A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or
genetics
has become a fixture of British journalism.
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
18
The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a sta~nd in favor of genocide!
What about the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's description of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted"). In it they wrote, "As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. "19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just -- a socialist -- society" and see their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society. "20 At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power {127} based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment -- Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. 22 The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment. " That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous" -- not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.
Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23 -- presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it lust as they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. " But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which . . . shall we choose? . . . Let us take this stand. . . . We can do otherwise. " And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will. "24 {128}
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness. " Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet. ) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution -- limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority -- then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect hu~mans.
The Ghost in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left. In his book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature, the psychologist Morton Hunt has shown that the foes include people on the left, people on the right, and a motley collection of single-issue fanatics in between. 25 So far I have discussed the far-left outrage because it has been deployed in the battlefield of ideas in the universities and the mainstream press. Those on the far right have also been outraged, though until recently they have aimed at different targets and have fought in different arenas.
The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain.
The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one creationist minister put it, "If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation? "26
But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical {129} literalism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed in God's image and placed on earth for a larger purpose -- namely, to live a moral life by following God's commandments. If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U. S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel. "27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as "our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud. "28
The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist movement. Until a Supreme Court decision in 1968, states were allowed to ban the teaching of evolution outright. Since then, creationists have tried to hobble it in ways that they hope will pass constitutional muster. These include removing evolution from science proficiency standards, demanding disclaimers
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? that it is "only a theory," watering down the curriculum, and opposing textbooks with good coverage of evolution or imposing ones with coverage of creationism. In recent years the National Center for Science Education has learned of new instances of these tactics at a rate of about one a week, coming from forty states. 29
The religious right is discomfited not just by evolution but by neuro-science. By exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining two moral doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul, which finds value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If behavior is controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of chemistry, choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral responsibility would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, "If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life -- religion, morality, beauty -- is revealed to be without objective basis. "30
The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equivalent to murder. It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be {130} seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging and disease. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 13. )
But the right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature can no longer be associated only with Bible-thumpers and televangelists. Today evolution is being challenged by some of the most cerebral theorists in the formerly secular neoconservative movement. They are embracing a hypothesis called Intelligent Design, originated by the biochemist Michael Behe. 31 The molecular machinery of cells cannot function in a simpler form, Behe argues, and therefore it could not have evolved piecemeal by natural selection. Instead it must have been conceived as a working invention by an intelligent designer. The designer could, in theory, have been an advanced alien from outer space, but everyone knows that the subtext of the theory is that it must have been God.
Biologists reject Behe's argument for a number of reasons. 32 His specific claims about the "irreducible complexity" of biochemistry are unproven or just wrong. He takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out and chalks it up to design by default. When it comes to the intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ignores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel.
Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have also sympathized with creationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the writer William F. Buckley, the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the bioethicist Leon Kass -- chair of George W. Bush's new Council on Bioethics and thus a shaper of the nation's policies on biology and medicine. 33 A story entitled "The Deniable Darwin" appeared, astonishingly, on the cover of Commentary, which means that a magazine that was once a leading forum for secular Jewish intellectuals is now more skeptical of evolution than is the Pope! 34
It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for other people to believe it is false. In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court. The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:
They're simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It's all they have.
That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written: {131}
If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded -- or even if it suspects -- that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe. 35
He spells out the moral corollary:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work. 36
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, "Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is 'the opium of the people'; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God! ' "37
Many conservative intellectuals join fundamentalist Christians in deploring neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they see as explaining away the soul, eternal values, and free choice. Kass writes:
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite) but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. 38
Similarly, the journalist Andrew Ferguson warns his readers that evolutionary psychology "is sure to give you the creeps," because "whether behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and materialism in general, cannot make. "39 The new sciences, he writes, claim that people are nothing but "meat puppets," a frightening shift from the traditional Judeo-Christian view in which "human beings [are] persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious. "40
Even the left-baiting author Tom Wolfe, who admires neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, worries about their moral implications. In his essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," he writes that when science has finally killed the soul ("that last refuge of values"), "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make [Nietzsche's] phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame": {132}
Meanwhile, the notion of a self -- a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior -- a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds -- this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake? ) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away. . . slipping away. . . 41
"Where does that leave self-control? " he asks. "Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all? "42
An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can't stand the sight of each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of "Against 'Sociobiology'" wrote that theories like Wilson's "provided an important basis for . . . the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany. " In May 2001 the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that "Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced . . . to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals. "43 The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its defense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited approvingly in creationist propaganda. 44 Though Gould has been a tireless opponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of Darwinism that creationists fear most.
The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple sexual partners than do females, Rose accused him of really saying:
Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it's not their fault they are genetically programmed. 45
Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek:
The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i. e. , unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it! )46 {133}
On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question:
Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes? 47
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point:
The "scientific belief" would . . . appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal
responsibility, or universal morality. 48
For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a "we" that can construct history and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a "soul" that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this~irreducible locus of free choice.
