : 1/ obsolete and primitive as he's still caught in the stupid and sterile debate of genes vs environement as it's so evident as Unclesam said that the two interact and are consequently both important;
2/ false and prejudiced: "the united states have lower rates of violence than pretechnological societies" ; okay the US is the most violent society of the western world, and certainly one of the most violent societies of the world; he probably has never been in a non anglosaxon country...
Also i'm quite curious about what the hell is a "pre-technological" society. No offense but such thing doesn't exist.
3/ incoherent: "genes are everything, but no they don't determine everything ". Okay lay off the crack dude !
4/ clearly fascist and imperialistic "US movies and music are succesfull because they are "a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic". Now either he's stupid and naïve (the same naïvity that makes united-statians wonder "gee why do everybody hates us ? - i mean we're so good !") or he's clearly an imperialistic fuck - basically what he's telling us is that "western culture is superior" hence its sucess. Of course it doesn't even reach his mind that the success of such cultures has in fact to do with their political and economical domination of the world which guarantees such success. Unless he does know that but he's simply trying to obscure the mind of people of the real causes of most problems of the present world.
5/ mediocre and ignorant : there has never EVER been such a concept of the noble savage - he probably hasn't even read Rousseau !
I found it so ironic and pathetic that he's himself a complete product of his culture (ie he's the living evidence that his theory is false): most of the ideas that he defends are peculiar to a certain current of thinking in the present Anglosaxon countries : extreme right wing materialistic scientism (in the same line as Skinner if you want), the same kind of mind that wants today to promote an unregulated globalization with the consequences that we know (see the collapse of Argentina). Welcome to WASP Nazism !
PS: Bricoleur i frankly wonder why you recommend to waste money on such a piece of mediocre yet dangerous WASP trash ?
Re:Are we only such stuff as genes are made of?
« Reply #4 on: 2002-11-07 15:41:35 »
Got the book last night and started right in. So far it is quite interesting, I'll post snippets as they come up.
Anyone who wants my copy of the book (provided they'll mail it back) will get it as soon as I am done - I plan on completing the book in the next few days, so first come first serve.
Explaining consciousness, personality, and action in the human sphere with genes seems to me to be a rather unfortunate appeal to oracular divination...
...but without the dependability.
I don't really see any evidence that is not confounded with naturalistic variables that genes do anything measurable at all in determination of the human self and its actions.
I also think that genes support a methodological otherness which takes the focus of attention away from the appropriate materials of study, namely the objects of consciousness as introspectively apprehended by the individual (an area of expertise in which we seem to be almost entirely incompetent) and converts them, rather disturbingly, into the arcana of a new techo-priestly class, the genetic chemist.
It also seems rather suspect to me that evolution would work through genes as opposed to mind in humans.
I imagine it would be almost axiomatic to say that the hallmark of the success of the human species is bound up in our plastiticity and adaptability. Well now...
...what do you imagine it is easier to do...
...change your mind or change your genes.
I will easily admit that to truly change your mind, to truly change your self, is a feat of inordinate labor, but it is most surely doable.
You can change your fundamental constitution within one lifetime. Death is no longer essential for growth.
Surely this must be seen as an evolutionary advancement.
And it can only happen if the tool of change is the mind, not the genes.
Ooga booga
Cool board, Virion King, I've been a secret admirer for a long time.
Re:Are we only such stuff as genes are made of?
« Reply #6 on: 2003-01-02 12:39:07 »
When dealing with the old "nature vs nurture" issue it is important not to confuse "how it should be" with "how it is", neither "what is convenient" with "what is true".
It is natural that a racist might lean towards the "nature" side, claiming that everything is in the genes ("a twisted nerve?") and that any effort for human improvement through education or other social means is futile.
It is also natural that a proponent of the enlightenment and improvement of man might lean more towards the "narture" side, claiming a greater significance for the efforts for enlightenment and improvement through education and social care.
However, what is important is to find out what really happens.
By the way, there is a book out there, Up From Dragons by John Skoyles, which has been mentioned several times by nrv8 in our IRC channel. That book rejects some of Pinker's evolutionary conlusions claiming that neural plasticity is enough to explain the capability of the brain to rewire itself during a person's lifetime. You can find more about this Skoyles vs Pinker debate here:
...and equally so to make sure that you know how to find what you're looking for.
Who can say, who can say.
Personally, I'm not especially convinced by most materialistic "research" on the subject of nature vs. nuture. As stated above, all of it involving human subjects is inescapably confounded by parallel variables existant in the cultural realm. It is true that alcoholism runs in families, but so do religions, languages and cultural identities. Surely one wouldn't presume that the latter are either genetic or non-influential. And even in the "best" materialistic research on genes and humans, i.e., twins studies and some mental illness studies, I find the conclusions entirely unconvincing. They strike me as grasping for straws at the very best. Not to mention that all of this material, if not simply purely theoretical, is always no more convincing that correlational.
