Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

humanities librarian and it is as always my privilege to welcome you to an author's mit series event on behalf of the staff of the mit press bookstore and john jenkins a manager of the press book store and the mit libraries tonight the authors at mit series is a series of celebrations of book length publications by mit faculty or staff and occasionally a pertinent mit press book not authored by an mit author tonight we are here as you know to showcase of the new book by steve pinker who is the current peter de flores a professor of psychology here at mit and to introduce professor pinker we have the peter de flores emeritus professor samuel j kaiser which i think should be a special treat i know it will be for me for in my opinion jay kaiser is the preeminent renaissance man here at mit he is an accomplished linguist administrator poet musician and chronicler of his world's travels and adventures therein he has two new books one just published by the mit press and co-authored by the late professor kenneth l hale entitled programming on to a theory of argument structure and just to prove my renaissance man remark his next book to be published next year by front street books is written for children and will be called the pond god and other stories please welcome professor kaiser thank you all can everybody hear me i've known steve pinker ever since he came to mit in 1979 as a postdoctoral fellow in the center for cognitive science in the course of the last 23 years i've watched with admiration as he's gone from a talented young researcher to the country's leading voice in bringing cognitive science to an intelligent lay public and by intelligent lay public i include my colleagues here at mit just two days ago i attended the emeriti professor's lunch i was sitting next to asher shapiro who's been retired for several years now and asher asked me if i'd ever read the language instinct i said i had and he commented on what a terrific writer the author was he wanted to know if i knew him this is actually not an infrequent question teresa mentioned that i'm a musician and a couple of weeks ago i was at a jazz festival in alexandria bay new york it's a sleepy little resort town in the thousand lakes region it's just across the border from canada and it's only about two and a half hours car drive from the town that steve was uh born in and grew up in montreal one morning at breakfast one of the guests his name was bert joss had heard that i was from mit he wanted to know if i knew steve pinker i said yeah i did he asked me to convey this message which i'm doing now his daughter susan went to edinburgh school with your sister and he knows your mother and father and he sends you all his regards there are many reasons why steve has become what one writer called quote the new age guru for the machinery of thought one of those reasons is surely his hair he is a member of the luxuriant flowing hair club for scientists i want you to know that i deeply resent that for obvious reasons i do acknowledge however that there is a connection between steve's hair and the strength of his scholarship i think of him more as a samson than a guru and i urge you don't get a haircut steve um there are other reasons for steve's meteoric rise to national prominence here's four of them the language instinct 1940 1994 how the mind works 1997 words and rules 1999 and his latest book the blank slate 2002. his productivity at the rate of one book every two and a half years is extraordinary anyone who takes the time and trouble to read these very readable volumes will not only have acquired a crash course in what cognitive science has been built to tell us about how the mind works but we'll also have taken the pill with a spoonful of very stylish sugar consider for example the opening paragraph of chapter 3 of the blank slate in 1755 samuel johnson wrote that his dictionary should not be expected to quote change sublunary nature and clear the world at once from folly vanity and affectation end quote few people today are familiar with the lovely word word sublunary literally below the moon it alludes to the ancient belief in a strict division between the pristine lawful unchanging cosmos above and our grubby chaotic fickle earth below the division was already obsolete when johnson used the word newton had shown that the same force that pulled an apple toward the ground kept the moon in its celestial orbit that paragraph just about sums up a thousand years of intellectual history in one elegant production gems like that are awaiting the attentive reader and i urge you to it i think steve's book comes at an auspicious time at any rate i'm someone who is inclined to think about that to think that something is auspicious when i hear human nature being discussed in the context of hollywood films just the other day tim blake nelson was being interviewed on npr he's the actor who played bubba in the good girl and he was del mar in oh brother where art thou and he uh just wrote and directed a new film called the gray zone it is an account of concentration camp jews the so-called zonder commandos jewish units in auschwitz who cooperated with the nazis to help exterminate other jews to save their own lives in the course of the interview blake said something to the effect that the film was a commentary on human nature whether it was essentially lockheed or hobson that is whether it is a blank slate or one predisposed to being nasty and brutish he opted for the latter steve's book makes it clear what these choices really come down to with an extraordinarily interesting account of the intellectual wars surrounding the question of human nature of the last quarter century it is both fascinating and disquieting reading but there is another more pressing reason why i think steve's book is so timely in 1960 carl jung the great psychologist wrote a letter in response to a request that he participate in a world conference on peace the request came from a man who was a designer of missiles to deliver nuclear warheads here in part is jung's reply to that request and i quote the jungle is in us in our unconscious and we have succeeded in projecting it into the outside world where now the saurians are lustily playing about again in the form of cars airplanes and rockets if a psychologist should participate in your world conference he would be up against the thankless task to make his colleagues from other disciplines see where they have the blind spot the human mind will sacrifice everything for a new gadget but will carefully refrain from a look into himself steve's latest book will go a long way toward illuminating the blind spot that jung so presciently identified a half century ago the blank slate has re-licensed serious inquiry into human nature as an important perhaps the most important item on the agenda of those who like myself are interested in understanding how 350 cc's of gray matter arose in the savannahs of sub sub-saharan africa and managed to go from napping courts hand axes to the big bang in just one hundred 000 short years ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure to introduce to you a great colleague and friend stephen pinker thank you very much jay for that very kind introduction this is the fourth uh trade book that i've written and uh engaged in an author publicity tour for and in each case the high point of speaking about the book is coming back to mit and discussing it with my colleagues friends and students so thank you very much the mit press bookstore for arranging this event and thanks to all of you for coming people often ask me what it's like uh to be on a book tour and i think it's best captured in the following cartoon yes a lot of people ask me that the restroom is down the hall on the right the blank slate is a book about uh human nature and a starting point for this topic is realizing that everyone needs a theory of human nature everyone has to anticipate how other people will behave in their surroundings and that means all of us need theories explicit or implicit about what makes people tick so much depends on our theory of human nature in our personal lives we use it to win friends and influence people to bring up our children to control our own behavior its assumptions about learning guide our policies in education its assumptions about motivation guide our policies in law and because a theory of human nature delineates what we can achieve easily what we can achieve only with pain and suffering and what we cannot achieve at all it affects our values what we think we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society because of this tide of values it comes as no surprise that for thousands of years the dominant theory of human nature in our intellectual tradition was intimately tied to religion and in fact the judeo-christian intellectual tradition encompassed a theory of human nature which made commitments about what we would today consider to be the subject matter of psychology it was a modular theory that is it assumed that people come equipped with a capacity for love a moral sense that presents us with standards of right and wrong and a decision or choice faculty a free will that allows us to choose behavior uh in conformity to these standards and although our free will is not part of the world of cause and effect it is uh truly free it has an innate tendency to choose sin uh it has a the judeo-christian theory has a theory of perception and cognition embedded in it that our faculties keep us in touch with the world because god is no deceiver and he de designed them to keep us uh in touch with reality and it even has a theory of mental health that mental health comes from uh accepting god's purpose loving god and loving our fellow human beings for the sake of god now the judeo-christian theory emerged out of an interpretation of particular events narrated in the bible for example the doctrine of free will comes from the story in which adam and eve were punished for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge which implies that they could have chosen otherwise therefore free will must exist now today no scientifically literate person can believe that the events narrated in the book of genesis actually took place and that uh opened up a gap uh for a new theory of human nature uh with the decline of biblical literalism and a principle argument of the blank slate is that this secular theory of human nature is based on three doctrines each of them associated with a dead white european male the first one is the theory of the blank slate or the tabula rasa commonly associated with this man the english philosopher john locke now all of locke's works are now available on the internet and a search reveals that he actually never used the expression the blank slate or the tabula rasa but he did say something similar here's what locke wrote let us suppose the mind to be as we say white paper void of all characters without any ideas how comes it to be furnished wins comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge to this i answer in one word from experience now in lock's time and in hours the blank slate had a great deal of emotional appeal it implied that dogmas such as the divine right of kings could not be treated as self-evident truths but had to be justified by experiences that people shared and therefore could debate it undermined a hereditary royalty in aristocracy who could claim no inherent wisdom or or virtue if their minds started out as blank as everyone else's and by the same token it undermined the institution of slavery because slaves could no longer be considered to be innately inferior or subservient this idea the set of ideas is captured by a a lovely cartoon that i clipped out of the new yorker about eight years ago where one king says to the other i don't know anything about the bell curve but i say heredity is everything now we continue to see an influence of the blank slate in modern intellectual life in most of the 20th