Book Review Essay

Rationality Run Amok

Grant Evans
Anthropology, University of Hong Kong
Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York, NY: Viking Press 2002. Pp.528, bibliog., index. $US19.56 (Hc.), ISBN 0-67003-15 1-8; $US1 1.20 (Pb.), ISBN 0-14200-334-4. Melvin Konner. The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. Second Edition, Revised and Updated. New York, NY:Henry Holt and Company, 2002. Pp.540, bibliog., index. US$35 (Hc.), ISBN 0-71674-602-6; US$20 (Pb.), ISBN 0-80507-227-9.
Steven Pinkers The Blank Slate is a strong statement for the relevance of biology to an understanding of inequality, violence, gender, and other key social and political issues. Although it is hard not to be irritated by Pinkers verbosity and political posturing, his forceful style has made him one of the most articulate proponents of the broad field of evolutionary biology. A more low-key text is Melvin Konners The Tangled Wing, whose first edition published in 1982 I much admired. The opening line of his new and thoroughly revised book declares boldly: Human nature exists. To some this may be a modest claim, but to others it is a frontal assault on ... deeply held beliefs @.xi$. This is Pinkers argument too, but he struts his stuff like Mick Jagger, grabbing the attention of review editors in search of sensationalism. By contrast, Konners densely, elegantly written book sums up a lifetimes knowledge and is deeply, quietly thoughtful. It is the better of these two important books. Reading them back to back one is struck by their similarity, by how much they draw on the same evidence and examples, down to the same screaming headlines about this or that breakthrough in genetics and what it may mean for humanity, or the scientifically nalve US governor who handed out Mozart to all new mothers believing it would enhance their childrens intelligence. In those inevitable moments when ones attention wanders, I sometimes had to remind myself exactly which book it was I was reading. Both authors are critical of what Pinker characterises as Blank Slate theories which play down, or completely deny the role of genetic inheritance in the formation of intelligence or personality. One major scientific exponent was the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner who saw all human development as a product of external conditioning. A variant of this has been predominant in sociology with the primacy it has given to socialisation and social conditions. Walt Disney wrote, I think of a childs mind as a blank book, a metaphor that has attracted more than one social reformer. Blank Slate theories, our authors argue, are favourites of social engineers, especially those who wish to create new societies and new people-remember socialist man? All attempts to do so in the twentieth century have been disastrous, and both writers argue that a more realistic understanding of human nature and its limitations would alert us to the dangers inherent

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in such dreams. Even though most people are not utopian revolutionaries many, especially in the social sciences, remain hostile to arguments for a human nature. They see it as conservative, an argument against any change or amelioration of the human condition. Not so, both Pinker and Konner are at pains to argue. Change they say is possible but only within certain parameters, and change based on a scientific understanding of these parameters will hopefully help ensure that people dont get mangled in the process. In his discussion of inequality Pinker is right to point out that Many atrocities of the twentieth century were committed in the name of egalitarianism, in Stalins Russia, Maos China, and Pol Pots Kampuchea (Konner runs an almost identical list at one point). He also dares to raise the controversy about inborn differences, saying that inborn differences are one contributor to social status, but is quick to add that they are not the only contributor, inherited wealth, race, i.e. the environment also plays an important but debatable role. A non-blank slate means that a trade off between freedom and material equality is inherent to all political systems, he writes. And that in turn means that any discovery of innate differences among individuals is not forbidden knowledge to be suppressed but information that might help us decide on these tradeoffs in an intelligent and humane manner (p. 152). Konners revision of The Tangled Wing has been substantial and he has drawn on the extraordinary advances that have been made in our knowledge of animal and human biology since the first edition, knowledge which is set to increase exponentially. In that time, he writes:
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have become the main research paradigms for thousands of professionals studying animal and human behaviour, and evolution itself rests on a new scientific foundation, thanks to advances in molecular genetics, geology, and electron microscopy. Some critics continue to rail against these trends, but they appear increasingly shrill and impotent. Sociobiology has triumphed. (p.xviii)