As such, these days I am happy to ignore most all "research findings" on the materialistic explaination of human personality.
What is true, as far as I can see it, is that it does not make evolutionary sense for human behavior to be controlled by genes. And, in view of our abject dependency upon and extensive refinement of learning, it doesn't really seem to be the way things go either.
But, as Pinker ruefully admits, "she felt dizzy and despondent upon starting it - like drinking turpentine," she said.
It's not his style that depressed her, for Pinker is an eloquent storyteller with a ready wit and an apparently endless fund of telling anecdotes. (He is also generous and courteous in person.) Underneath his jaunty prose, however, are ideas that not only depress vacationers but upset fellow researchers.
This is essentially what brought me to this board and although this is an old post, I'd like to discuss this if anyone is willing.
In order for a meme to successfully propogate for the long term and through the multitudes I can't see it being depressing as a very good quality to have. So how exactly is this meme-complex ever going to take off if it depresses its receiver right from the start?
Humanism/atheism seems to have a limiting factor in the sense that the meme tends to depress those who are already ingrained with the believe that there must be a reason. In thinking hard about how I could make this particular meme more successful I started to try and identify "entry points", so to speak, where a meme enters the brain.
I was ecstatic when I stumbled across this web site during my search on what makes memes successful. I subscribe to this idea 110% and think that the Theory of Evolution as it applies to anything that replicates and mutates is most likely one of the leading complex theories of all time - right along with quantum mechanics.
The three entry points that I came up with were:
The raw emotional, animal side: This is your basic entry point for pop culture - you know and love it, sex, violence - all that good stuff in the media. These memes in the form of fads tend to spread quickly and die off quickly. They generally don't last too long, but they do very well in a short period of time.
The belief side: I am classifying this as somewhere between the raw emotional and the pure reason centers in the brain. Without getting into definitions of self-awareness and consciousness here, one undeniable aspect of self-awareness is the concept of the self dying. This tends to generate the question in the brain of "What happens?" and other types of religious and philosophical questions. Any meme or meme-complex that serves to satisfy these meta-physical questions I think enter through this point. While not completely rational I think it serves as an in-between point between emotion and logic.
The logical side: This is the stuff of rationale, science, and everything that has allowed technology to bring us to where we are today. 'Nuff said.
Okay, so first off, if anyone knows where these concepts may be discussed in more depth, I'd love to hear about it. I'm sure I'm not the first person to recognize demarkations points in the brain where memes enter.
Using the above three entry points I think you can then size up a meme and based on memes and meme-complexes before it determine how successful it may be. I think a meme tends to not be too successful if it doesn't tap the emotional side to some degree. One of the first things that struck me about this site was the mentioning of that - and that if the CoV were to ever take off it needs to somehow tap that aspect. On top of that, anyone I've met who was an atheist almost always without exception was someone who found emotional comfort in scientific discoveries. The comfort stemming from the fact that we are slowly, but ever more rapidly, gaining more control and a clearer insight into our universe. I would postulate that those who do not see that extreme importance and take comfort knowing that we are unraveling mysteries in the universe will also be seeking meaning from some supernatural source.
In any event, this is as far as my thinking has gotten me so far. I'm still enjoying running around and classifying different memes by how they enter the brain and what aspects of the brain are stimulated by them.
Does anyone know about the studying of memes in a more mathematical sense? It seems to me that you could begin to quantify memes to the point where you could make predictions about how successful they might be. Of course, it probably is like trying to predict the weather based on the level of complexity to the problem, but the idea that it could be calculable is intriguing. Sort of like Asimov's psychohistory.