Where does this leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution itself. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent Design, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional damage the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it sinks is unknown.
The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin. 49 Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice.
A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov probably did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that "Gould can do no wrong," but that is precisely the attitude of many journalists and social scientists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright called him a "stalker" and a "young punk" with "penis envy" because he had the temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts. 50
In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on {134} many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of memory. But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, "Stephen Jay Gould abhors violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a person? "51 This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists' unfair attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.
Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as justifying the station of the poor. The confusions do not come only from the scientifically illiterate but may be found in prestigious publications such as Scientific American and Science. 52 After Wilson argued in Consilience that divisions between fields of human knowledge were becoming obsolete, the historian Tzvetan Todorov wrote sarcastically, "I have a proposal for Wilson's next book . . . [an] analysis of Social Darwinism, the doctrine that was adopted by Hitler, and of the ways it differs from sociobiology. "53 When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2001, its leaders made a ritual denunciation of "genetic determinism," the belief -- held by no one -- that "all characteristics of the person are 'hard-wired' into our genome. "54
Even many scientists are perfectly content with the radicals' social constructionism, not so much because they agree with it but because they are preoccupied in their labs and need picketers outside their window like they need another hole in the head. As the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides note, the dogma that biology is intrinsically disconnected from the human social order offers scientists "safe conduct across the politicized minefield of modern academic life. "55 As we shall see, even today people who challenge the Blank Slate or the Noble Savage are still sometimes silenced by demonstrators or denounced as Nazis. Even when such attacks are sporadic, they create an atmosphere of intimidation that distorts scholarship far and wide.
But the intellectual climate is showing signs of change. Ideas about human nature, while still anathema to some academics and pundits, are beginning to get a hearing. Scientists, artists, scholars in the humanities, legal theorists, and thoughtful laypeople have expressed a thirst for the new insights about the mind that have been coming out of the biological and cognitive sciences. And the radical science movement, for all its rhetorical success, has turned out to be an empirical wasteland. Twenty-five years of data have not been kind to its predictions. Chimpanzees are not peaceful vegetarians, as Montagu claimed, nor is the heritability of intelligence indistinguishable from zero, IQ a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? {135} "reification" unrelated to the brain, personality and social behavior without any genetic basis, gender differences a product only of "psychocultural expectations," or the number of murderous clans equal to the number of pacific bands. 56 Today the idea of guiding scientific research by "a conscious application of Marxist philosophy" is just embarrassing, and as the evolutionary psychologist Martin Daly pointed out, "Sufficient research to fill a first issue of Dialectical Biology has yet to materialize. "57
In contrast, sociobiology did not, as Sahlins had predicted, turn out to be a passing fad. The title of Alcock's 2001 book The Triumph of Sociobiology says it all: in the study of animal behavior, no one even talks about "sociobiology" or "selfish genes" anymore, because the ideas are part and parcel of the science. 58 In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience -- beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence -- in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. 59 Behavioral genetics has revivified the study of personality and will only expand with the application of knowledge from the Human Genome Project. 60 Cognitive neuroscience will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behavior, including the emotionally and politically charged ones. The question is not whether human nature will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, but what we are going to do with the knowledge. What in fact are the implications for our ideals of equality, progress, responsibility, and the worth of the person? The opponents of the sciences of human nature from the left and the right are correct about one thing: these are vital questions. But that is all the more reason that they be confronted not with fear and loathing but with reason. That is the goal of the next part of the book.
<< {137} >>
HUMAN NATURE WITH A HUMAN FACE
hen Galileo attracted the unwanted attention of the Inquisition in 1633, more was at stake than issues in astronomy. By stating that the W Earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa, Galileo was contradicting the literal truth of the Bible, such as the passage in which
Joshua issued the successful command "Sun, stand thou still. " Worse, he was challenging a theory of the moral order of the universe.
According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below (hence Samuel Johnson's disclaimer that he could not "change sublunary nature"). Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained within the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals (in the order beasts, birds, fish, insects), then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications. Our home, it was thought, lay at the center of the universe, reflecting the importance of our existence and behavior. People lived their lives in their proper station (king, duke, or peasant), and after death their souls rose to a higher place or sank to a lower one. Everyone had to be mindful that the human abode was a humble place in the scheme of things and that they must look up to catch a glimpse of heavenly perfection. And in a world that seemed always to teeter on the brink of famine and barbarism, the Great Chain offered the comfort of knowing that the nature of things was orderly. If the planets wandered from their spheres, chaos would break out, because everything was connected in the cosmic order. {138}
As Alexander Pope wrote, "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, / Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. "1
None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He knew that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified by sunspots, novas, and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galileo's alter ego in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wondering what is so great about being invariant and inalterable:
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes, it were a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? vast desert of sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered or changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon, of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.
. . . Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, et cetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are. 2
Today we see things Galileo's way. It's hard for us to imagine why the three-dimensional arrangement of rock and gas in space should have anything to do with right and wrong or with the meaning and purpose of our lives. The moral sensibilities of Galileo s time eventually adjusted to the astronomical facts, not just because they had to give a nod to reality but because the very idea that morality has something to do with a Great Chain of Being was daffy to begin with.