century psychology tried to explain all human behavior through a few simple mechanisms of association and conditioning in the social sciences culture and socialization has often been used as the only explanatory construct for human experience and i'll give you uh one example of this from a well-known anthropologist with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support into sudden loud noises the human being is entirely instinctless man is man because he has no instincts because everything he is and has become he has learned acquired from his culture from the man-made part of the environment from other human beings and that is a quote from the anthropologist and public intellectual uh ashley montague uh but the influence goes beyond uh scholars and universities and to spread to the culture at large here's another statement of the blank slate from a public intellectual i think of a child's mind as a blank book during the first years of his life much will be written on the pages the quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly and that is a quote from walt disney and here's i'll give you one more when kids go to school at the age of six there's an empty bucket there and someone by the time they're 18 will fill that bucket is it going to be a parent is it going to be a good educator or is it going to be some other scum out there who's going to fill that bucket now there's another doctrine that often accompanies the blank slate and the my the name that i'll use for it comes from a poem by john dryden called the conquest of grenada in which he wrote i am as free as nature first made man heir the base laws of servitude began when wild in woods the noble savage ran now the noble savage is more commonly associated with this gentleman the french philosopher janja caruso and here's what rousseau wrote so many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel and requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed whereas nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state the more we reflect on this state the more convinced we shall be that it was the best for man and that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident which should never have happened the example of the savages seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in this condition that it is the real youth of the world and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps in appearance towards the perfection of individuals but in fact towards the decrepitness of the species now you can never understand someone especially in a different century unless you know who he was arguing against and in the case of rousseau uh his foil was this gentleman who wrote hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe they are in that condition which is called war and such a war is of every man against every man in such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no culture of the earth no navigation no commodious building no knowledge of the face of the earth no account of time no arts no letters no society and which is worst of all continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man solitary poor nasty brutish and short this of course is the famous quotation from thomas hobbes leviathan now the doctrine of the noble savage had also had a great deal of emotional appeal it implied that there was no need for a domineering leviathan a government and police force to keep us from each other's throats if we're basically nasty then conflict is a permanent part of the human condition and we have to get used to it if on the other hand we're basically noble then we can work for a utopian society of the future children are born savages that is uncivilized so if the inner savage in us is nasty it means that child rearing is a dis is an arena of discipline and conflict whereas if the inner savage is noble it means that childhood child-rearing consists of providing children with opportunities to develop their potential we continue to see an influence of the doctrine of the noble savage in modern intellectual life we see it in the respect for everything green and organic and a distrust of anything man-made as in natural childbirth natural medicines natural foods we see it in the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of child rearing and we see it in an understanding of our social problems as repairable defects in our institutions [Music] in contrast to a traditional view in which they would be seen as part of the inherent tragedy of the human condition and there's a third doctrine that accompanies the blank slate and the noble savage commonly associated with this man the philosopher rene descartes descartes wrote when i consider my mind i cannot distinguish any parts but apprehend it to be clearly one and entire the faculties of willing feeling conceiving etc cannot be said to be its parts for it is one in the same mind which employs itself in willing and in feeling and an understanding but it is quite otherwise with corporeal objects for there is not one of them imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide into parts this is sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body a doctrine which three centuries later would be derided as the doctrine of the ghost in the machine uh and the man who coined that was gilbert ryle it was not coined by the police even though they used it as the title of one of their albums the ghost in the machine has a great deal of emotional appeal we don't like to think of ourselves as just glorified hunks of machinery machines are insensate built to be used and disposable humans are sentient possessing of dignity and rights and precious machines have some work a day purpose like grinding corn or sharpening pencils humans we like to think have a higher purpose such as love worship and the pursuit of knowledge and beauty machines follow the inelectable laws of physics whereas behavior is freely chosen with choice comes optimism about possibilities for the future and with choice also comes responsibility and the power to hold people accountable for their actions finally if the mind as descartes suggested is entirely separate from the body that holds out the hope that the mind can survive the death of the body an idea whose appeal i think is all too obvious uh like the other two doctrines we continue to feel the impact of the ghost in the machine we see it in the fact that freedom dignity and responsibility are often seen as incompatible with a biological view of the mind which is often denounced as reductionist or determinist now no one really knows what these words mean but everyone knows that they refer to something bad we see it in the stem cell debate where some of the theologians advising george w bush on stem cell research claim that it should be outlawed because harvesting stem cells from five-day-old blastocysts occurs after the moment of insolvent uh and therefore is tantamount to murder which means that perhaps the most promising medical technology of the 21st century is being debated in terms of when the ghost first enters the machine and we see it in everyday thinking in speech as when we uh talk about john's brain which seems to presuppose some other entity john that's separate from the brain that it owns or when we see journalists speculate about brain transplants whereas in fact they really should call them body transplants because as dan dennett once pointed out this is the one transplant operation in which you really want to be the donor not the recipient well it should come as no surprise that i think that these these doctrines are deeply flawed beginning with the blank slate and the fundamental problem with with the doctrine is that blank slates don't do anything the inscriptions would just sit there forever unless there was some innate capacity to interpret their meaning to combine them with other inscriptions and to use them to organize behavior in pursuit of goals no one denies the central importance of learning socialization and culture in all aspects of human life the only question is how do they work and when locke said there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the census i think the ultimate right post came from leibniz when he said except for the intellect itself and indeed the uh modern sciences of mind i think have posed a number of threats to the blank slate for these reasons my own field cognitive science has tried to spell out how many innate mechanisms you need to do the learning that human beings undeniably do they would include some kind of concept of an object and of causation a number sense that allows us to conceptualize numbers separate from the entities they uh enumerate a set of spatial representations that the brain uses to keep track of where things are and allow us to navigate in in the world a theory of mind or intuitive psychology that allows us to infer the thoughts and feelings of other people a language instinct that allows us to communicate our thoughts to others and executive systems of the frontal lobes that integrate information from other parts of the brain and carry out reasoning and decision-making evolutionary psychology has undermined the blank slate by documenting human universals now though it is undoubtedly undoubtedly true that there are very important differences among cultures uh which anthropology has called to our attention in addition there is a bedrock of human universals patterns of thought and feeling that can be found in all human beings the anthropologist donald brown has recently tried to catalog universal traits as documented by ethnography and he's found some so far some 300 of them everything from aesthetics affection ambivalence and antonyms all the way down to verbs violence visiting vowel contrasts weaning weapons attempts to control the the weather and the color white now evolutionary psychology has undermined the blank slate in another way by showing that many human drives can't be understood as ways that people maximize their happiness and well-being but rather are can only be understood as adaptations to an ancestral environment the one that we evolved in in uh and are designed to pursue evolutionary goals an obvious example is our taste for sugar and fat which sends many people to an early grave with from eating too much junk food but which was clearly adaptive in an environment in which these nutrients were in short supply and so one could never get too much of them very recently we've invented technologies that can crank out mass quantities of the stuff our tastes have not caught up and we therefore eat more of them than are good for us another example is the thirst for revenge which has led to enormous suffering in the forms of vendettas and blood feuds and cycles of violence but which was uh one's only defense in a world in which one couldn't dial 9-1-1 to get leviathan to show up when one was threatened but a willingness to retaliate with violence and a reputation for toughness was the only defense against becoming a permanent punching bag unless obviously i think it explains our paradoxical desire for attractive mates now the humorist fran leibowitz i think once made an insightful observation about our psychology she said people who marry someone that they're attracted to are making a terrible mistake you should really marry your best friend you like your best friend more than your app to like anyone you happen to be physically attracted to you wouldn't pick your best friend because they have a cute nose but that's all you do you're doing when you're getting married you're saying i'm going to spend the rest of my life with you because of your lower lip now this indeed is a paradox but i think it's resolved by research in from evolutionary psychology showing that the physical signs of attractiveness are cues to health fitness and fertility and by wanting to have children with someone with those features you are combining your genes with other genes that have the best chance of leading to offspring that will be healthy and fertile in their