The latter is probably his most provocative statement, and one suspects it is a settling of old scores. As he says elsewhere in the book, he normally only gives two cheers for sociobiology. Sociobiology was made famous by E. 0. Wilson in a book of the same name, published in 1975, which argued that evolutionary biology could make an important contribution to the understanding of human societies. Reviewers pounced on several rash statements in the final chapter to denounce its biological reductionism and a furore ensued. Wilson himself was generally quite careful, saying that humans were unique in the extent to which they are not genetically programmed and the degree to which culture determines their ways of life. But, as usual, his followers were not so prudent and their attempts to colonise the social sciences were as blatant as their reductionism. Many silly things were said, and consequently a number of people who previously marched under the flag of sociobiology now call themselves evolutionary psychologists. A key part of the dispute revolves around reductionism. Pinker has some useful clarifications of what he calls greedy reductionism, or the attempt to explain things by reduction to their simplest constituents. Thus, if anyone really thought that sociology or literature or history could be replaced by biology, why stop there? Biology could be ground up into chemistry, and chemistry into physics, leaving one struggling to explain the causes of World War 1 in terms of electrons and quarks (p. 170). Good reductionism on the other hand is hierarchical in that it does not attempt to collapse one field into another, but tries to connect them and perhaps test the claims of one field against those of

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another. Somewhat more problematic, but still useful, is his insistence that proximate or real time causes be distinguished from ultimate causes, such as lust from the rationale of species reproduction. Unfortunately, however, Pinker often fails to adhere to his own strictures. Indeed, Jagger-like Pinker is too preoccupied with teasing the crowd. It makes him careless, so that often we are unclear whether a causal statement is being made, or simply a correlation. For example, he claims that

... behavioral traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments are heritable: how proficient with language you are, how religious, how liberal or conservative ... And traits that are surprisingly specific turn out to be heritable, too, such as dependence on nicotine or alcohol, number of hours of television watched, and likelihood of divorcing. (p.375)
But, what is really being said or implied here? For, two pages on, we are told that behavioural genetic methods can show only that traits correlate with genes, not that they are directly caused by them. Time and again the reader is left with the impression that a causal explanation is being offered, only to fmd it qualified or withdrawn in the arguments fine print. Pinker shuffles the deck so fast you are either taken in, or start to believe the guy is a little crooked. Furthermore, as in the above claims, Pinker rarely tells you where his data comes from-though one can safely assume that most comes from the USA. The fact that the data may be culturally specific is rarely considered by him, fixed as he is on universal mechanisms that underlie superficial variations across cultures. Just what a superficial variation may be is never explained. Even if the above data do predict (correlate with?) divorce in the US, for instance, they are hardly likely to in all the various divorce regimes we find cross-culturally or historically. A respectful reading of W. J. Goodes (1993) study of divorce regimes would have shown Pinker this-or are they just superficial variations? Yet again, one is left wondering, what sorts of claims are being advanced? Konner, on the other hand, proposes arguments which, while anathema to BlankSlatists, are made unambiguously. For example, he writes of data from North America, Japan and England showing that if one twin is a lawbreaker then there is a very high chance that the other one will be too, especially if they are identical twins. That means that if you are a social worker looking at a convicted juvenile and you know that boy has a twin, you are justified in being more concerned for the unconvicted twin when he is identical (p.193). And, both Konner and Pinker would argue that it would be irresponsible to ignore such correlations. Nevertheless, Konner makes it clear that the facts also leave room for-indeed they demand-nvironmental factors of even greater importance. Fiji? percent of the identical twins of adult felons are not criminals. Something other than genes creates the immense difference (p.193). Our two authors have very different styles. Konner, a behavioural anthropologist with medical training, is less confident about global claims for genetic influences and more attuned to the importance of society and culture. The latter concepts hardly exist in the optic of Pinker, the cognitive neuroscientist, who like many psychologists seems to find entities larger than the individual or smaller than humankind hard to contemplate. Differences in training are also apparent. Konner has spent years in the field in Africa learning another culture, whereas Pinker appears to have lived his life in a laboratory. Indeed Pinker, when not hostile, is largely indifferent to ways of life outside the US. Among other things, this leads to a cavalier treatment of the evidence. In his tirade against

