I recently re-read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and it holds up well. One way to think of the book is as a defense of evolutionary psychology and a survey of its political and philosophical implications. The entire book is worth reading, but here are a few quotes.
p. 143:
Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. . .
But. . .Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences betwee races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent. . .
p. 147:
The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future.)
p. 222-223:
Children don’t have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.
. . .children are equipped with a toolbox of implements for reasoning and learning in particular ways, and those implements must be cleverly recruited to master problems for which they were not designed. . .They cannot learn modern biology until they unlearn intuitive biology, which thinks in terms of vital essences. And they cannot learn evolution until they unlearn intuitive engineering, which attributes design to the intentions of the designer.
I would add that they cannot learn economics until they unlearn intuitive economics, which Pinker suggests is based on what Alan Fiske calls Equality Matching, which is the form of trade that takes place in primitive societies. p. 234:
Fiske contrasts Equality Matching with a very different system called Market Pricing. . .Market Pricing relies on the mathematics of multiplication, division, fractions, and large numbers, together with the social institutions of money, credit, written contracts, and complex divisions of labor. Market Pricing is absent in hunter-gatherer societies, and we know it play no role in our evolutionary history because it relies on technologies like writing, money, and formal mathematics, which appeared only recently. Even today the exchanges carried out by Market Pricing may involve causal chains that are impossible for any individual to grasp in full.
On p. 276, Pinker offers a long list of things that have become moral issues recently, including “big box” stores, oil drilling, Columbus Day, and IQ tests. He writes,
Many of these things can have harmful consequences, of course, and no one would want them trivialized. The question is whether they are best handled by the psychology of moralization (with its search for villains, elevation of accusers, and mobilization of authority to mete out punishment) or in terms of costs and benefits, prudence and risk, or good and bad taste.
It seems to me that when people adopt the psychology of moralization they become intolerant of deviant behavior. I think that this is a big challenge for libertarians these days.
In a chapter on politics, Pinker adapts Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Pinker re-labels them the Tragic Vision vs. Utopian Vision. p. 287:
In the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in knowledge, wisdom, and virtue, and all social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. . .
In the Utopian Vision, psychological limitations are artifacts that come from our social arrangements, and we should not allow them to restrict our gaze from what is possible in a better world.
On p. 290, he quotes Michael Oakeshott on the side of the Tragic Vision. “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.” I believe that the quote comes from Rationalism in Politics and other essays.
p. 293-294:
The ideas from evolutionary biology and behavioral genetics that became public in the 1970s could not have been more of an insult to those with the Utopian Vision. . .
My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. . .Among them I would include the following:
- The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance
- The limited scope of communal sharing in groups. . .
- The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurobiological mechanisms that underlie it.
- The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.
- The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems. . .
- The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themsleves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.
- The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.
The subtitle of Pinker’s books is “The Modern Denial of Human Nature” and he focuses on three fallacies: 1. the blank slate, 2. the noble savage, and 3. the ghost in the machine. The blank slate question is settled and those that cling to the mind being shaped purely by culture are the true “deniers”. The ghost in the machine seems to be too taboo to discuss in polite company.
The noble savage (forager society being the epitome of living in harmony with nature) lives on with the green movement, locavores, veganism, and climate change activism. Why do anti-capitalist and green sentiments go hand-in-hand? Is it a simple “man is exploiting mother nature” sentiment that fits with Kling’s Three Languages of Politics model?
From a libertarian perspective, I’m curious why the Steven Pinkers and Robert Wrights of the world are politically neoliberal rather than libertarian. If you live and breath evolutionary psychology (i.e. sociobiology) how do you become politically Robert Wright instead of politically Matt Ridley?
Price might be a result of living in seasonal climes where storage had to be maintained to cover the seasonal gaps. Pricing would be as simple ratios as half full or quarter full, for example, as a measure of liquidity.
Trading is about as close to a human universal as there is, and even the most primitive foragers do it as if by natural instinct. One has to be able to do things like, say, offer three fish or ten shells for one blanket , and that kind of relative, fractional pricing and whatever ‘math’ is implicated by it, seems totally natural, easy, and intuitive.
Somewhat natural.
Why three fish for a blanket? Because fishing is seasonal and the catch may be greater this year, or fur capture is weak. Something sets the ratio in our mind.