turn neuroscience has shown that there is a complex genetic patterning of the brain another undermining of the blank slate this is not an oil refinery but a diagram of the visual system of the primate brain comprising some 50 areas interconnected in specific ways and recent research has started to show how this cabling is laid out by complex patterns of gene expression it's uh present and pretty much functional in the newborn monkey and recent research with knockout mice has shown that the parsilation into cortical areas and their connections does not depend on sensory input or neural activity now it's not just the basic cabling of the brain that's under genetic control but to some extent the fine structure of the distribution of gray matter now i'm going to present now results from a recent study by paul thompson and his collaborators at ucla who used mri to measure the amounts of gray matter in different parts of the brain in a large sample of individuals they looked at correlations between gray matter in uh corresponding parts of the brain in two people in pairs of people and plotted them in false color so that deep blue or purple corresponds to no correlation and other colors correspond to a statistically significant correlation when you pair people at random by definition you get zero correlation and so here the left hemisphere the right hemisphere and the top view of the brain are depicted in deep blue this is what happens among people who share half their genes namely fraternal twins and as you can see a majority of the brain has distribution of gray matter that is significantly correlated across these uh fraternal twins this is what happens in people who share all of their genes namely identical twins and as you can see even more areas of the brain are correlated uh some of them at very extremely high levels of statistical significance now these we have reason to believe that these uh genetically influenced features are not just meaningless bits of anatomy like the shape of your outer ear but have functional consequences which i think are nicely summed up in the following charles adams cartoon also from the new yorker separated at birth the malefor twins meet accidentally and you can see identical twins uh with identical contraptions in their lap sitting who bump into each other in the waiting room of a patent attorney now the cartoon is not that much of an exaggeration because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities my favorite example being the pair of twins one of whom was brought up as a catholic in a nazi family in germany the other was brought up in a jewish family in trinidad when they were bumped into each other in the lab in their forties both were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulets both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists both of them like to dip buttered toast in coffee both of them flush the toilet before using it as well as after and both of them like to sneeze in crowded elevators to watch people jump now you might think that these are these have to be coincidences um but in fact these similarities are never observed in fraternal twins who were test separated at birth and tested in adulthood and they've been verified with more systematic measures using psychological instruments such as tests of personality and intelligence which leads to what sometimes called the first law of behavioral genetics which is that all behavioral traits are partially though nowhere near completely heritable the noble savage has also come under threat from recent studies of of the mind behavioral genetics has shown that among the uh heritable traits are having an antagonistic personality a tendency to violate crime in certain circumstances and psychopathy or the lack of a conscience neuroscience has shown that there are brain mechanisms associated with uh aggression and evolutionary psychology and anthropology have underscored the ubiquity of conflict in human societies now here's a graph from the archaeologist lawrence keeley which plots the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a variety of societies the red bars correspond to a number of pre-state societies hunter-gatherer and hunter horticultural societies in the amazon rainforest and new guinea highlands and they range from about a ten percent uh chance that a man will die at the hands of another man as opposed to dying of natural causes to almost a 60 chance that that's how a man will meet his end the tiny little blue bar at the bottom of the graph plots the corresponding statistic for the united states and europe in the 20th century and it includes all of the casualties from two world wars so not to put too fine a point on it but when it comes to life in a state of nature hobbes was right rousseau was wrong now what about our culture has human nature changed in uh western democracies where we enjoy this comparatively low rate of violent death well not necessarily here's a question which i'd like you to just think of and keep the answer to yourself please do not answer out loud have you ever thought about killing someone you don't like please keep the answer to yourself now we psychologists are a nosy bunch and several psychologists have asked samples of people have you ever fantasized about killing someone that you don't like and the answer is that about a third of men and 15 percent of women frequently think about killing people they don't like and uh about three-quarters of men and more than 60 percent of women at least occasionally fantasize about killing people they don't like and i know what some of you are thinking yeah and the rest of them are lying but it's the ghost in the machine i think that has been uh undergone the the severest threat uh cognitive science has shown that intelligence this seemingly miraculous process which was formerly attributed uniquely to some spiritual mental stuff can be explained in mechanistic terms by the idea that beliefs are a kind of information that thinking is a form of information processing or computation not computation like your macintosh or pc does but presumably some kind of parallel analog fuzzy computation but computation nonetheless and that emotions can be thought of as mechanisms of feedback and control a little bit like the principle that allows your thermostat to keep the temperature at a constant range artificial intelligence has confirmed that intelligent behavior can be carried out by a mechanism most famously in the defeat of the world chess champion gary kasparov by the computer known as deep blue but it's been neuroscience that i think has most thoroughly exercised the ghost in the machine through what francis crick has called the astonishing hypothesis the hypothesis that all of our thoughts and feelings and passions and joys and aches consist of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain and though the hypothesis is astonishing there is increasing reason to believe that it's true we know that a surgeon can by sending an electrical current through the cerebral cortex can cause the person to have a an experience that's indistinguishable from from a lifelike experience we know that chemistry can affect consciousness as when people take drugs with psychological effects when a surgeon severs the corpus callosum and disconnects the two cerebral hemispheres the result can be two largely independent consciousnesses co-residing in one skull as if the soul can be bisected with a knife we know that damage to the brain can eliminate a part of the person's mental life and can leave a patient unable to appreciate music or to make a moral choice so descartes was wrong when he said that the mind is one and indivisible we know that the brain has a staggering complexity 100 billion neurons interconnected by a hundred trillion connections which is fully commensurate with the staggering complexity of human thought and behavior finally we have every reason to believe that when the brain dies the person goes out of existence despite extensive efforts by 19th century scientists no one has succeeded in communicating with the dead now this isn't a new idea and i think the most eloquent uh exposition of it comes from a remarkable passage from in the brothers karamazov in which the imprisoned dmitry karamazov has been visited by a local medical researcher and he's now recounting to his brother what he's just learned he says imagine inside in the nerves in the head there are sort of little tails i look at something with my eyes and when they begin quivering those little tails an image appears that is an object or an action damn it that's why i see and then think because of those tails not because i've got a soul and that i am some sort of image and likeness rockington explained it all to me yesterday brother and it simply bowled me over it's magnificent alyosha this science a new man's arising that i understand and yet i am sorry to lose god now many people are sorry to lose god when they hear of these results or sorry to lose the values that are traditionally associated with uh religion and god and there's been a widespread fear and loathing of a biological understanding of human nature both from the left and from the right from the academic left for example their uh the manifesto against sociobiology by stephen j gould richard lewinton and others was posted after the biologist eo wilson wrote his book sociobiology which was one of the first attempts to publicize the application of evolutionary biology to human behavior and here's what they wrote the reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class race or sex these theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in nazi germany and as a result of these accusations when wilson would speak at college campuses for years later he would be met with uh demonstrators such as one's uh call to his lecture by the the following poster come in here edward o wilson sociobiologist and the prophet of right-wing patriarchy and at the bottom of the poster it says bring noisemakers but it's also been the uh religious and cultural right that has been uh offended by these uh claims in uh the weekly standard a popular conservative magazine uh of a political opinion which i'm willing to bet a single person in this room reads andrew ferguson wrote the following biological theories of the mind are sure to give you the creeps because whether a behavior is moral whether it signifies virtue is a judgment that the new science and materialism in general cannot make he contrasted it with the judeo-christian view according to which human beings are persons from the start endowed with a soul created by god and infinitely precious and this is the common understanding the new science means to undo now this was an articulate statement of this sphere and not all the statements have been that articulate here's one from tom delay the house republican majority whip who offered the following theory of the cause of the columbine high school shootings four years ago he said that these outbursts are inevitable because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud and the uh house judiciary committee uh received the following testimony from a creationist think tank about the dangers of darwinism they cited the lyrics of a rock song you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do it on the discovery channel well these are serious accusations and uh and i think that they really should be should be addressed and that's what i tried to do in the the bulk of the blank slate i think that the the fears of human nature can be boiled down to four concerns the fear of inequality the fear of imperfectibility the fear of determinism and the fear of nihilism uh which i'll discuss separately i'm going to argue that all of them are based on non-sequiturs they come about because these ideas are so unfamiliar not because uh the conclusions actually follow from the discoveries i'm going to go further and say that not only are there not the dangers that so many people have feared in a better understanding