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ideas of the noble savage he criticises, for example, a book on the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, called The Harmless People (1960). But as soon as anthropologists camped out long enough to accumulate data, they discovered that the !Kung San have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities (p.56). Konner is one of the anthropologists who camped out among them, and while he repeats this shocking statistic about the !Kung San, and criticises romantic views of them, he still writes of their society: Far from brutish, it is courageous, egalitarian, good-humored, philosophical-in a word, civilized-with an esthetic so fine its very music touches the gods (p.8). Some human societies have constructed relatively successful and satisfying ways of living, without the benefits of modem science and US-style democracy. And, not through their own fault, many of them have been destroyed. There is no going back, as Konner reminds us. But that should not stop us from acknowledging their achievement. Pinkers chapter Culture Vultures on anthropology is almost embarrassing in its inadequacy, and too often one feels his knowledge is third hand. Furthermore, Pinker seems to believe that anthropology is some variant of post-modem cultural studies. Franz Boas is praised for helping to overthrow bad racial science, but his successors allegedly then made culture completely autonomous from biology. Unfortunately, that left the dramatic differences among cultures unexplained, says Pinker, but here one could list a mountain of books just by American anthropologists who outlined the ecological foundations of different cultures. Boass brilliant student of linguistics, Edward Sapir, is pilloried for allegedly asserting the autonomy of linguistic categories. I wonder what Pinker would make of the following comment on personality types from Sapir (2002: 153): Genetically determined predispositions may be shown, for example in [childrens] varying sensitivity to loud noises, and their varying apperception...? One of the hot buttons (Pinkers term) both authors press is arguments over the impact of parents on their childrens personalities. And both draw on developmental psychologist Judith Harriss book, The Nurture Assumption (1998). Pinkers take on her argument is that Its not all in the genes, but what isnt in the genes isnt from parents either. Socializationacquiring the norms and skills necessary to function in society-takes place in the peer group. In a cutesy way he adds: Children have cultures, too,... Right on pop! Beyond that, the best he can do is say that parents select an environment for their children and thereby select a peer group (p.390). Like Pinker, Konner is annoyed by the psychological guilt-industry in the US which provides endless flaky advice to parents, and he also finds Hamss work a healthy antidote to it, although she only has a piece of the truth. Group socialisation comes as no surprise to anthropologists, who see in it cultural reproduction. Parents, Konner suggests, contribute to cultural stability, while peers stimulate change, a distinction the researchers may be missing:
But what really allows the underestimation of parental influence-and indeed of all environmental forces-is that the families studied by psychologists are so similar to one another. As any basic-statistics student can tell you, if two causes influence an outcome, then holding one of them constant highlights the others effect. So it is not surprising that when family environments in a sample are very similar, the effects of the genes look larger... That is why cultural anthropology was invented. By enormously widening the spectrum of learning environments, it highlighted the impact of their effects. (p.407)

But there is plenty of room to doubt a methodology that negates parental influence on their childrens personalities. Pinker does make the point that peer groups may explain socialisation but maybe not how children develop their personalities. However, like so

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many psychologists he is blinded by statistical methodology, and thus individual personality or the unexplained variance becomes a product of chance events in brain assembly, indeed fate! Non-statistical life history and narrative approaches, on the other hand, can reveal the unique cognitive effects of parents. But these approaches are rejected by scientists who, in the ultimate rationalist manoeuvre seem to argue that if it cannot be quantified then it doesnt exist. In their early pages both authors comment with some alarm on the fact that 76% of people in the US believe in the Biblical account of creation while only 15% believe Darwinism, and 67% think that they will exist in some spiritual form after their death. These are extraordinary figures for the most scientifically advanced country on earth, and they are clearly galling for those who are so committed to a scientific vocation. Indeed, when George W. Bush announced that the US government would not fund stem cell research partly because of disputes over when ensoulment occurs one can fully understand the frustration of Pinker and other American natural scientists. Yet, at no point does Pinker pause to ask himself why Americans hold such a set of beliefs, whereas populations in other scientifically advanced societies are much more comfortable with Darwin. Indeed, Canadians who are close in many ways, are not committed to creationism. Why? In his important chapter Out of Our Depths, Pinker writes of the lay persons intuitive psychology or theory of mind as being animated, driven by non-physical entities we cannot see or touch. And this arises from our recognition that others have interests too, which he says is the basis of our moral convictions. It is peoples intuitive psychology that leads to bizme misconceptions of cloning as the duplication of bodies without a soul, for example. Among them this animism is likely to emerge whenever they have not digested the findings of biology. But why have so many people in the US not digested these findings? No answer. Time and again Pinker finds himself hoist on his own petard because in the absence of an explanation derived from evolutionary biology he is lost. Clearly the differences between US and Canadian populations (let alone others), whether it be in religious beliefs or a propensity to violence, are primarily amenable to social and historical explanations. But having so thoroughly denounced sociologicayhistorical explanations Pinker has painted himself into a comer. Indeed, to explain historical changes he propounds an idealist teleology of progress. Thus the changed status of women is part of the inexorable logic of the expanding moral circle, which led also to the abolition of despotism, slavery, feudalism, and racial segregation. No mention here of crass material causes like demography, trade, or political structures! But there are deeper issues. Having identified a general human propensity to animism, it is surely also obvious that it is not going to go away. It is part of human nature. The white light of scientific reasoning may have more profound effects in some populations rather than others for specific sociological and historical reasons, and among specific individuals due to the peculiarities of biography. But even among scientists it is not going to be exorcised entirely, and indeed it may be why they sometimes wish to play God. Pinker occasionally lays down the sword of pure reason to contemplate these difficult issues, realising that we are all a little bit out of our depths. He is, of course, not the first person to have noted the mismatch between our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past and the current uses to which we put our brains and bodies. Conspicuous by their absence are faculties suited to the stunning new understanding of the world wrought by science and technology (p.221). Even if our brains are neural networks driven by electro-chemical