We are now living, I think, through a similar transition. The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galileo, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious. {139}
This part of the book will show why a renewed conception of meaning and morality will survive the demise of the Blank Slate. I am not, to say the least, proposing a novel philosophy of life like the spiritual leader of some new cult. The arguments I will lay out have been around for centuries and have been advanced by some of history's greatest thinkers. My goal is to put them down in one place and connect them to the apparent moral challenges from the sciences of human nature, to serve as a reminder of why the sciences will not lead to a Nietzschean total eclipse of all values.
The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:
? If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified.
? If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.
? If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.
? If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.
Each will get a chapter. I will first explain the basis of the fear: which claims about human nature are at stake, and why they are thought to have treacherous implications. I will then show that in each case the logic is faulty; the implications simply do not follow. But I will go farther than that. It's not just that claims about human nature are less dangerous than many people think. It's that the denial of human nature can be more dangerous than people think. This makes it imperative to examine claims about human nature objectively, without putting a moral thumb on either side of the scale, and to figure out how we can live with the claims should they turn out to be true.
<< {141} >> Chapter 8
The Fear of Inequality
The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality. Blank is blank, so if we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils.
The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life -- their income, status, and crime rate, for example -- come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -- by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children, by taking that decision out of their hands, or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the "final solution" because they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist -- or even that human nature does not exist, because if it did, innate differences would be possible.
I hope that once this line of reasoning is laid out, it will immediately set off alarm bells. We should not concede that any foreseeable discovery about humans could have such horrible implications. The problem is not with the possibility that people might differ from one another, which is a factual question that could turn out one way or the other. The problem is with the line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all. Fundamental values (such as {142} equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow. In this chapter we will see how these values mi~ght be put on a more secure foundation.
What kinds of differences are there to worry about? The chapters on gender and children will review the current evidence on differences between sexes and individuals, together with their implications and non-implications. The goal of this part of the chapter is more general: to lay out the kinds of differences that research could turn up over the long term, based on our understanding of human evolution and genetics, and to lay out the moral issues they raise. This book is primarily about human nature -- an endowment of cognitive and emotional faculties that is universal to healthy members of Homo sapiens. Samuel Johnson wrote, "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure. "1 The abundant evidence that we share a human nature does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or sexes are also in our nature. Confucius could have been right when he wrote, "Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart. "2
Modern biology tells us that the forces that make people alike are not the same as the forces that make people different. 3 (Indeed, they tend to be studied by different scientists: the similarities by evolutionary psychologists, the differences by behavioral geneticists. ) Natural selection works to homogenize a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes -- the ones that build well-functioning organs -- and winnowing out the ineffective ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs. This is most obvious in the case of language, where every neurologically intact child is equipped to acquire any human language, but it is true of other parts of the mind as well. Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences. 4
We are all pretty much alike, but we are not, of course, clones. Except in the case of identical twins, each person is genetically unique. That is because random mutations infiltrate the genome and take time to be eliminated, and they are shuffled together in new combinations when individuals sexually reproduce. Natural selection tends to preserve some degree of genetic heterogeneity at the microscopic level in the form of small, random variations among proteins. That variation twiddles the combinations of an organism's molecular locks and keeps its descendants one step ahead of the microscopic germs that are constantly evolving to crack those locks.
All species harbor genetic variability, but Homo sapiens is among the less variable ones. Geneticists call us a "small" species, which sounds like a bad joke {143} given that we have infested the planet like roaches. What they mean is that the amount of genetic variation found among humans is what a biologist would expect in a species with a small number of members. 5 There are more genetic differences among chimpanzees, for instance, than there are among humans, even though we dwarf them in number. The reason is that our ancestors passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary history (less than a hundred thousand years ago) and dwindled to a small number of individuals with a correspondingly small amount of genetic variation. The species survived and rebounded, and then underwent a population explosion after the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago. That explosion bred many copies of the genes that were around when we were sparse in number; there has not been much time to accumulate many new versions of the genes.
At various points after the bottleneck, differences between races emerged. But the differences in skin and hair that are so obvious when we look at people of other races are really a trick played on our intuitions. Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. 6 Working in opposition to the adaptation to local climates, which makes groups different on the skin, is an evolutionary force that makes neighboring groups similar inside. Rare genes can offer immunity to endemic diseases, so they get sucked into one group from a neighboring group like ink on a blotter, even if members of one group mate with members of the other infrequently. 7 That is why Jews, for example, tend to be genetically similar to their non-Jewish neighbors all over the world, even though until
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? recently they tended to marry other Jews. As little as one conversion, affair, or rape involving a gentile in every generation can be enough to blur genetic boundaries over time. 8
Taking all these processes into account, we get the following picture. People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.
