Man has no nature. (José Ortega y Gassett)
The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none. (Stephen Jay Gould)
Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything. (B.F. Skinner)
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Steven Pinker, the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the Annals of Improbable Research. Photo: Rose Lincoln/Harvard University, via Wikimedia. Creative Commons license.
I rarely buy hardback books for reasons, in equal measure, of economy and utility. One exception to this, nearly 20 years ago, was Canadian linguist-psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. My splurge was rewarded: it’s a terrific read, in which Pinker wraps complicated, controversial and complex themes and ideas in a playful and easy-to-digest text. My sort of book.
In it, Pinker demolishes the thesis that we are born as “blank slates” (as alluded to above by historian Ortega y Gasset, evolutionist Gould and psychologist Skinner) i.e. that we — our minds — are 100% products of the environment in which we grow up, including that of our parents and of society as a whole, and of our life experiences. He undermines the blank slate idea in at least four ways: universal traits, acquisition of culture, twin studies and our Stone Age responses.
Universal traits: There are literally hundreds of universal traits in all of our planet’s 6,000-odd cultures. (The Darwinian anthropologist Donald Brown itemized about 300 in his 1991 book Human Universals, listed in an appendix in The Blank Slate.) While it sometimes seem as if our seven billion persons are defined by our differences, a Martian anthropologist would be much more impressed by our commonalities. Eight traits in particular define humanness in every society that’s been studied by anthropologists: belonging (we’re social beings); community (we want to be part of something larger than our individual selves); creativity (we’re imaginative); curiosity (we triumphed over our non-curious ancestors); family (whatever our relationship with our family, it’s hugely important); love (nature’s trick to get us to self-perpetuate); memory (both to help our own lives and to pass on survival information to our progeny); storytelling (from the earliest raconteurs and cave painters).
Acquisition of Culture: Somehow we — all of us — effortlessly “acquire” the culture into which we’re born. How? Because we’re born already wired with the innate circuitry that supports this ability. (Compare this to Noam Chomsky’s controversial “Language Acquisition Device.” I explored the controversy here.)
Twin studies: This is where the blank slate thesis falls apart empirically. I’m usually wary of anecdotal evidence, but the story of identical twins Oskar and Jack is worth repeating here. Separated at birth, one was raised in a Catholic and pro-Nazi family in Germany, the other in a Jewish family in Trinidad. When they agreed to take part in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared-Apart (which aimed to differentiate between inherited traits and those learned from the environment), they arrived at the airport wearing “the same rimmed glasses, the same neatly trimmed mustaches, the same quirky shirts with epaulets and four pockets on the front, the same collection of rubber bands on their wrists.”
(For that matter, anyone who has had more than one child, twins or not, knows that kids don’t arrive as if cast from the same mold!)
Stone Age responses: We’re born with stuff learned a million years ago on the East African savannah. Ever wonder why ice cream is so delicious? It’s no accident that our Pleistocene forebears learned the survival value of sugars and fats, leading to our unhealthy cravings today. Or why it’s so hard to let go of perceived hurts and injustices? Way back then, human’s thirst for revenge kept things orderly in the tribe. Why men, the world over, are preferentially attracted to women with a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio? Think fertility…
If all this intrigues you, do watch this old TED talk from Stephen Pinker here—it will be the best 22 minutes of your day. Unless you’re rafting on the Klamath.
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