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activity, the way we think and decide is not simply intelligent computation, subjective emotions and motivations always intervene to confound cold rationality. This, Konner argues, is because the brain in evolution felt before it could think. The brain is a makeshift, inelegant evolutionary pastiche. It is surely a parallel processor, but its structure of side-by-side or nested elements preserves ancient and outmoded chunks of circuitry forced to work in tandem with shiny, superfast new ones (p. 142). As he shows, emotions are crucial to our ability to make decisions. However, just what emotions are, not surprisingly, is contested territory. Konner and other evolutionists claim that emotions like happiness and grief are universal, but some anthropologists have argued that they are culturally specific and untranslatable. In part this has rested on a simple-minded equation of words with emotions. But, variable forms of verbal expression are only one aspect of the cultural management of emotion, which is the far more tenable proposition advanced by Konner. Nevertheless, the dispute does highlight an important misunderstanding between some proponents of human nature and anthropologists engaged in the study of cultural contingencies. Most of the propositions advanced by evolutionary psychologists are rather blunt instruments in the field, especially when it comes to emotions where nuance is often all. The detailed ethnographies of anthropologists are attempts to capture and understand these all-important nuances for the people they are studying. Why did she raise her eyebrow? Was he sneering or just smiling? A voice too loud or too soft ... all of which could be matters of life or death. While following these arcane manoeuvres ethnographers can easily lose sight of broader themes; evolutionary psychologists on the other hand often appear little interested in what animates human interaction on a day-today basis. Clearly there remains a huge gulf of understanding between the natural and social sciences, with only the megalomania of statistical methodologies perhaps overlapping the domains, but even then usually in the service of very different theoretical strategies. Sometimes this leads to simple misrecognition, as with Pinkers account of cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperbers argument for an epidemiology of mental representations as a way of trying to understand the uneven distribution of culture in a population. Unlike others who have developed mathematical models of culture, Sperber makes it clear that his use of epidemiology is metaphorical precisely because culture does not reproduce itself exactly whereas a disease does. Each time it is transmitted it changes a little, because of the ambiguity of symbols. Subsequently, this has taken him in the direction of investigating why certain cultural ideas might be cognitively catching. Perhaps Pinker missed the point because he was briefed by a faceless research assistant, for the ambiguities of cultural communication in images or words which makes the study of cultural forms so fascinating is something he understands well. Read carehlly even Pinkers book makes it clear that biologists are a long way from developing theories of so-called genetic determinism feared by many social scientists, and Konner discusses how nongenetic changes may swamp gene effects. Both of them argue that social and political issues that are informed by bad biology or none at all can only add to human misery, whereas an intelligent approach to biological knowledge has at least a small chance of alleviating it. If nothing else, Konner Writes, biology may tell us something about how no2 to solve our problems. It is easy to sympathise with Pinkers critique of the tendency to reify society as a moral agent that can be blamed for sins as if it were a person, except that he then loses sight of society altogether, historical or otherwise. The default human society for him is the US, including its moral standards. It is an imperial imagining that matches his often

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imperious tone. Thus we are served up a feel-good list of the failures of other times and other places-the millennia that women have suffered oppression and double standards, morally irrelevant standards of purity such as in India, and the irrationality of the sacred. The difference he says between these atavistic moral positions and ours is that we can give reasons why our conviction is valid. In other words, our morality is rational, because it is based on evolutionary biology. Pinker, deep down, is a closet rationalist utopian. In their final pages both books take us in unexpected directions. Konner revisits Malthus with some dire predictions for the planet; and Pinker makes us wonder if the whole polemical thrust of his book has been a poke at a straw man when he concludes that abandoning the Blank Slate would not be all that radical because it is not central to the world views of most people anyway.

References
Goode, W. J. 1993. World Changes in Divorce Patterns. New Haven, MA: Yale University Press. Harris, J. 1998. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way they Do. New York, NY: Free Press. Sapir, E. 2002. The Psychology of Culture: A Course of Lectures. New York, N Y : Mouton de Gruyet. Thomas, E. M. 1960. The Harmless People London: Secker and Warburg. Wilson, E. 0. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.