But biology does not let us off the hook entirely. Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences between races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent (as we see in their ability to give rise to physical differences and to {144} different susceptibilities to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia). Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are purely social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeonholes such as "colored," "Hispanic," "Asian/Pacific Islander," and the one-drop rule for being "black," it is an overstatement when it comes to human differences in general. The biological anthropologist Vincent Sarich points out that a race is just a very large and partly inbred family. Some racial distinctions thus may have a degree of biological reality, even though they are not exact boundaries between fixed categories. Humans, having recently evolved from a single founder population, are all related, but Europeans, having mostly bred with other Europeans for millennia, are on average more closely related to other Europeans than they are to Africans or Asians, and vice versa. Because oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges have prevented people from choosing mates at random in the past, the large inbred families we call races are still discernible, each with a somewhat different distribution of gene frequencies. In theory, some of the varying genes could affect personality or intelligence (though any such differences would at most apply to averages, with vast overlap between the group members). This is not to say that such genetic differences are expected or that we have evidence for them, only that they are biologically possible.
(My own view, incidentally, is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference -- the black-white IQ gap in the United States -- the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation. Thomas Sowell has documented that in most of the twentieth century and throughout the world, ethnic differences in IQ were the rule, not the exception. 9 Members of minority groups who were out of the cultural mainstream commonly had average IQs that fell below that of the majority, including immigrants to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the children of white mountaineers in the United States, children who grew up on canal boats in Britain, and Gaelic-speaking children in the Hebrides.
The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a sta~nd in favor of genocide!
What about the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's description of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted"). In it they wrote, "As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. "19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just -- a socialist -- society" and see their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society. "20 At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power {127} based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment -- Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. 22 The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment. " That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous" -- not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.
Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23 -- presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it lust as they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. " But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which . . . shall we choose? . . . Let us take this stand. . . . We can do otherwise. " And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will. "24 {128}
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness. " Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet. ) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution -- limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority -- then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect hu~mans.
The Ghost in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left. In his book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature, the psychologist Morton Hunt has shown that the foes include people on the left, people on the right, and a motley collection of single-issue fanatics in between. 25 So far I have discussed the far-left outrage because it has been deployed in the battlefield of ideas in the universities and the mainstream press. Those on the far right have also been outraged, though until recently they have aimed at different targets and have fought in different arenas.
The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain.
The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one creationist minister put it, "If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation? "26
But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical {129} literalism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed in God's image and placed on earth for a larger purpose -- namely, to live a moral life by following God's commandments. If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U. S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals / So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel. "27 After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as "our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud. "28
The most damaging effect of the right-wing opposition to evolution is the corruption of American science education by activists in the creationist movement. Until a Supreme Court decision in 1968, states were allowed to ban the teaching of evolution outright. Since then, creationists have tried to hobble it in ways that they hope will pass constitutional muster. These include removing evolution from science proficiency standards, demanding disclaimers
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? that it is "only a theory," watering down the curriculum, and opposing textbooks with good coverage of evolution or imposing ones with coverage of creationism. In recent years the National Center for Science Education has learned of new instances of these tactics at a rate of about one a week, coming from forty states. 29
The religious right is discomfited not just by evolution but by neuro-science. By exorcising the ghost in the machine, brain science is undermining two moral doctrines that depend on it. One is that every person has a soul, which finds value, exercises free will, and is responsible for its choices. If behavior is controlled instead by circuits in the brain that follow the laws of chemistry, choice and value would be myths and the possibility of moral responsibility would evaporate. As the creationist advocate John West put it, "If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life -- religion, morality, beauty -- is revealed to be without objective basis. "30
The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equivalent to murder. It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be {130} seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging and disease. (We will return to this issue in Chapter 13. )
But the right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature can no longer be associated only with Bible-thumpers and televangelists. Today evolution is being challenged by some of the most cerebral theorists in the formerly secular neoconservative movement. They are embracing a hypothesis called Intelligent Design, originated by the biochemist Michael Behe. 31 The molecular machinery of cells cannot function in a simpler form, Behe argues, and therefore it could not have evolved piecemeal by natural selection. Instead it must have been conceived as a working invention by an intelligent designer. The designer could, in theory, have been an advanced alien from outer space, but everyone knows that the subtext of the theory is that it must have been God.
Biologists reject Behe's argument for a number of reasons. 32 His specific claims about the "irreducible complexity" of biochemistry are unproven or just wrong. He takes every phenomenon whose evolutionary history has not yet been figured out and chalks it up to design by default. When it comes to the intelligent designer, Behe suddenly jettisons all scientific scruples and does not question where the designer came from or how the designer works. And he ignores the overwhelming evidence that the process of evolution, far from being intelligent and purposeful, is wasteful and cruel.
