<< {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.
The Fear of Inequality
The greatest moral appeal of the doctrine of the Blank Slate comes from a simple mathematical fact: zero equals zero.
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
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 differences were at least as large as the current black-white gap but disappeared within a few generations. For many reasons, the experience of African Americans in the United States under slavery and segregation is not comparable to those of immigrants or rural isolates, and their transition to mainstream cultural patterns could easily take longer. )10
And then there are the sexes. Unlike ethnic groups and races, in which any differences are biologically minor and haphazard, the two sexes differ in at least one way that is major and systematic: they have different reproductive organs. On evolutionary grounds one might expect men and women to differ somewhat in the neural systems that control how they use those organs -- in their sexuality, parental instincts, and mating tactics. By the same logic, one would expect them not to differ as much in the neural systems that deal with {145} the challenges both sexes face, such as those for general intelligence (as we will see in the~chapter on gender).
So could discoveries in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Absolutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs. Enlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant. Discriminating against people on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity would be unfair, penalizing them for traits over which they have no control. It would perpetuate the injustices of the past, in which African Americans, women, and other groups were enslaved or oppressed. It would rend society into hostile factions and could escalate into horrific persecution. But none of these arguments against discrimination depends on whether groups of people are or are not genetically indistinguishable.
Far from being conducive to discrimination, a conception of human nature is the reason we oppose it. Here is where the distinction between innate variation and innate universals is crucial. Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person cannot control. The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery comes from a conviction that however much people
? ? ? ? ? vary on some traits, they do not vary on these. This conviction contrasts, by the way, with the supposedly progressive doctrine that people have no inherent concerns, which implies that they could be conditioned to enjoy servitude or degradation.
The idea that political equality is a moral stance, not an empirical hypothesis, has been expressed by some of history's most famous exponents of equality. The Declaration of Independence proclaims, "We hold these truths to be self- evident; that all men are created equal. " The author, Thomas Jefferson, made it clear that he was referring to an equality of rights, not a biological sameness. For example, in an 1813 letter to John Adams he wrote: "I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . . For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son. "11 (The fact that the Declaration originally was applied only to white men, and that Jefferson was far from an egalitarian in the conduct of his own life, does not change the argument. Jefferson defended political equality among white men -- a novel idea in his time -- even as he acknowledged innate differences among white men. ) Similarly, Abraham Lincoln thought that the signers of the Declaration "did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, {146} intellect, moral development or social capacity," but only in respect to "certain inalienable rights. "12 Some of the most influential contemporary thinkers about biology and human nature have drawn the same distinction. Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of the modern theory of evolution, wisely anticipated nearly four decades of debate when he wrote in 1963:
Equality in spite of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to "conditioning" or other nongenetic factors. Such authors conveniently ignore the results of twin studies and of the genetic analysis of nonmorphological traits in animals. An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. 13
Noam Chomsky made the same point in an article entitled "Psychology and Ideology. " Though he disagreed with Herrnstein's argument about IQ (discussed in Chapter 6), he denied the popular charge that Herrnstein was a racist and distanced himself from fellow radical scientists who were denouncing the facts as dangerous:
A correlation between race and IQ (were this shown to exist) entails no social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions a possible correlation between height and IQ. Of what social importance is that? None of course, since our society does not suffer under discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the category "below six feet in height" or "above six feet in height" when we ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of the mean IQ of people of his height category. In a nonracist society, the category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean IQ of individuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of a particular individual who is what he is. . . .
It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might
be heritable, perhaps largely so. {147}
Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the one-
hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or
another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to
serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society?
14
Some readers may not be reassured by this lofty stance. If all ethnic groups and both sexes were identical in all talents, then discrimination would simply be self-defeating, and people would abandon it as soon as the facts were known. But if they are not identical, it would be rational to take those differences into account. After all, according to Bayes' theorem a decision maker who needs to make a prediction (such as whether a person will succeed in a profession) should factor in the prior probability, such as the base rate of success for people in that group. If races or sexes are different on average, racial profiling or gender stereotyping would be actuarially sound, and it would be nai? ve to expect information about race and sex not to be used for prejudicial ends. So a policy to treat people as individuals seems like a thin reed on which to hang any hope of reducing discrimination.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? An immediate reply to this worry is that the danger arises whether the differences between groups are genetic or environmental in origin. An average is an average, and an actuarial decision maker should care only about what it is, not what caused it.