of human nature but there are actually dangers in denying human nature that have been less appreciated and because of this we should look at human nature objectively without putting a moral thumb on either side of the scale so let me start with a fear of inequality it comes from a basic mathematical truth which is that zero equals zero if we're blank slates we must be equal but if the mind has any innate organization then different races sexes classes or individuals could be biologically different and that would condone discrimination and oppression well i think as soon as you see the argument laid out this way you can you can see that that um it really doesn't uh doesn't follow that um it confuses the notion of fairness with the notion of sameness and they're not the same thing when the declaration of independence uh declared we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal thomas jefferson was not saying we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are clones rather our commitment to political equality is foremost a commitment to recognizing certain universal human interests that arise because humans have a universal nature and suffer and prosper because of the same conditions as the declaration continues people are endowed with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness also it's a commitment to prohibit discrimination against individuals based on the statistics of certain groups such as race ethnicity sex or class that they belong to and neither of these believes declaring a priori that all human groups however or individuals are biologically indistinguishable also there's a downside of denying human differences and that is that if you believe that people are indistinguishable but you observe that some of them end up better than others there's a temptation to assume that they must be more greedy or avaricious and indeed many of the outbreaks of violence against ethnic minorities in the 20th century came uh in from ethnic groups that had cultural practices and set out social conditions that allowed their more talented members to prosper and because of these visible individuals the groups as a whole were often subject to uh expulsion or and persecution and pogroms the most obvious example is the case of the jews in europe but other examples include the chinese in malaysia and indonesia the indians in east africa and the south pacific and the igbos in nigeria now the second fear is the fear of imperfectibility the dashing of the age-old dream of the perfectability of humankind it runs more or less as follows if ignoble traits are innate such as selfishness violence prejudice and rape that would make them unchangeable so attempts at social reform and human improvement would be a waste of time why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and will just foul it up no matter what you do that's the nature of the fear well i think that too is a non-sequitur because ignoble motives do not automatically lead to ignoble behavior the human mind is undoubtedly a complex system with many parts and some of these parts can counteract others such as a moral sense a set of cognitive abilities that allows us to learn the lessons of history and executive systems of the frontal lobes that can convert these moral goals and knowledge of history into tangible behavior in fact the social progress that we undoubtedly have enjoyed over the past few centuries and that can be continued didn't come from denying human nature or erasing it and starting out with something completely different but rather by taking one part of human nature and expanding its range of application the philosopher peter singer in his book the expanding circle argued that universally you see humans demonstrate a capacity for empathy an ability to sympathize with other people unfortunately the default setting for that sense of empathy is one's own clan or village or tribe and people outside that circle have traditionally been treated as uh sub-human but what we've seen over the past few centuries is an expansion of that circle so that it embraces not just the tribe but other tribes other races prisoners children the handicapped the mentally impaired and most recently in the case of the universal declaration of human rights all of humanity and so this progress uh ongoing progress doesn't have to uh consist of uh pretending that human nature doesn't exist but rather taking one feature of human nature and adjusting a knob or slider that controls the size of the circle that embraces the entities whose interests we treat as equivalent to our own and there's also downsides in a belief in perfectability it's really not as rosy as it might appear anyway and i'll discuss three of them the first is the uh invitation to intrusive social engineering if people are blank slates then the temptation of leaders is to say that we we damn well better fill up control what gets uh written on those uh slates rather than leaving it to chance this is an argument that some of you are familiar with from our colleague noam chomsky in the department of linguistics and in fact uh many of the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century were quite explicitly based on the doctrine of the blank slate for example mao zeitung probably responsible for 35 million deaths wrote it is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written similarly the khmer rouge who massacred a quarter of their countrymen had a slogan only the newborn baby is spotless and less horrifically but still significant we hear the an echo of the blank slate in a quote from the uh planner and architect the corbusier that city city planners should begin with a clean tablecloth we must build places where mankind will be reborn and here's what the corbusier had in mind in terms of starting with a clean tablecloth this is a picture of paris or at least it's a picture of what paris would have looked like if luck corbusier had been granted his wish to begin with a clean tablecloth um why would le corbusier want to make paris look like this well he was an architect of a movement sometimes called authoritarian high modernism the idea that society should be planned from the top down according to quote scientific principles based on a notion of human needs now the problem was that they had a blank slate theory of human needs that every human according to the scientific calculation needed so many gallons of water per day for bathing so many gallons of water for drinking so many cubic feet of air to breathe so many square feet in which to sleep ways to commute to work and that was pretty much uh it and so the most efficient way to satisfy those needs would be to crowd people into concrete high-rises linked by super highways now we now i think realize what went wrong with this vision that they left out the rest of human nature needs such as uh the need for intimate social interaction in uh public places in which people could meet the need for green space what eo wilson called biophilia the uh well-being that people feel when surrounded by nature the effect of natural light on mood visual aesthetics and ornamentation the need for human scale places in which people could feel safe and cozy and uh by forgetting these needs even though le corbusier didn't achieve his dream of flattening paris and starting all over his um disciples did get carte blanche to design brasilia which is notorious as one of the most uninviting urban wastelands anywhere and this theory was responsible for the so-called urban renewal projects of the late 1950s and 1960s in which vibrant urban neighborhoods were bulldozed and replaced by concrete high-rises freeways and empty open plazas now a related downside of the belief in perfectability is a lack of appreciation for democracy another feature of uh 20th century totalitarian dictatorships is that they were brought in in revolutions by charismatic idealistic leaders who based their claim to authority on moral superiority to their predecessors and their rivals who believed that their repressive measures were just uh temporary and would vanish as the state withered away leaving people to coexist in a kind of romantic utopian state of anarchy and i think it was this these seemingly uh benevolent principles that led to many uh authoritarian dictatorships and indeed genocides in contrast uh democracy which i think has had a more benign outcome is based on a rather jaundiced theory of human nature according to which people are eternally subjected to ambition and self-deception and delusions of moral superiority the the best statement of that comes from james madison who wrote if men were angels no government would be necessary if angels were to govern men neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary and it's this uh pessimistic theory of human nature that led to democracies with their permanent checks and balances mechanisms that were explicitly designed to counteract the innate tendencies of humans towards ambition and self-deception finally a third downside of the belief in perfectability i think is a distortion of human relationships especially parenting now here's a quote in an article on uh the parenting experts uh that appeared in the boston globe a couple of years ago and it quotes a frazzled mother who told the reporter i'm overwhelmed with parenting advice i'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so i can instill in them a physical fitness habits so they'll grow up to be healthy adults and i'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual plays so they'll grow up smart and they're all kinds of play clay for finger dexterity word games for reading success large motor play small motor play i feel like i could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids on top of that i have to be a short order cook preparing two or three meals at a time because if i force my kids to choose between eating what's there or skipping a meal they'll get an eating disorder pressures on mothers that i think our mothers did not have to face and that have led to much of the anxiety that that women feel today now here's some sobering facts about parenting most of the studies of parenting that uh that led to this advice are useless they're useless because they don't control for heritability they show that parents who talk a lot to their children have advanced language skills that parents who spank their children have kids who grow up to be violent that parents who talk to their teenagers have kids who are less likely to be on drugs but what they don't even consider as an alternative hypothesis is that parents give genes to their children as well as a family environment and the correlations which as we all know don't necessarily imply causation could merely be saying that talkative people have talkative kids and violent people have violent kids and so on when studies are done with the proper genetic controls that is using twins or adoptees the results are rather bracing they show that siblings separated at birth end up as similar as siblings reared together now remember the malafor twins separated at birth reunited in adulthood and both of them ended up with identical contraptions on their laps at the in the waiting office of the patent attorney now think about what would have happened if the malifor twins had not been separated at birth and they grew up together well then you might think they share all their genes and they share all their environment so they must be even more similar well in fact they're not siblings separated at birth are no more different than siblings reared together and complementing this finding is that adoptive siblings this is the mirror image of identical twins separated at birth the separated twins share their genes don't share their environment adoptive siblings share their environment don't share their genes and they end up not similar at all they're no more similar when tested as adults than two people plucked from the population at random so what the study suggests is that children are not shaped by