Nonetheless, Intelligent Design has been embraced by leading neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other conservative intellectuals have also sympathized with creationism for moral reasons, such as the law professor Philip Johnson, the writer William F. Buckley, the columnist Tom Bethell, and, disconcertingly, the bioethicist Leon Kass -- chair of George W. Bush's new Council on Bioethics and thus a shaper of the nation's policies on biology and medicine. 33 A story entitled "The Deniable Darwin" appeared, astonishingly, on the cover of Commentary, which means that a magazine that was once a leading forum for secular Jewish intellectuals is now more skeptical of evolution than is the Pope! 34
It is not clear whether these worldly thinkers are really convinced that Darwinism is false or whether they think it is important for other people to believe it is false. In a scene from Inherit the Wind, the play about the Scopes Monkey Trial, the prosecutor and defense attorney (based on William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow) are relaxing together after a day in court. The prosecutor says of the Tennessee locals:
They're simple people, Henry; poor people. They work hard and they need to believe in something, something beautiful. Why do you want to take it away from them? It's all they have.
That is not far from the attitude of the neocons. Kristol has written: {131}
If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded -- or even if it suspects -- that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe. 35
He spells out the moral corollary:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work. 36
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? As the science writer Ronald Bailey observes, "Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is 'the opium of the people'; they add a heartfelt, 'Thank God! ' "37
Many conservative intellectuals join fundamentalist Christians in deploring neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they see as explaining away the soul, eternal values, and free choice. Kass writes:
With science, the leading wing of modern rationalism, has come the progressive demystification of the world. Falling in love, should it still occur, is for the modern temper to be explained not by demonic possession (Eros) born of the soul-smiting sight of the beautiful (Aphrodite) but by a rise in the concentration of some still-to-be-identified polypeptide hormone in the hypothalamus. The power of religious sensibilities and understandings fades too. Even if it is true that the great majority of Americans still profess a belief in God, He is for few of us a God before whom one trembles in fear of judgment. 38
Similarly, the journalist Andrew Ferguson warns his readers that evolutionary psychology "is sure to give you the creeps," because "whether behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science, and materialism in general, cannot make. "39 The new sciences, he writes, claim that people are nothing but "meat puppets," a frightening shift from the traditional Judeo-Christian view in which "human beings [are] persons from the start, endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious. "40
Even the left-baiting author Tom Wolfe, who admires neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, worries about their moral implications. In his essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," he writes that when science has finally killed the soul ("that last refuge of values"), "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make [Nietzsche's] phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame": {132}
Meanwhile, the notion of a self -- a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior -- a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds -- this old-fashioned notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake? ) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away. . . slipping away. . . 41
"Where does that leave self-control? " he asks. "Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all? "42
An irony in the modern denial of human nature is that partisans at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who ordinarily can't stand the sight of each other, find themselves strange bedfellows. Recall how the signatories of "Against 'Sociobiology'" wrote that theories like Wilson's "provided an important basis for . . . the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany. " In May 2001 the Education Committee of the Louisiana House of Representatives resolved that "Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced . . . to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals. "43 The sponsor of the resolution (which was eventually defeated) cited in its defense a passage by Gould, which is not the first time that he has been cited approvingly in creationist propaganda. 44 Though Gould has been a tireless opponent of creationism, he has been an equally tireless opponent of the idea that evolution can explain mind and morality, and that is the implication of Darwinism that creationists fear most.
The left and the right also agree that the new sciences of human nature threaten the concept of moral responsibility. When Wilson suggested that in humans, as in many other mammals, males have a greater desire for multiple sexual partners than do females, Rose accused him of really saying:
Don't blame your mates for sleeping around, ladies, it's not their fault they are genetically programmed. 45
Compare Tom Wolfe, tongue only partly in cheek:
The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous, i. e. , unfaithful to his legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the picture soon enough. (Three million years of evolution made me do it! )46 {133}
On one wing we have Gould asking the rhetorical question:
Why do we want to fob off responsibility for our violence and sexism upon our genes? 47
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? And on the other wing we find Ferguson raising the same point:
The "scientific belief" would . . . appear to be corrosive of any notion of free will, personal
responsibility, or universal morality. 48
For Rose and Gould the ghost in the machine is a "we" that can construct history and change the world at will. For Kass, Wolfe, and Ferguson it is a "soul" that makes moral judgments according to religious precepts. But all of them see genetics, neuroscience, and evolution as threats to this~irreducible locus of free choice.
Where does this leave intellectual life today? The hostility to the sciences of human nature from the religious right is likely to increase, but the influence of the right will be felt more in direct appeals to politicians than from changes in the intellectual climate. Any inroads of the religious right into mainstream intellectual life will be limited by their opposition to the theory of evolution itself. Whether it is known as creationism or by the euphemism Intelligent Design, a denial of the theory of natural selection will founder under the weight of the mass of evidence that the theory is correct. How much additional damage the denial will do to science education and biomedical research before it sinks is unknown.
The hostility from the radical left, on the other hand, has left a substantial mark on modern intellectual life, because the so-called radical scientists are now the establishment. I have met many social and cognitive scientists who proudly say they have learned all their biology from Gould and Lewontin. 49 Many intellectuals defer to Lewontin as the infallible pontiff of evolution and genetics, and many philosophers of biology spent time as his apprentice.