“And though genetic differences betwee races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent”
That’s often not accurate, and sounds like a nod to audiences that still adhere to zombie-idea Lewontin’s fallacy). Pigment is an obvious case, but, for example, average height differences between tall groups and short groups are 2.5 times the typical standard deviation within a group.
The general fixation index (Fst) between some human groups is as high as 40%, and, by this measure, Chinese and sub Saharan Africans are as different as wolves and coyotes (and obviously the in-group variance for average fst between members of the same population group is tiny compared these kinds of differences).
This is interesting but I’m not sure how well the 46% difference between Papua New Guinean highlander tribes and Congo pygmy tribes maps to the physical characteristics we associate with race. Physical anthropologists are good at specifying gender, age, and race from specific skeletal characteristics which seems like the obvious counter to Lewontin-style genetic statistics. The same Wikipedia article states that the largest Fst within Europe is 7% between Lapplanders (Sami reindeer herders/hunters in Finland) and Sardinians. All of these highly isolated cultures/populations so I’m curious how much difference in Fst there is between non-Sami Finlanders and Sami people given their common linguistic heritage. Modern day European forager societies like the Sami seem to be a rosetta stone for race/culture/genetics.
I don’t think the Coyote/Wolf comparison is useful since these populations are highly hybridized. I’m still unsure what to call the canines in the Great Lakes region I’ve seen chasing after deer.
“I don’t think the Coyote/Wolf comparison is useful since these populations are highly hybridized.”
Recently around the econoblogosphere there was some poking fun at the progressives for some combination of “cognitive dissonance”, inconsistency, or outright self-contradiction regarding incompatible claims about the elasticity of labor supply (and, by implication, the effect of the minimum wage), depending on the political context, i.e., whether their ox is goring or getting gored.
The wolf vs. coyote Fst as compared to human groups example is designed to perform the same ‘heightening of contradictions’ (ha, there’s the Marxism again Moo cow!)
On the one hand, progressive environmentalists would totally balk if you said, back when there were many fewer wolves, that wolves were not an endangered species, because there were plenty of coyotes around, and coyotes and wolves are too close and too hybridized to make any important difference. The progressive would say, “Of course they are definitely different species, biologically and legally, and the wolves are thus specially protected under the law, with all of its onerous restrictions and requirements.”
On the other hand, if you point out that major human groups are at least as different by the same index attempting to give some kind of objective measure to ‘genetic distinctiveness’, not only are those not different ‘species’, but also, “race does not exist” and is a mere social construction.
All circumstances like this do is make someone smirk with amused annoyance when told by some smug zealot that he belongs in the “reality-based community” and is a member of the “party of science” and that it’s those bad other guys on the other team who are the science “deniers”.
Like personality, I think there is a complex interaction between nature and nurture on the “race” front. Both Pinker and the race-is-a-social-construct crowd are mostly correct; the physiological differences we perceive as racial are superficial. In a eusocial species, however, this weak signal can be incorporated into complex social behaviors. In human cultures, ethnicity can be an important component of group identity but it can also quickly be overridden by other factors such as written language and belief systems.
Since 1945 the world has been neatly divided into a collection of nation-states. I think we have underplayed the “nationality” aspect of this system but let us not forget that national identity is a very fluid thing; a purely social construct in an age of inexpensive global travel.
“Heightening the contradictions” strikes me as the correct way to go after the other side as long as you have a story that more closely cleaves to reality.
A nice followup to _The blank slate_ is
_Behave_ by Robert Sapolsky. 2017. Viking Penguin.
I’ve only managed about 5% of it so far. He may be slightly less funny than Pinker, and a tad more earnest. The book is more fragmented, with lots of brief chapters.
Sapolsky has provided an update on current scientific understanding of human behavior
Agreed, Sapolsky’s “Behave” is a great read. While Pinker clearly states that the science supports a complex interaction between nature and nurture he mostly focuses on the history of the taboo against claims that nature plays any role whatsoever (all-nurture-all-the-time). Sapolsky untangles the complex interaction that Pinker hints at but doesn’t unpack.
Although Pinker seems to be widely read and his books receive a great deal of mass media coverage, his message doesn’t seem to sink in. Rarely does The Blank Slate come up in discussions/articles about social justice activism, and I’ve never heard anyone discuss The Stuff of Thought in the context of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) even though NLU is a hot topic in technical/AI circles.