parents but are shaped in part though only in part by genes in large part by culture both the surrounding culture of the society and the subculture that they grow up in and also the culture of children themselves which we condescendingly call their peer group and in large part by chance factors that that no one really can predict in the wiring of the brain in utero and chance events as we live our lives now when many people hear their findings their first reaction is oh so you're saying it doesn't matter how i treat my children well what a question of course it matters how you treat your children it's never all right to abuse or beat or belittle or neglect a child because those are horrible things for a big strong person to do to a helpless little person who is their responsibility child rearing above all is an ethical responsibility also another uh simple truth that people are apt to forget is that um let's say i i told you that you don't have the power to shape the personality of your spouse now no one but a newlywed thinks that they can change the personality of their spouse nonetheless when you hear this your reaction isn't oh so you're saying it doesn't matter how i treat my spouse well of course it matters how you treat your spouse because you you're nice to your spouse so that you'll build a deep and satisfying and loving relationship and that's a good reason to be nice to your kids to have a deep and lasting and uh reciprocal relationship of respect and love with your children and i think it's a sign of the somewhat pernicious effect of the blank slate that these basic human truths can be uh forgotten and that people can think of parenting only as the molding or manipulation of children's personalities and so when they're told that they can't manipulate their children's personalities they think it doesn't matter how they treat them at all forgetting the child rearing that parents and children have a human relationship um i'll go through the the um last two fears a little bit more uh quickly uh the fear of determinism is the fear of the opposite of free will and responsibility in the uh in the philosopher's sense and the fear is that if behavior is caused by a person's biology he can't be held responsible for it and it's not just a hypothetical fear here's a headline from the wall street journal of a few years ago man's genes made him kill his lawyer's claim and you can insert your favorite lawyer joke here now uh this defense did not succeed the uh the man's genes did not get him off the hook um and i think it's uh when you think about it it's clear why not there's an old thing to understand is not to forgive standards of responsibility that is holding people uh responsible for their behavior is itself a cause of behavior these standards don't have to appeal to a ghost or some mysterious entity that we call free will but rather to certain parts of the brain presumably concentrated in the prefrontal cortex that can anticipate the consequences of behavior whether it will be esteemed or condemned rewarded or punished and can inhibit behavior accordingly we can continue to hold people responsible that is retain this influence on the brain systems for inhibition even as we come to understand the brain systems for temptation now um there's also i think a downside in uh in believing that the genes are the only thing that erode responsibility and that is that in fact most of the bogus defenses for bad behavior that creative defense lawyers have come up with are more likely to be environmental than biological to begin with examples include the abuse excuse which was used to get the menendez brothers off the hook in their first trial they claimed that the reason that they shot their parents to death is because they were abused by the parents years ago as children the black rage syndrome which the radical lawyer william kunsler proposed to defend the long island railroad gunman saying that he snapped under the pressure of living in a racist society the patriarchy made me do it defense which lawyers have used to try to exonerate rapists saying they were inflamed by pornographic images and a misogynistic society and probably the best statement of this syndrome comes from west side story and i'm sure you all remember the scene in which the juvenile delinquents say to the local police sergeant dear kindly sergeant krupke you gotta understand it's just our bringing up key that gets us out of hand our mothers all our junkies our fathers all our drunks golly moses naturally we're punks there's the fear of nihilism uh which runs as follows that biology strips life of meaning and purpose it says that love beauty and morality are just figments of a brain pursuing selfish evolutionary strategies and i'll give you an illustration of this sphere from the uh comic page of the boston globe from the comic strip arlo and janus in which one night our hero arlo can't sleep he's wracked by existential doubt pacing the floors unable to fall asleep asks his son why am i here and the boy says to pass on your jeans you still here now admittedly most people find this an unsatisfying answer to the question now uh the fear of nihilism many people think of as a religious concern but in fact there are religious and secular versions of the fear which i'll consider separately the religious version is that people need to believe in a soul which seeks to fulfill god's purpose and is rewarded or punished in an afterlife and that without the belief in a soul then morality has no basis and all hell would break loose well i one response to the religious fear is that um a belief in a life to come is not necessarily such a good thing because it necessarily devalues life on earth at a in our at a personal level think about what you say to yourself when you use the cliche life is short that is a an impetus to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute to offer a gesture of affection uh to a loved one to vow to use your time productively and not to squander it i think one could argue that nothing gives life more meaning than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious gift also have you ever noticed that in practice god's purpose is always conveyed by other human beings well i think this opens the door to a certain amount of mischief um now i'm sure many of you are familiar with the satirical newspaper the onion well you might remember a year ago the famous headline hijacker surprised to find selves in hell we expected eternal paradise for this say suicide bombers well this was criticized at the time for being rather tasteless and it is rather tasteless but i think it it uh makes a a valid point uh which is that even if you thought that people that there are some people who could not be deterred by the standards of their community the uh police and government or their own conscience and could only be deterred from committing evil acts by the the threat of spending eternity in hell there are also people undoubtedly who commit atrocious acts by the promise of spending eternity in heaven um now what about the secular version uh of the fear of nihilism well i think the response to this is best summed up in the opening scene of annie hall in which the six-year-old woody allen has been taken to the family doctor by his mother the doctor says why are you depressed alvey his mother answers for him it's something he read something he read huh and alfie says the universe is expanding the universe is expanding well the universe is everything and if it's expanding someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything his mother says what is that your business he stopped doing his homework and alvi says what's the point well how do we answer this as often happens in life the best answer uh came from alvi's mother uh as wisdom often comes from mothers uh when she said what has the universe got to do with it you're here in brooklyn brooklyn is not expanding uh indeed we laugh because alvey has confused two different levels of analysis and i think the secular version of the fear of nihilism also confuses two different levels of analysis the human level uh which operates on the time scale of years and decades namely what is meaningful to us how we want to live live our lives today given the brains that we have as opposed to the causal level acting over hundreds of thousands or millions of years which is how and why our brain causes us to have those thoughts another way of putting it is just because genes are in some metaphorical sense selfish it doesn't mean that we are selfish and just because the process of evolution is purposeless and amoral it doesn't mean that the end product of that prop of that process has to be selfish and amoral there's nothing that prevents the process of evolution from resulting in the evolution of a big brain social species with an elaborate moral sense there's a cliche that people who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made the same the same might be true of human uh moral sentiments and in fact the final thought that i will present is that once we have a moral sense it's not necessarily the case that its intuitions are figments or hallucinations but there is a sense in which morality has an inherent logic that the human moral sense can be thought to implement and again i'll turn to the comic pages to illustrate this idea although it's an idea that goes back to at least to plato um you remember the the comic strip calvin and hobbes well one day calvin inadvertently demonstrates why we can't do without morality by claiming that he is going to do without it he says one day i don't believe in ethics anymore as far as i'm concerned the ends justify the means get what you can while the getting is good that's what i say might makes right the winners write the history books it's a dog eat dog world so i'll do whatever i have to and let others argue about whether it's right or not hey why'd you do that and hobbes answers you are in my way now you're not the ends justify the means and calvin says i didn't mean for everyone you dolt just me indeed the philosophy of just me immediately dissolves when one has to as soon as one has to persuade other people of rules to live by it's logically inconsistent to demand that other people abide by rules that one is not willing to abide by oneself simply because you can't convince someone else that you occupy a privileged position in the universe this i think is the logical basis of morality and it's why different versions such as the golden rule and the categorical imperative have been rediscovered by the world's secular and religious moral traditions so let me sum up i've argued that the dominant theory of human nature in modern intellectual life comprises the doctrines of the blank slate the noble savage and the ghost in the machine that these doctrines are being challenged by the modern sciences of mind brain genes and evolution that these challenges are also seen to threaten fundamental moral values but in fact that doesn't follow on the contrary i think a better understanding of what makes people tick can clarify those values by showing that political equality does not require sameness but policies that treat people as individuals with rights that moral progress does not require that the mind is free of selfish motives only that it has other motives to counteract them responsibility does not require that behavior is uncaused only that it responds to contingencies of credit and blame and meaning in life does not require that the process that shaped the brain have a purpose only that the brain itself have a purpose moreover i think that grounding values in a blank slate is a mistake it's a mistake because it makes important values hostages to fortune implying that someday empirical discoveries could make them obsolete and it's a mistake because it conceals the downsides of denying human nature such as persecution of the successful totalitarian social engineering an exaggeration of the effects of the environment such as in parenting in the criminal justice