A sneering review by Rose of every new book on human evolution or genetics has become a fixture of British journalism. As for Gould, Isaac Asimov probably did not intend the irony when he wrote in a book blurb that "Gould can do no wrong," but that is precisely the attitude of many journalists and social scientists. A recent article in New York magazine on the journalist Robert Wright called him a "stalker" and a "young punk" with "penis envy" because he had the temerity to criticize Gould on his logic and facts. 50
In part the respect awarded to the radical scientists has been earned. Quite aside from their scientific accomplishments, Lewontin is an incisive analyst on {134} many scientific and social issues, Gould has written hundreds of superb essays on natural history, and Rose wrote a fine book on the neuroscience of memory. But they have also positioned themselves shrewdly on the intellectual landscape. As the biologist John Alcock explains, "Stephen Jay Gould abhors violence, he speaks out against sexism, he despises Nazis, he finds genocide horrific, he is unfailingly on the side of the angels. Who can argue with such a person? "51 This immunity from argument allowed the radical scientists' unfair attacks on others to become part of the conventional wisdom.
Many writers today casually equate behavioral genetics with eugenics, as if studying the genetic correlates of behavior were the same as coercing people in their decisions about having children. Many equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism, as if studying our evolutionary roots were the same as justifying the station of the poor. The confusions do not come only from the scientifically illiterate but may be found in prestigious publications such as Scientific American and Science. 52 After Wilson argued in Consilience that divisions between fields of human knowledge were becoming obsolete, the historian Tzvetan Todorov wrote sarcastically, "I have a proposal for Wilson's next book . . . [an] analysis of Social Darwinism, the doctrine that was adopted by Hitler, and of the ways it differs from sociobiology. "53 When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2001, its leaders made a ritual denunciation of "genetic determinism," the belief -- held by no one -- that "all characteristics of the person are 'hard-wired' into our genome. "54
Even many scientists are perfectly content with the radicals' social constructionism, not so much because they agree with it but because they are preoccupied in their labs and need picketers outside their window like they need another hole in the head. As the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides note, the dogma that biology is intrinsically disconnected from the human social order offers scientists "safe conduct across the politicized minefield of modern academic life. "55 As we shall see, even today people who challenge the Blank Slate or the Noble Savage are still sometimes silenced by demonstrators or denounced as Nazis. Even when such attacks are sporadic, they create an atmosphere of intimidation that distorts scholarship far and wide.
But the intellectual climate is showing signs of change. Ideas about human nature, while still anathema to some academics and pundits, are beginning to get a hearing. Scientists, artists, scholars in the humanities, legal theorists, and thoughtful laypeople have expressed a thirst for the new insights about the mind that have been coming out of the biological and cognitive sciences. And the radical science movement, for all its rhetorical success, has turned out to be an empirical wasteland. Twenty-five years of data have not been kind to its predictions. Chimpanzees are not peaceful vegetarians, as Montagu claimed, nor is the heritability of intelligence indistinguishable from zero, IQ a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? {135} "reification" unrelated to the brain, personality and social behavior without any genetic basis, gender differences a product only of "psychocultural expectations," or the number of murderous clans equal to the number of pacific bands. 56 Today the idea of guiding scientific research by "a conscious application of Marxist philosophy" is just embarrassing, and as the evolutionary psychologist Martin Daly pointed out, "Sufficient research to fill a first issue of Dialectical Biology has yet to materialize. "57
In contrast, sociobiology did not, as Sahlins had predicted, turn out to be a passing fad. The title of Alcock's 2001 book The Triumph of Sociobiology says it all: in the study of animal behavior, no one even talks about "sociobiology" or "selfish genes" anymore, because the ideas are part and parcel of the science. 58 In the study of humans, there are major spheres of human experience -- beauty, motherhood, kinship, morality, cooperation, sexuality, violence -- in which evolutionary psychology provides the only coherent theory and has spawned vibrant new areas of empirical research. 59 Behavioral genetics has revivified the study of personality and will only expand with the application of knowledge from the Human Genome Project. 60 Cognitive neuroscience will not shrink from applying its new tools to every aspect of mind and behavior, including the emotionally and politically charged ones. The question is not whether human nature will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, but what we are going to do with the knowledge. What in fact are the implications for our ideals of equality, progress, responsibility, and the worth of the person? The opponents of the sciences of human nature from the left and the right are correct about one thing: these are vital questions. But that is all the more reason that they be confronted not with fear and loathing but with reason. That is the goal of the next part of the book.
<< {137} >>
HUMAN NATURE WITH A HUMAN FACE
hen Galileo attracted the unwanted attention of the Inquisition in 1633, more was at stake than issues in astronomy. By stating that the W Earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa, Galileo was contradicting the literal truth of the Bible, such as the passage in which
Joshua issued the successful command "Sun, stand thou still. " Worse, he was challenging a theory of the moral order of the universe.