Moreover, the fact that discrimination can be economically rational would be truly dangerous only if our policies favored ruthless economic optimization regardless of all other costs. But in fact we have many policies that allow moral principles to trump economic efficiency. For example, it is illegal to sell your vote, sell your organs, or sell your children, even though an economist could argue that any voluntary exchange leaves both parties better off. These decisions come naturally in modern democracies, and we can just as resolutely choose public policies and private mores that disallow race and gender prejudice. 15
Moral and legal proscriptions are not the only way to reduce discrimination in the face of possible group differences. The more information we have about the qualifications of an individual, the less impact a race-wide or sex-wide average would have in any statistical decision concerning that person. The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future. )
Discrimination -- in the sense of using a statistically predictive trait of an individual's group to make a decision about the individual -- is not always {148} immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral. To predict someone's behavior perfectly we would need an X-ray machine for the soul. Even predicting someone's behavior with the tools we do have -- such as tests, interviews, background checks, and recommendations -- would require unlimited resources if we were to use them to the fullest. Decisions that have to be made with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of errors, must use some trait as a basis for judging a person. And that necessarily judges the person according to a stereotype.
In some cases the overlap between two groups is so small that we feel comfortable discriminating against one of the groups absolutely. For example, no one objects to keeping chimpanzees out of our schools, even though it is conceivable that if we tested every chimp on the planet we might find one that could learn to read and write. We apply a speciesist stereotype that chimps cannot profit from a human education, figuring that the odds of finding an exception do not outweigh the costs of examining every last one.
In more realistic circumstances we have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the discrimination is justifiable. Denying driving and voting rights to young teenagers is a form of age discrimination that is unfair to responsible teens. But we are not willing to pay either the financial costs of developing a test for psychological maturity or the moral costs of classification errors, such as teens wrapping their cars around trees. Almost everyone is appalled by racial profiling -- pulling over motorists for "driving while black. " But after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, about half of Americans polled said they were not opposed to ethnic profiling -- scrutinizing passengers for "flying while Arab. "16 People who distinguish the two must reason that the benefits of catching a marijuana dealer do not outweigh the harm done to innocent black drivers, but the benefits of stopping a suicide hijacker do outweigh the harm done to innocent Arab passengers. Cost-benefit analyses are also sometimes used to justify racial preferences: the benefits of racially diverse workplaces and campuses are thought to outweigh the costs of discriminating against whites.
The possibility that men and women are not the same in all respects also presents policymakers with choices. It would be reprehensible for a bank to hire a man over a woman as a manager for the reason that he is less likely to quit after having a child. Would it also be reprehensible for a couple to hire a woman over a man as a nanny for their daughter because she is less likely to sexually abuse the child? Most people believe that the punishment for a given crime should be the same regardless of who commits it. But knowing the typical sexual emotions of the two sexes, should we apply the same punishment to a man who seduces a sixteen-year-old girl and to a woman who seduces a sixteen-year-old boy?
These are some of the issues that face the people of a democracy in {149} deciding what to do about discrimination. The point is not that group differences may never be used as a basis for discrimination. The point is that they do not havetobeusedthatway,andsometimeswecandecideon~moralgroundsthattheymustnotbeusedthatway.
The Blank Slate, then, is not necessary to combat racism and sexism. Nor is it necessary to combat Social Darwinism, the belief that the rich and the poor deserve their status and so we must abandon any principle of economic justice in favor of extreme laissez-faire policies.
Because of a fear of Social Darwinism, the idea that class has anything to do with genes is treated by modern intellectuals like plutonium, even though it is hard to imagine how it could not be true in part. To adapt an example from the philosopher Robert Nozick, suppose a million people are willing to pay ten dollars to hear Pavarotti sing and
?