system a mystification of the bases of responsibility democracy and morality and the devaluing of human life on earth thank you very much thanks and are there any questions there are two microphones in the aisles and it's a be a good idea to come up to the microphone so that other people can hear the question yes phil um well thank you very much professor pinker uh this was as fun as the 2900 lectures that i sat through yeah apologist is invigorating it is very room um one of the aspects which you talked about was the implications for free will having to do with this discussion and what i want to ask you is that there seem to be notions of desert and retribution retribution especially which the supreme court said was the main tenant of our justice system which seemed to be very involved with notions of free will so taking into account free will and how it plays into certain retribution using the argument where you don't have a notion of a soul and just sort of being mechanical um is there a relevant distinction to be made between the desert that a human being has as opposed to the dessert that a computer deserves when it does something well and do you think that these are important things to take into consideration uh yeah i think i think they are and i have a i have a chapter on that uh that very question um based in in part on uh work of dan dennett in his book elbow room uh which he's going to expand in a forthcoming book called uh i think freedom evolves um the argument is that in you know i don't claim uh to have solved the problem of free will the but the arg my argument is you don't need to have solved the problem of free will you just have to ask why we want free will what kind of free will do we really care about that's why the subtitle of dennis bennett's elbow room was the varieties of free will worth wanting the reason we want free will is not that we think it's important that people can do whatever they want whenever they want that would actually be a bad thing not a good thing and an example from dennett is every time you drive along the road you are counting on the following deterministic uh belief in human behavior that the drivers on the other side of the road are not going to immediately swerve into your lane killing both of you because they have the free will to do to do that you really want in some cases human behavior to be 100 predictable what you want free will for is that among the things that make behavior predictable are anticipation of consequences of blame and credit reward and punishment so by holding someone responsible saying if you do the following act we will think you're a boorish cat and ostracize you or will put you in jail or will fine you that will have a predictable indeed a deterministic effect on behavior namely caddish boorish behavior will decrease in frequency if it has consequences if people really had free will they could i mean free will in the sense of doing whatever you want whenever you want they could say well i don't care what you think about me and i don't care if i spend the rest of my life in jail i'm going to murder or rape or steal or assault nonetheless because i have the freedom to do so so the kind of free will we want is really not complete unpredictability but almost the opposite we want behavior to respond to certain contingencies such as the ones that we try to implement in the criminal justice system and indeed a lot of the exceptions that we make in the criminal justice system like the insanity defense or excluding children from uh criminal penalties i think are really grounded on the idea that a the principle of trying to deter bad behavior without causing unnecessary suffering that is pure spite pure punitiveness for its own sake should discriminate among people for whom criminal sanctions will be an effective deterrent namely people of sound mind and people where punishing them will not deter similar people like them in the future such as children and the the truly insane um and so that's i think the kind of analysis of what you want free will to do that i think gets us out of this conundrum thank you yes um in that we're all relieved that nobody brought noise makers tonight um my question is what's your sense of the percent of uh social scientists in the academic community in the u.s that still subscribe wholeheartedly to the blank slate or its equivalents and a sort of quick follow-up to that would be and are you going to continue your mission here to help move people away from that well i i guess i would know percentages and you know social sciences of scientists is a big category and i i consider myself a kind of social scientist in so far as psychology is commonly thought to be a social scientist science um i wouldn't know percentages because there are social sciences fractionated into different schools there are sort of quantitative number crunching um i think that it's i i probably would shouldn't uh offer a percentage i think there are schools of social science i think probably a very large percentage of cultural anthropologists would subscribe to the blank slate um a smaller number of psychologists and and uh sociologists but they i think they're too fractionated to generalize across the whole discipline um you don't think that we're sort of under that uh misconception as as we proceed in the social sciences today well i think there's some there's some schools for example post-modernism in the humanities uh certainly believes in a kind of blank slate psychology in that reality is socially constructed as opposed to being a product of human faculty of cognition and perception and it's often assumed in post-modernist anthropology and a literary criticism that uh that there's no enduring human nature uh certainly among in marxist sociology and marxist economics uh there's also a fervent belief that it's meaningless to talk about an enduring human nature um so i think it would you'd have to subdivide it into different schools of thought yeah you did you did get a pretty critical review in the new york times book review from there but i destroyed confirmed the antagonism is still out there yes yes uh so just a uh simple question uh the quote by madison did not show more of an understanding of human nature in designing a government rather than some type of overdoing social engineering and if not and if not what suggestions would you make to improve a republican government or what alternative to a republican government would you suggest oh no i didn't make myself clear i i cited madison as an acknowledgement of human nature and is a good thing not as social engineering and a bad thing so so madison i would i'm claiming madison on my side okay yeah yeah that's that's great i didn't make that i feel much better now okay i'm sorry for not making that clear yeah yeah yes yes a friend of mine has a son who was described at a very young age as by by a clinical psychologist as utterly lacking in empathy and you use the term tonight where does is there such a thing um is it if there is is it possible to be utterly lacking in it and where how would we describe it in terms of the brain thank you uh there is a syndrome sometimes uh alternatively called antisocial personality disorder sociopathy or psychopathy which um which does seem to be i mean to a first approximation be a lack of empathy and these are people estimated at somewhere to say about three to five three percent of the male population um that engages in things like raping a succession of women uh bilking elderly people out of their life savings shooting convenience store clerks lying on the floor during a robbery and often signs of psychopathy can show up early in children who beat up kids much smaller than themselves torture animals don't seem to respond to entreaties by their parents to you know how would you feel if or think about the way it makes someone else feel i don't think anyone knows the the causes there's some evidence that like like everything it's partly heritable but nowhere near completely heritable it's probably tied to activity in the frontal lobes and possibly also the amygdala one of a brain structure tightly connected to the frontal lobes that seems to process the emotional valence of stimuli so not completely understood but the clinical syndrome is uh has been repeatedly documented probably ted bundy would be the prototype case often superficially charming and socially skilled but utterly lacking in any sense of remorse or empathy yes in light of the way in which our technology is now helping us manipulate our appearances to what extent will this push genetic selection to select for behaviors more than for uh physical traits yeah you mean by genetic engineering no not by genetic engineering but just if you can go out and have plastic surgery then that's going to change your appearance so people are not so much making the quote right decision for selecting for this favorable gene they're actually selecting for an undisfavored gene i i think that um the uh it's really impossible to tell what effect on biological evolution our current cultural practices uh will lead to simply because biological evolution requires that certain kinds of selection contingencies be in place over a long enough period of time and over some kind of cohesive group of organisms in order to have its effect so one could always speculate what would the human species be like if the current practices now extended over 100 000 years and applied to one culture that was hermetically sealed from other cultures but given that we lurch from lifestyle to lifestyle pretty quickly no one can predict how we'll be living in 100 years and there's no part of the human planet in which you have a self-contained set of breeding isolates but you have constant immigration and emigration we're moving target for biological evolution and it's possible that we're not evolving in any particular direction we know in other cases of evolution that species don't change sometimes over millions of years and although no one can you'd have to sort of go into a time machine in the future to answer the question i think there's reason to believe that there's no consistent change in human evolution that we can spot right now okay at least evolution in the biological sense yes um i'm sure that your statement or finding that children are not shaped by parents as much as they are by gene's culture and the chance surprised many and but i would like to know what study or studies did you use to support that statement and also um what or how it was measured and where they were conducted yes there's a by now a large number of studies from behavior geneticists most people hear about these studies because they remember the findings that that there is some statistical genetic influence on on behavior such as the fact that twins separated at birth are are highly similar but those same studies try to see whether growing up in a given home has a lasting effect and often to the shock of the researchers themselves who are sure since let's say the effect of the genes is uh 40 to 50 percent of the variation in a particular sample what everyone expected would be that the other 50 to 60 percent would come from the home from growing up in the same homes that say adopted siblings growing up in the same home should be much more similar than randomly selected pairs of people and in study after study uh done in numerous countries united states scandinavia um western europe time and again the results came out to be zero to ten percent of the variation being attributed to a given family so the there are two sets of studies that uh use different techniques but have the same conclusion namely sibs separated at birth are no more sorry no less similar sims brought up together and adopted siblings are not similar at all corroborating that there are a number of studies of um that look at parenting in other ways that i think also are consistent with this finding and the the person who really deserves credit for summing it up is judith rich harris in her book the nurture