According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below (hence Samuel Johnson's disclaimer that he could not "change sublunary nature"). Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained within the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals (in the order beasts, birds, fish, insects), then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a Great Chain of Being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications. Our home, it was thought, lay at the center of the universe, reflecting the importance of our existence and behavior. People lived their lives in their proper station (king, duke, or peasant), and after death their souls rose to a higher place or sank to a lower one. Everyone had to be mindful that the human abode was a humble place in the scheme of things and that they must look up to catch a glimpse of heavenly perfection. And in a world that seemed always to teeter on the brink of famine and barbarism, the Great Chain offered the comfort of knowing that the nature of things was orderly. If the planets wandered from their spheres, chaos would break out, because everything was connected in the cosmic order. {138}
As Alexander Pope wrote, "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, / Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. "1
None of this escaped Galileo as he was pounding away at his link. He knew that he could not simply argue on empirical grounds that the division between a corrupt Earth and the unchanging heavens was falsified by sunspots, novas, and moons drifting across Jupiter. He also argued that the moral trappings of the geocentric theory were as dubious as its empirical claims, so if the theory turned out to be false, no one would be the worse. Here is Galileo's alter ego in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, wondering what is so great about being invariant and inalterable:
For my part I consider the earth very noble and admirable precisely because of the diverse alterations, changes, generations, etc. that occur in it incessantly. If, not being subject to any changes, it were a
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? vast desert of sand or mountain of jasper, or if at the time of the flood the waters which covered it had frozen, and it had remained an enormous globe of ice where nothing was ever born or ever altered or changed, I should deem it a useless lump in the universe, devoid of activity and, in a word, superfluous and essentially nonexistent. This is exactly the difference between a living animal and a dead one; and I say the same of the moon, of Jupiter, and of all other world globes.
. . . Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, et cetera, are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world. Such men really deserve to encounter a Medusa's head which would transmute them into statues of jasper or diamond, and thus make them more perfect than they are. 2
Today we see things Galileo's way. It's hard for us to imagine why the three-dimensional arrangement of rock and gas in space should have anything to do with right and wrong or with the meaning and purpose of our lives. The moral sensibilities of Galileo s time eventually adjusted to the astronomical facts, not just because they had to give a nod to reality but because the very idea that morality has something to do with a Great Chain of Being was daffy to begin with.
We are now living, I think, through a similar transition. The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galileo, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious. {139}
This part of the book will show why a renewed conception of meaning and morality will survive the demise of the Blank Slate. I am not, to say the least, proposing a novel philosophy of life like the spiritual leader of some new cult. The arguments I will lay out have been around for centuries and have been advanced by some of history's greatest thinkers. My goal is to put them down in one place and connect them to the apparent moral challenges from the sciences of human nature, to serve as a reminder of why the sciences will not lead to a Nietzschean total eclipse of all values.
The anxiety about human nature can be boiled down to four fears:
? If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination would be justified.
? If people are innately immoral, hopes to improve the human condition would be futile.
? If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth and we could no longer hold people responsible for their actions.
? If people are products of biology, life would have no higher meaning and purpose.
Each will get a chapter. I will first explain the basis of the fear: which claims about human nature are at stake, and why they are thought to have treacherous implications. I will then show that in each case the logic is faulty; the implications simply do not follow. But I will go farther than that. It's not just that claims about human nature are less dangerous than many people think. It's that the denial of human nature can be more dangerous than people think. This makes it imperative to examine claims about human nature objectively, without putting a moral thumb on either side of the scale, and to figure out how we can live with the claims should they turn out to be true.
<< {141} >> Chapter 8
The Fear of Inequality
The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero. This allows the Blank Slate to serve as a guarantor of political equality. Blank is blank, so if we are all blank slates, the reasoning goes, we must all be equal. But if the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individuals, sexes, classes, and races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations. And that, it is thought, could lead to three evils.
The first is prejudice: if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups. The second is Social Darwinism: if differences among groups in their station in life -- their income, status, and crime rate, for example -- come from their innate constitutions, the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easy to blame the victim and tolerate inequality. The third is eugenics: if people differ biologically in ways that other people value or dislike, it would invite them to try to improve society by intervening biologically -- by encouraging or discouraging people's decisions to have children, by taking that decision out of their hands, or by killing them outright. The Nazis carried out the "final solution" because they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? thought Jews and other ethnic groups were biologically inferior. The fear of the terrible consequences that might arise from a discovery of innate differences has thus led many intellectuals to insist that such differences do not exist -- or even that human nature does not exist, because if it did, innate differences would be possible.
I hope that once this line of reasoning is laid out, it will immediately set off alarm bells. We should not concede that any foreseeable discovery about humans could have such horrible implications. The problem is not with the possibility that people might differ from one another, which is a factual question that could turn out one way or the other. The problem is with the line of reasoning that says that if people do turn out to be different, then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all. Fundamental values (such as {142} equality and human rights) should not be held hostage to some factual conjecture about blank slates that might be refuted tomorrow. In this chapter we will see how these values mi~ght be put on a more secure foundation.