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 differences were at least as large as the current black-white gap but disappeared within a few generations. For many reasons, the experience of African Americans in the United States under slavery and segregation is not comparable to those of immigrants or rural isolates, and their transition to mainstream cultural patterns could easily take longer. )10
And then there are the sexes. Unlike ethnic groups and races, in which any differences are biologically minor and haphazard, the two sexes differ in at least one way that is major and systematic: they have different reproductive organs. On evolutionary grounds one might expect men and women to differ somewhat in the neural systems that control how they use those organs -- in their sexuality, parental instincts, and mating tactics. By the same logic, one would expect them not to differ as much in the neural systems that deal with {145} the challenges both sexes face, such as those for general intelligence (as we will see in the~chapter on gender).
So could discoveries in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Absolutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs. Enlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant. Discriminating against people on the basis of race, sex, or ethnicity would be unfair, penalizing them for traits over which they have no control. It would perpetuate the injustices of the past, in which African Americans, women, and other groups were enslaved or oppressed. It would rend society into hostile factions and could escalate into horrific persecution. But none of these arguments against discrimination depends on whether groups of people are or are not genetically indistinguishable.
Far from being conducive to discrimination, a conception of human nature is the reason we oppose it. Here is where the distinction between innate variation and innate universals is crucial. Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person cannot control. The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery comes from a conviction that however much people
? ? ? ? ? vary on some traits, they do not vary on these. This conviction contrasts, by the way, with the supposedly progressive doctrine that people have no inherent concerns, which implies that they could be conditioned to enjoy servitude or degradation.
The idea that political equality is a moral stance, not an empirical hypothesis, has been expressed by some of history's most famous exponents of equality. The Declaration of Independence proclaims, "We hold these truths to be self- evident; that all men are created equal. " The author, Thomas Jefferson, made it clear that he was referring to an equality of rights, not a biological sameness. For example, in an 1813 letter to John Adams he wrote: "I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . . For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son. "11 (The fact that the Declaration originally was applied only to white men, and that Jefferson was far from an egalitarian in the conduct of his own life, does not change the argument. Jefferson defended political equality among white men -- a novel idea in his time -- even as he acknowledged innate differences among white men. ) Similarly, Abraham Lincoln thought that the signers of the Declaration "did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, {146} intellect, moral development or social capacity," but only in respect to "certain inalienable rights. "12 Some of the most influential contemporary thinkers about biology and human nature have drawn the same distinction. Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of the modern theory of evolution, wisely anticipated nearly four decades of debate when he wrote in 1963:
Equality in spite of evident nonidentity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to "conditioning" or other nongenetic factors. Such authors conveniently ignore the results of twin studies and of the genetic analysis of nonmorphological traits in animals. An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. 13
Noam Chomsky made the same point in an article entitled "Psychology and Ideology. " Though he disagreed with Herrnstein's argument about IQ (discussed in Chapter 6), he denied the popular charge that Herrnstein was a racist and distanced himself from fellow radical scientists who were denouncing the facts as dangerous:
A correlation between race and IQ (were this shown to exist) entails no social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his own right, but as a representative of this category. Herrnstein mentions a possible correlation between height and IQ. Of what social importance is that? None of course, since our society does not suffer under discrimination by height. We do not insist on assigning each adult to the category "below six feet in height" or "above six feet in height" when we ask what sort of education he should receive or where he should live or what work he should do. Rather, he is what he is, quite independent of the mean IQ of people of his height category. In a nonracist society, the category of race would be of no greater significance. The mean IQ of individuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of a particular individual who is what he is. . . .
It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might
be heritable, perhaps largely so. {147}
Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the one-
hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or
another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to
serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society?
14
Some readers may not be reassured by this lofty stance. If all ethnic groups and both sexes were identical in all talents, then discrimination would simply be self-defeating, and people would abandon it as soon as the facts were known. But if they are not identical, it would be rational to take those differences into account. After all, according to Bayes' theorem a decision maker who needs to make a prediction (such as whether a person will succeed in a profession) should factor in the prior probability, such as the base rate of success for people in that group. If races or sexes are different on average, racial profiling or gender stereotyping would be actuarially sound, and it would be nai? ve to expect information about race and sex not to be used for prejudicial ends. So a policy to treat people as individuals seems like a thin reed on which to hang any hope of reducing discrimination.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? An immediate reply to this worry is that the danger arises whether the differences between groups are genetic or environmental in origin. An average is an average, and an actuarial decision maker should care only about what it is, not what caused it.