assumption she also points out that studies that compare different kids growing up in very different circumstances only children versus children with siblings kids who spend a lot of time in daycare versus those with stay-at-home moms kids with two lesbian mothers versus one of each sex kids who grow up in a hippie commune as opposed to a kind of leave it to beaver home in all of those cases the effects are pretty close to zero so that's a whole set of corroborations of what the behavioral geneticists tell us about the long-term effects of parenting then on top of that if you here's some sort of a common sense observation that i think is very robust if you look at immigration you look at cases where kids grow up in one culture and their parents come from another culture how do what how do the kids end up take accent as them as a salient example the answer is in virtually every case kids grow up with the accent of their peers not the accent of their parents and not even something that's halfway in between the accent of their peers and their parents likewise with styles of dress tastes in music and so on so the upshot of these studies is not by no means that genes are everything because they show conclusively the genes generally don't account for more than half of the variance that's a lot more than zero it's a lot less than a hundred percent what it suggests is that culture matters uh that is not the individual parents but the surrounding pure culture and and probably also the chance matters excuse me just uh in addition here is that it seems to me that i mean that's why i ask what was actually measured because if you measure a in behavioral way like how they walk how they dress etc etc then definitely i mean parents do not have to have a certain strong role in that however if you measure value system that is actually underneath our skin some i mean it's somewhere in there it's not really that visible and it's not as easy to measure it and and it kind of operates our behavior kind of down the line then this is kind of where i'm a little bit just you know curious whether they were measuring just you know how they dress how to talk what to do in an elevator as you said or or um you know or they actually measured a value system into two well here are some things here are some of the things they they um did measure that are at least indirectly relevant to the value system one of it is what they do most often is give tests of personality and these are batteries that you may have many of you may have filled out where you uh do a checklist of 550 statements that are then the numbers are then crunched and they indicate more or less reliably how conscientious someone is that is whether they attend to or they're responsible and attentive details or whether they're more sloppy and irresponsible uh how agreeable versus antagonistic they are that is do they basically sort of like people or they basically hostile to other people whether they're neurotic or self-confident introverted extroverted so these are some of the things that are um where you can't measure an effect of the home and family also there's some concrete cut and dried behavioral statistics that that fall under this generalization likelihood of getting divorced um likelihood of getting into trouble with the law which um is again not shows an environmental effective neighborhood sometimes but not one of uh typically one of parents a number of cigarettes smoked a number of hours of television watched the generalization is just about anything you measure uh shows uh an effective genes that's greater than zero less than a hundred percent an effect of parenting that is small zero to ten percent an effect of something else presumably culture and chance that is about 50 percent of the variation thank you yes to what degree do you think that art or aesthetic judgments might be constrained or shaped by biological human nature or maybe phrased another way what i potential or relevance do you think that um cognitive science has in discussions of the humanities about aesthetic value or equality yeah um it's an interesting question i have a chapter on that kind of topic um i think there is an influence that's often underestimated in the contemporary um uh world of criticism that there are um patterns universal patterns in music there are universal visual motifs such as symmetry and repetition there are universal patterns in what makes a face attractive and what makes a landscape attractive poetry has a common structure of three-second lines followed by pauses so in part it's a question of whether the glass is half empty or half full there's undoubtedly variation in aesthetic tastes from culture to culture and from decade to decade but there's also i think some degree of uh of commonality and i i cite some of the sources of universal aesthetics in that chapter yes it's common commonly believed that child abuse can cause personality disorders and it seems to be the basis of psychotherapy that people should look into their childhood to discover how to fix their current lives and i'm wondering if that's a caveat to your heritability argument um and if you want to take the genetics out of it you can point to cases of step parents abusing children um and resulting in profound personality disorders yeah yeah that's a good question certainly cases of of uh criminal abuse i think we have reason to believe can can leave um scars in the form of uh basically the equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder which i think children can suffer from as much as adults but it's not clear that in general say how parents treat their children in the first few years of life leaves a lasting mark on their personality and other than uh then i think the extremes of neglect and abuse growing up in a romanian orphanage deprived of all human contact or being beaten by a parent and being traumatized that way other than that it's not clear that current life difficulties can be traced back to parental maltreatment even though that is a or at least it was a common assumption in psychotherapy especially uh psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy um i think there's there's not a whole lot of evidence for that and more and more contemporary psychotherapists are moving away from finding the root of the adult difficulties in parental treatment and simply um saying to people well that was then this is now let's look at how you can um uh cope with the current challenges based on the talents and temperaments you now have uh but it is a key question yes yes uh do you think that there are innate and significant mental or psychological uh differences between racial groups um i don't think there's any uh well i don't think there's any evidence that the differences between racial groups have a genetic basis and the reason is that the current differences in ethnic groups and races in measures like iq can always be matched to historic differences between ethnic groups that have now disappeared so that the say the the gap between uh african-american and european americans in iq scores today is similar to the gap between immigrants from western europe and eastern europe in the 1920s but that difference vanished and similarly the even within a particular ethnic or racial group we know that iq scores have risen over recent over the past 70 or 80 years about three iq points a decade uh no one knows why and it's certainly not a genetic difference because evolution doesn't uh operate that quickly and so um since we know that there that a 15 point iq gap can simply exist between say european americans today and european americans in 1950 there's no reason to believe that the difference between different ethnic groups or races couldn't have a an environmental explanation of a similar magnitude yes i'm not quite sure what my question is but i am i'll try to maybe ask ask a question anyway in listening to you i have the sense somehow um a quality or an aspect of intersubjectivity is missing and i wish i could hear more of that or did i miss or did i not hear something that you said but for example in the the example of the pilots um that it's not an intellectual reasoning you know to to fear that one might for eternity be in hell if one doesn't do something but it's it's sometimes a permeability of a mind to other minds or a permeability between minds where um a hatred or a joy or a quality of mind penetrates another mind and there's the barriers are are loosened and um it seems that somehow in talking about human nature that quality of inter-subjectivity um it needs to be included and i wondered if there was some relationship between that and the the issue of electric stimulus to the mind as being indistinguishable from a from an experience that perhaps it has to do not is it is is that impression due perhaps to a the person's lack of discernment maybe a more discerning brain or human being would be able to um tell the difference okay so the first one by in an intersubjectivity do you mean say sort of shared cultural assumptions sort of a common way of seeing the world that uh proliferates through a culture and that might differ from one culture to another no i think i mean something more um more mysterious for example when you can feel another person's thought or feeling you know these types of coincidences people ask about and also the way those are misused in in group think or in in mobs of people suddenly becoming influenced by a demagogue you know that they're they lose the control of their own minds they become invaded by a another way of thinking there certainly is a mob psychology or group psychology as when i say during a riot when uh people can kind of lose their individuality and feel compelled to do what everyone around them is doing um i don't think it's mysterious in the sense of synchronicity or or some kind of junkie and collective unconscious i think it's mediated by social signals from one individual to another but it is an interesting aspect of our psychology that that we can lose ourself in a group um in terms of the uh the second question was remind me the difference with the the um electrical system oh i see well it's um you know i think that people can at a cognitive level know well here i am i'm sitting here in this chair and there's my my skull is open and there's a guy there sticking a uh an electrode into my brain i'm probably not at my ninth birthday party right now uh but it sure feels like i am uh so i think there is this sort of separate cognitive level that in some cases can distinguish between the hallucination and the real state of affairs um but on the other hand there are also cases that we know from from brain damage where the person doesn't have those cues of the you know the neurosurgeon and the the whole team where people really are deluded uh about what they are and are not feeling because the relevant cues would be part of my brain is missing but since we are our brains when a part is missing most of the time we have no way of knowing and you can have often shocking confabulations of people with brain damage precisely because the external cue of the of the surgeons say or the drug that you remember taking is not available oliver sacks writes very uh um uh eloquently about that such as the the person who um no longer felt that his leg uh was part of his body and uh thought that the doctors had put someone else's leg in his bed even though at the cognitive level you would think he would say well here i am in a you know neurology ward and i they tell me i suffered a stroke this must be a hallucination but uh or a confabulation but very often people with brain damage are unable to step outside themselves and recognize that a compelling feeling uh is a product of a damaged brain that's how compelling it is let me give you just another example of a set of syndromes typically going along with right hemisphere damage where a um a woman who had had a stroke and um was paralyzed and refused to acknowledge that she was paralyzed because the paralysis wasn't from