What kinds of differences are there to worry about? The chapters on gender and children will review the current evidence on differences between sexes and individuals, together with their implications and non-implications. The goal of this part of the chapter is more general: to lay out the kinds of differences that research could turn up over the long term, based on our understanding of human evolution and genetics, and to lay out the moral issues they raise. This book is primarily about human nature -- an endowment of cognitive and emotional faculties that is universal to healthy members of Homo sapiens. Samuel Johnson wrote, "We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure. "1 The abundant evidence that we share a human nature does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or sexes are also in our nature. Confucius could have been right when he wrote, "Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart. "2
Modern biology tells us that the forces that make people alike are not the same as the forces that make people different. 3 (Indeed, they tend to be studied by different scientists: the similarities by evolutionary psychologists, the differences by behavioral geneticists. ) Natural selection works to homogenize a species into a standard overall design by concentrating the effective genes -- the ones that build well-functioning organs -- and winnowing out the ineffective ones. When it comes to an explanation of what makes us tick, we are thus birds of a feather. Just as we all have the same physical organs (two eyes, a liver, a four-chambered heart), we have the same mental organs. This is most obvious in the case of language, where every neurologically intact child is equipped to acquire any human language, but it is true of other parts of the mind as well. Discarding the Blank Slate has thrown far more light on the psychological unity of humankind than on any differences. 4
We are all pretty much alike, but we are not, of course, clones. Except in the case of identical twins, each person is genetically unique. That is because random mutations infiltrate the genome and take time to be eliminated, and they are shuffled together in new combinations when individuals sexually reproduce. Natural selection tends to preserve some degree of genetic heterogeneity at the microscopic level in the form of small, random variations among proteins. That variation twiddles the combinations of an organism's molecular locks and keeps its descendants one step ahead of the microscopic germs that are constantly evolving to crack those locks.
All species harbor genetic variability, but Homo sapiens is among the less variable ones. Geneticists call us a "small" species, which sounds like a bad joke {143} given that we have infested the planet like roaches. What they mean is that the amount of genetic variation found among humans is what a biologist would expect in a species with a small number of members. 5 There are more genetic differences among chimpanzees, for instance, than there are among humans, even though we dwarf them in number. The reason is that our ancestors passed through a population bottleneck fairly recently in our evolutionary history (less than a hundred thousand years ago) and dwindled to a small number of individuals with a correspondingly small amount of genetic variation. The species survived and rebounded, and then underwent a population explosion after the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago. That explosion bred many copies of the genes that were around when we were sparse in number; there has not been much time to accumulate many new versions of the genes.
At various points after the bottleneck, differences between races emerged. But the differences in skin and hair that are so obvious when we look at people of other races are really a trick played on our intuitions. Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts that face the eyes of other people, which fools them into thinking that racial differences run deeper than they really do. 6 Working in opposition to the adaptation to local climates, which makes groups different on the skin, is an evolutionary force that makes neighboring groups similar inside. Rare genes can offer immunity to endemic diseases, so they get sucked into one group from a neighboring group like ink on a blotter, even if members of one group mate with members of the other infrequently. 7 That is why Jews, for example, tend to be genetically similar to their non-Jewish neighbors all over the world, even though until
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? recently they tended to marry other Jews. As little as one conversion, affair, or rape involving a gentile in every generation can be enough to blur genetic boundaries over time. 8
Taking all these processes into account, we get the following picture. People are qualitatively the same but may differ quantitatively. The quantitative differences are small in biological terms, and they are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races. These are reassuring findings. Any racist ideology that holds that the members of an ethnic group are all alike, or that one ethnic group differs fundamentally from another, is based on false assumptions about our biology.
But biology does not let us off the hook entirely. Individuals are not genetically identical, and it is unlikely that the differences affect every part of the body except the brain. And though genetic differences between races and ethnic groups are much smaller than those among individuals, they are not nonexistent (as we see in their ability to give rise to physical differences and to {144} different susceptibilities to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia). Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are purely social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeonholes such as "colored," "Hispanic," "Asian/Pacific Islander," and the one-drop rule for being "black," it is an overstatement when it comes to human differences in general. The biological anthropologist Vincent Sarich points out that a race is just a very large and partly inbred family. Some racial distinctions thus may have a degree of biological reality, even though they are not exact boundaries between fixed categories. Humans, having recently evolved from a single founder population, are all related, but Europeans, having mostly bred with other Europeans for millennia, are on average more closely related to other Europeans than they are to Africans or Asians, and vice versa. Because oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges have prevented people from choosing mates at random in the past, the large inbred families we call races are still discernible, each with a somewhat different distribution of gene frequencies. In theory, some of the varying genes could affect personality or intelligence (though any such differences would at most apply to averages, with vast overlap between the group members). This is not to say that such genetic differences are expected or that we have evidence for them, only that they are biologically possible.
(My own view, incidentally, is that in the case of the most discussed racial difference -- the black-white IQ gap in the United States -- the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation. Thomas Sowell has documented that in most of the twentieth century and throughout the world, ethnic differences in IQ were the rule, not the exception. 9 Members of minority groups who were out of the cultural mainstream commonly had average IQs that fell below that of the majority, including immigrants to the United States from southern and eastern Europe, the children of white mountaineers in the United States, children who grew up on canal boats in Britain, and Gaelic-speaking children in the Hebrides.