Moreover, the fact that discrimination can be economically rational would be truly dangerous only if our policies favored ruthless economic optimization regardless of all other costs. But in fact we have many policies that allow moral principles to trump economic efficiency. For example, it is illegal to sell your vote, sell your organs, or sell your children, even though an economist could argue that any voluntary exchange leaves both parties better off. These decisions come naturally in modern democracies, and we can just as resolutely choose public policies and private mores that disallow race and gender prejudice. 15
Moral and legal proscriptions are not the only way to reduce discrimination in the face of possible group differences. The more information we have about the qualifications of an individual, the less impact a race-wide or sex-wide average would have in any statistical decision concerning that person. The best cure for discrimination, then, is more accurate and more extensive testing of mental abilities, because it would provide so much predictive information about an individual that no one would be tempted to factor in race or gender. (This, however, is an idea with no political future. )
Discrimination -- in the sense of using a statistically predictive trait of an individual's group to make a decision about the individual -- is not always {148} immoral, or at least we don't always treat it as immoral. To predict someone's behavior perfectly we would need an X-ray machine for the soul. Even predicting someone's behavior with the tools we do have -- such as tests, interviews, background checks, and recommendations -- would require unlimited resources if we were to use them to the fullest. Decisions that have to be made with finite time and resources, and which have high costs for certain kinds of errors, must use some trait as a basis for judging a person. And that necessarily judges the person according to a stereotype.
In some cases the overlap between two groups is so small that we feel comfortable discriminating against one of the groups absolutely. For example, no one objects to keeping chimpanzees out of our schools, even though it is conceivable that if we tested every chimp on the planet we might find one that could learn to read and write. We apply a speciesist stereotype that chimps cannot profit from a human education, figuring that the odds of finding an exception do not outweigh the costs of examining every last one.
In more realistic circumstances we have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the discrimination is justifiable. Denying driving and voting rights to young teenagers is a form of age discrimination that is unfair to responsible teens. But we are not willing to pay either the financial costs of developing a test for psychological maturity or the moral costs of classification errors, such as teens wrapping their cars around trees. Almost everyone is appalled by racial profiling -- pulling over motorists for "driving while black. " But after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, about half of Americans polled said they were not opposed to ethnic profiling -- scrutinizing passengers for "flying while Arab. "16 People who distinguish the two must reason that the benefits of catching a marijuana dealer do not outweigh the harm done to innocent black drivers, but the benefits of stopping a suicide hijacker do outweigh the harm done to innocent Arab passengers. Cost-benefit analyses are also sometimes used to justify racial preferences: the benefits of racially diverse workplaces and campuses are thought to outweigh the costs of discriminating against whites.
The possibility that men and women are not the same in all respects also presents policymakers with choices. It would be reprehensible for a bank to hire a man over a woman as a manager for the reason that he is less likely to quit after having a child. Would it also be reprehensible for a couple to hire a woman over a man as a nanny for their daughter because she is less likely to sexually abuse the child? Most people believe that the punishment for a given crime should be the same regardless of who commits it. But knowing the typical sexual emotions of the two sexes, should we apply the same punishment to a man who seduces a sixteen-year-old girl and to a woman who seduces a sixteen-year-old boy?
These are some of the issues that face the people of a democracy in {149} deciding what to do about discrimination. The point is not that group differences may never be used as a basis for discrimination. The point is that they do not havetobeusedthatway,andsometimeswecandecideon~moralgroundsthattheymustnotbeusedthatway.
The Blank Slate, then, is not necessary to combat racism and sexism. Nor is it necessary to combat Social Darwinism, the belief that the rich and the poor deserve their status and so we must abandon any principle of economic justice in favor of extreme laissez-faire policies.
Because of a fear of Social Darwinism, the idea that class has anything to do with genes is treated by modern intellectuals like plutonium, even though it is hard to imagine how it could not be true in part. To adapt an example from the philosopher Robert Nozick, suppose a million people are willing to pay ten dollars to hear Pavarotti sing and
?