with out confuzing my genes or brain tissue I pose the aspect of controll and the controll of the "knowledge" at are desposal What he is perposing is w/out the soul humanity has come thus far and only the power of the mind and body propelled that . socitiy use the spiritual aspect as a tranquilizer datr to tame socitiy from it's inbreed natural instinked of violence, anger , hatered, cruletiy and suffering. the pceking order of life we cluster in to be generated Memes none-the-less. I agree only in part but that tranquilizer's aimed for the soul not just the thought there of. I whould like to point out the evolution of china both in tyrants and spiritualist , there the prime exsample of this thought as to weather or not we have a soul sorry but in the quest for linking magic and science I found the analisist of the human animal hell even plant became in and of it's self an act of proving it with science more so than... pinker offers blunt sopporting evidence to back up what he considers a scientific exsplination of brain an body mind over matter comes to mind free assocyating . in comprehending with fewer obJetives and perseption of the subjest i could come to agree and surport to idea preposed . but... where Would be the Fun in that sence I set out to devils advocate (with this message) that we have a soul and indeed it's vital. It however has posed more of a chalange than when i stared because common sence agrees mind ofver matter is the most rasional idea. and It's Beating up my origenal thought. I'm a sceptic on magic too and have been looking for theoratic mattereal to test it's exsistence against. Well I've got this in surport we have a soul . suck spiritualy evolved people as the monks of china are emplore such tecniques of mind over matter by being in touch with.. "themselves" mind and body to keep perspective and then by brain power chemical flow or some unknown force (or them selves) (you can name the force anything you want) . I prepose that force generated is for what ever reason the source of the soul or nameing there of For girls it's easyer or to fime in more ways than one It's located between the breast that point where they say your hearts located (the stur-nem i think it's called ). In that point where it feels slightly indented the end of the rib cage before the stomic on the bone if i knew the shock-cra i'd name it. any way thats the location. of the surposed soul it's in the kamasutra too and other easten studies i'm bad names and thuse refering exsactly is rough on me sorry. these are frome my anilise. that the soul generates emotion, tears , energey capabliy , copying, data up loads and remeberences as well as subconscience dreaming . or cyberspace projecting (astreal im j/k) ,ego and selfprepetualiasion that a fre though to. that this phenomina is both proveable and exsplainable (so much of it's compossion is to prove magic to science with actual theorum ) my theorum was taken from the prespective of the soul that it will be harder on me to put forth convicing proff sence this is still an incompleat theory as it has not been tried on all possable sources and i fear puting it up against this one will be it's killing blow if ones theory is disprove it's nolonger viable truth and thus dies in theory. (no i'm not just throwing the word a round it's there for meaning) Ok that a free thought to if one can mentaly controll angery then why does the claming sensation ,get produced in the location of the soul . I'll use anger it's the easyist of my conculsion anger is generated as an emotion tha then takes controll of the body and mind causeing blackout,tempertantrums, and ( a mother holding her child is (not generating teleapathy a force of the brain that could be aplied for lack of a better term) but with slight hushes and the claming force generated like, a cats purr. from calming the mother, like all engrgy , vibrated over through sound to calming the child). violent muscel spazems and stress . for all sciences study they can not controll it with a pill. like they ginie pig human for an now prepose to are children here TAKE DRUGS THERE GOOD FOR YOU!! for all pinkers study they are numing the human race worse than the thought of the soul ever did. how is that darwinism if darwin perpose evololusion. sciences disregard of the exsistance of the soul and trying to get around it is not evolovusionary at all in fact the soul in my theory also allows for the evolusion through science . with what science is doing with it's idealistic opinion and implamenting ways to i freethought ways to cure the human condision . (the human condisions being the whole of the being you are) is infact trying both to cure the human soul, or rid humanity of that need for it and it's human condisions. With out ever have anything to prove or deny relivence of the so says noone ever thought to look for it flaws and benifits or pros and cons. as it seems the more we fuck up the speicies the less we have need for the soul (or perhappes the more we need it ) if one could do without it as prepose. what are the social backlases on them and the world around them. and vise versa with one who perpose to have one and the social environ. I've found that noone reconize that part of them to get to understand it's potenscial. prehappes those monks have i don't know any to ask but they prove it well enough alone and won't tell anyone how it's in the doing that makes it work like evolusion and brain chemical anilise. I haven't writen out the exspariments cause I haven't had time and I surpose this may still be a hiepothisies . seeing as my state of being is all i have to show for my anailise i'm my one test subject infact it's what made this so hard you can only be your own test subject . noone can do or prove it to you but your self and for mye to do it to another is hard cause your asking for conformaions of free will hence the creations of false gods to fill the i need a hand or hand out piont of self weaknesses noone ever made it much farther than that. and even know i watch the bicking over it continue but I give this site props for it's illuminious act of the doubble edged sword Darwin and Lucifer it also is all the things enlightenment should be and evolusion A great symbolism for me it's a chalange to prove whats truth and given me such new perspective to wrap my mind soul empathy around but even being a quick learner i'm an opinionate quistioner of why?? hence my claims to science I am a thinker. you have given me more to work with as magic closes one eye to science to be able to beleive. i have run out of thoughts in the it's anilise and need more to work with you've given me that and prehappes As your generated Memes Inspired this, perhappes the new Memes it causes in the change of perspective, my generate Memes may inspire new line of Evolusion in it's anilise of this lifes work i've spent my life working on . which in turn may yet inspire the next phaze of evololusion, and new age or i could start a cult. figured that wouldn't happen here so i thought i'd look for a real opinion not just unjustified admeration...from those who need the hand (or more so me to do it for them) . and I figure science is the best please to find people to disprove me or up grade my perspectives. not start a religon ( evolusion will get rid of that religon that is ) sorry its so long with all thought about just in it's compostion it could of been longer but i don't have time to right my book yet so i'm doing it in peices. and it's easyer in replys . my head is full at least 12 new aplyable point but it's long enough ( there's no room for spelling so sorry it poorly writen whenit's revised and publised it'll be spelled right but s they are now ( out of my head on to the cyber relem ) there origenal peices instantaniouse thoughts given to inspiration and subject to change . Shandra 3/8/03 oh try measuring memes with the stock market i do .
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