say a spinal cord injury where the brain is intact and can recognize the disparity between the thought and the physical action but if the damage is actually in the brain and since we are our brain the faculty of knowing that it must be our own infirmity can itself be damaged and so uh a woman denied that there was anything wrong with her and um uh would just weave a coherent story as to everything about her like why there are crutches oh well i uh you know my leg was a little bit weak this morning so i needed the crutches well you know aren't do you recognize you're here in a nursing home you're not at home oh yes well it's uh we it just looks like a nursing home we rearranged the furniture well do you have an elevator in your house oh you wouldn't believe what it cost to have that installed and she would rearrange reality her conception of reality to be consistent with the fact that nothing was wrong with her and this often happens and it shows that that um indeed there are cases where the sense of discernment itself being a brain function can be impaired yes you mentioned um the vilification of those who are successful and i'm wondering you also talk about um well it seems like it's a random distribution of capability that humans have as a species and so i wonder about if you could discuss poverty and the amount of gray matter that goes unused and how this how your book or your findings may could affect social policy yes well in the book i make it very clear that i um don't i i don't argue for particular social policies um because i don't think that's that the discoveries about uh the biology of the brain or of of genes or of evolution have uh automatically lead to social policies simply because any social policy that's worth debating will involve some trade-off between uh the competing goods and i think the best that science can do is illuminate what the trade-off is but how to resolve the trade-off uh is up to ordinary debate in a democracy so let's say in the case of uh economic equality or inequality the fact that people might differ partly genetically in traits that could lead to greater or less economic success say ambition intelligence and so on doesn't does it mean that well we should tolerate whatever inequality we find because it's it's in the genes and in a completely fair system you expect some inequality well not necessarily because um eliminating visible signs of inequality is itself a could be a social goal separate from strict fairness and freedom and one has to trade off being in a society in which you uh less a fair society in which all you do is level the playing field and let people end up wherever they end up and the good of reducing suffering of the of poor people who may by no choice of their own end up having trouble making a living and there's no way in which these competing goods of say maximum freedom or maximum equality can be satisfied at the same time so you can and you could i think array political philosophies in terms of how they resolve that trade-off an extreme say ein rand style libertarianism would say that the only value is freedom and to heck with with an equality of outcome a say a maoist or stalinist philosophy would say to heck with freedom what's important is everyone end up the same and it doesn't matter how much we suppress individuals to end up that way and then most philosophical philosophies that we debate are somewhere in between how much freedom should we trade off for a reduction in inequality or a reduction in the uh suffering of of uh poorer people and um so my argument is not that um the uh any discoveries about heritability should dictate what our political choices are but just they make the choices a little bit clearer yes thank you for speaking tonight um i i'm sure you've been asked this question before but one of the implications of linking human behavior to almost a physical component either of the brain or the genetics is that medical treatments can be suggested for aberrant behavior and examples of this might be depression or you know the ability to focus and so what would be i guess your opinion on treatments like drug treatments versus therapeutic treatments and this sort of situation and kind of the concept of almost medical perfectibility of behavior or human nature yeah well i think that um the uh first of all we just we have to know what what the facts are namely what are the side effects of of pharmaceutical interventions um and often there will be side effects and so it's again a kind of cost benefit trade-off i think if there is a meta a pharmaceutical intervention that reduces suffering say alleviates depression or anxiety or attention disorder and has no side effects or the side effects are outweighed by the benefits then people should have the freedom of using them but it's an empirical question say in the case of depression whether simply taking a pill is better than say taking a pill and undergoing therapy or for that matter undergoing therapy alone there i would simply be kind of an empiricist and say let's look at the statistics as to what works my understanding is in the case of depression drugs and therapy are more effective than either one alone and i would provide hope that people will be provided with the information of what works to what extent it could make their choices accordingly one more yeah hi a difficult problem in computer science one of the more difficult ones has been a random number generator making a very good one of those and the at first glance it can seem like a contradiction in terms a computer needs a set list of instructions that it will perform the same way every time and yet it's supposed to come up with to our mind something different every time a different number and the random number generators i've seen have always relied fundamentally on a human input at the very beginning and then it'll multiply it by three divide by seven etc so the belief is that the ghost in the machine can come up with a pure spontaneous random number the seed and then the computer programmer the computer program can take over from there but if neuroscience seems to be seeing that the brain is just another kind of computer is that negating the idea of whim or spontaneity that there is no such thing as random bursts that we can direct too not that just come because someone hit me in the hammer because i say i want my random number to be five things like that yes so who's the eye that provides the seed to the pseudo random number generator yeah um well it's you know we don't know enough and that in cases where human behavior really is unpredictable and it looks like a coin is being flipped um it's possible that like the first computer that i ever used uh when i was an undergraduate this was a a pdp-11 mini computer where we needed the lab needed a generate random sequences and it didn't have the computational power to do a proper pseudorandom approximation and so there was a gadget that had a little bit of some kind of radioactive substance and i don't know if it was a radium and a little geiger counter and it actually used the physical indeterminacy to generate the random numbers it's possible that in the human brain there are uh quantum level interactions so that whether a neurotransmitter molecule zigs instead of zags could be due to some kind of ultimately quantum event that gets amplified or it could be some kind of non-linearity uh some sort of chaotic system where some minuscule infinitesimal difference in the initial conditions can set the brain off in one direction or another would again wouldn't be truly random but it would be the functional equivalent of random and it may begin the seed maybe were you you know this way in your mother's womb or that way in your mother's womb or did you you know did your mom uh you know jog for one mile or two miles on a particular day so i think the indeterminacy to the extent that there is indeterminacy and you know as i mentioned in the case of the cars coming down the highway we hope that in many cases of human behavior there is not indeterminacy but the indiscriminacy that there is like should i order chocolate or vanilla could come from physical processes with a random seed of either of those events okay why don't we take one more i was fascinated by um in the nature nurture debate about your injection of the role of chance of this kind of follow-up question to the one you were just addressing and i was hoping you could expand a little bit on some of the ways in which uh chance events play a role in our psyche and perhaps even in psychopathology for example in adults well here's some of the possibilities i mean again the just to make it very clear the datum that we're trying to explain is as follows identical twins reared together uh typically correlate maybe let's say 0.5 that is less than 100 now they share their genes and they share their environment at least most of their environment um this refutes just about every theory in the history of psychology uh because there's this huge percentage of the variance that's neither heredity nor measurable environment here are some of the possibilities chance events in the development of the brain in utero or in the first few years of life while the brain is still developing such as the ones that i just mentioned does a growth cone of an axon go left or go right chance events in in other biological events do do you inhale a virus or does a virus get purchased in your cells or get just uh surrounded by the immune system and it's possible that some of the missing variants in diseases and pathology could come from pathogens chance events do you in throughout your life you you pick up a brochure and some field that you never knew about turns you on and you decide from that moment on that you've always wanted to be a you know cognitive psychologist or a trapeze artist uh you bump into someone and they say something and you you think about it and you know you think some more about it and you do something that sets you off in a direction and then that kind of puts you on a groove that leads you farther or farther apart from your identical twin who didn't have that conversation um so these are some of the possibilities that could add up events cultural chance events uh really a whole panoply of different uh yes exactly probably a larger role than has ever been acknowledged as far as you're concerned exactly and some of the corroboration of that suspicion comes from studies of development in laboratory organisms such as c elegans the worm or drosophila the fruit fly which shows that in highly inbred strains which are the equivalent of clones or identical twins brought up in monotonous highly controlled laboratory conditions same temperature and salinity and so on you can have organisms that are physically different that can have different numbers of bristles under one wing or under another wing in the case of roundworms you can have differences in longevity of a factor of three and as one um longevity specialist studying c elegans pointed out that the variation in the lifespan of uh genetically homogeneous roundworms brought up in laboratory conditions is the same as what we find in human beings living a variety of lifestyles neglecting or taking care of their health bumping into enraged postal workers eating tainted beef uh all of these bakeries of human life give us variance in our life in our lifespan which is the same as basically the equivalent of clones growing up in a monotonous laboratory so chance if it has that much of an effect in an organism that's only composed of 959 cells imagine how chance could operate in an organism of trillions of cells

Channel: intellectual Dark web - iDW

Views: 26,757

Keywords: The Portal, Eric Weinstein, exploration, discovery, conversations, leaders, Thiel Capital, science, culture, business, capitalism, demons, Andrew Yang, NY Times, bestselling, Sam Harris, Navy Seal, Jocko Willink, presidential candidate

Id: 6A_6yR00pHA

Length: 111min 36sec (6696 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020