No More Learning

Research on human nature would be controversial in any era, but the new sciences picked a particularly bad decade in which to attract the spotlight. In the 1970s many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. " The traditional misgivings about human nature were folded into a hard-left ideology, and scientists who examined the human mind in a biological context were now considered tools of a reactionary establishment. The critics announced they were part of a "radical science movement," giving us a convenient label for the group. 2 Weizenbaum was repelled by the attempt within artificial intelligence and cognitive science to unify mind and mechanism, but the other sciences of human nature evoked acrimony as well. In 1971 the psychologist Richard Herrnstein published an article called "IQ" in the Atlantic Monthly. 3 Herrnstein's argument, he was the first to point out, should have been banal. He wrote that as social status becomes less strongly determined by arbitrary legacies such as race, parentage, and inherited wealth, it will become more strongly determined by talent, especially (in a modern economy) intelligence. Since differences in intelligence are partly inherited, and since intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people, when a society becomes more just it {107} will also become more stratified along genetic lines. Smarter people will tend to float into the higher strata, and their children will tend to stay there. The basic argument should be banal because it is based on a mathematical necessity: as the proportion of variance in social status caused by nongenetic factors goes down, the proportion caused by genetic factors has to go up. It could be completely false only if there were no variation in social status based on intellectual talent (which would require that people not preferentially hire and trade with the talented) or if there were no genetic variation in intelligence which would require that people be either blank slates or clones).
Herrnstein's argument does not imply that any differences in average intelligence between races are innate (a distinct hypothesis that had been broached by the psychologist Arthur Jensen two years earlier),4 and he explicitly denied that he was making such a claim. School desegregation was less than a generation old, civil rights legislation less than a decade, so the differences that had been documented in average IQ scores of blacks and whites could easily be explained by differences in opportunity. Indeed, to say that Herrnstein's syllogism implied that black people would end up at the bottom of a genetically stratified society was to add the gratuitous assumption that blacks were on average genetically less intelligent, which Herrnstein took pains to avoid.
Nonetheless, the influential psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint wrote that Herrnstein "has become the enemy of black people and his pronouncements are a threat to the survival of every black person in America. " He asked rhetorically, "Shall we carry banners for Herrnstein proclaiming his right to freedom of speech? " Leaflets were handed out at Boston-area universities urging students to "Fight Harvard Prof's Fascist Lies," and Harvard Square was plastered with his photograph above the caption wanted for racism and five misquotations purportedly from his article. Herrnstein received a death threat and found that he could no longer speak about his research specialty, learning in pigeons, because wherever he went the lecture halls were filled with chanting mobs. At Princeton, for example, students declared they would block the doors of the auditorium to force him to answer questions on the IQ controversy. Several lectures were canceled when the hosting universities said they could not guarantee his safety. 5 The topic of innate differences among people has obvious political implications, which I will examine in later chapters. But some scholars were incensed by the seemingly warm-and-fuzzy claim that people have innate
? ? ? ? ? ? commonalities. In the late 1960s the psychologist Paul Ekman discovered that smiles, frowns, sneers, grimaces, and other facial expressions were displayed and understood worldwide, even among foraging peoples with no prior contact with the West. These findings, he argued, vindicated two claims that Darwin had made in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and {108} Animals. One was that humans had been endowed with emotional expressions by the process of evolution; the other, radical in Darwin's time, was that all races had recently diverged from a common ancestor. 6 Despite these uplifting messages, Margaret Mead called Ekman's research "outrageous," "appalling," and "a disgrace" -- and these were some of the milder responses. 7 At the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Alan Lomax Jr. rose from the audience shouting that Ekman should not be allowed to speak because his ideas were fascist. On another occasion an African American activist accused him of racism for claiming that black facial expressions were no different from white ones. (Sometimes you can't win. ) And it was not just claims about innate faculties in the human species that drew the radicals' ire, but claims about innate faculties in any species. When the neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel published his historic work with David Hubel showing that the visual system of cats is largely complete at birth, another neuroscientist angrily called him a fascist and vowed to prove him wrong. ~
Some of these protests were signs of the times and faded with the decline of radical chic. But the reaction to two books on evolution continued for decades and became part of the intellectual mainstream.
The first was E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology, published in 1975. 8 Sociobiology synthesized a vast literature on animal behavior using new ideas on natural selection from George Williams, William Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Trivers. It reviewed principles on the evolution of communication, altruism, aggression, sex, and parenting, and applied them to the major taxa of social animals such as insects, fishes, and birds. The twenty-seventh chapter did the same for Homo sapiens, treating our species like another branch of the animal kingdom. It included a review of the literature on universals and variation among societies, a discussion of language and its effects on culture, and the hypothesis that some universals (including the moral sense) may come from a human nature shaped by natural selection. Wilson expressed the hope that this idea might connect biology to the social sciences and philosophy, a forerunner of the argument in his later book Consilience.
The first attack on Sociobiology zeroed in on its main heresy. In a book-length critique, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins defined "vulgar sociobiology" as the challenge to Durkheim's and Kroeber's doctrine of the superorganism: the belief that culture and society lived in a separate realm from individual people and their thoughts and feelings. "Vulgar sociobiology," Sahlins wrote, "consists in the explication of human social behavior as the expression of the needs and drives of the human organism, such propensities having been constructed in human nature by biological evolution. "9 Acknowledging fear of an incursion into his academic turf, he added, "The central intellectual problem does come down to the autonomy of culture and of the {109} study of culture. Sociobiology challenges the integrity of culture as a thing-in-itself, as a distinctive and symbolic human creation. "10
Sahlins's book was called The Use and Abuse of Biology. An example of the alleged abuse was the idea that Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness could help explain the importance of family ties in human life. Hamilton had shown how a tendency to make sacrifices for relatives could have evolved. Relatives share genes, so any gene that nudges an organism to help a relative would be indirectly helping a copy of itself. The gene will proliferate if the cost incurred by the favor is less than the benefit conferred to the relative, discounted by the degree of relatedness (one- half for a full sibling or offspring, one-eighth for a first cousin, and so on). That can't be true, Sahlins wrote, because people in most cultures don't have words for fractions. This leaves them unable to figure out the coefficients of relatedness that would tell them which relatives to favor and by how much. His objection is a textbook confusion of a proximate cause with an ultimate cause. It is like saying that people can't possibly see in depth, because most cultures haven't worked out the trigonometry that underlies stereoscopic vision.
In any case, "vulgar" wasn't the half of it. Following a favorable review in the New York Review of Books by the distinguished biologist C. H. Waddington, the "Sociobiology Study Group" (including two of Wilson's colleagues, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and the geneticist Richard Lewontin) published a widely circulated philippic called "Against 'Sociobiology. '" After lumping Wilson with proponents of eugenics, Social Darwinism, and Jensen's hypothesis of innate racial differences in intelligence, the signatories wrote:
The reason for the survival of these recurrent determinist theories is that they consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex. . . . These theories provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? . . . What Wilson's book illustrates to us is the enormous difficulty in separating out not only the effects of environment (e. g. , cultural transmission) but also the personal and social class prejudices of the researcher. Wilson joins the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems. 11
They also accused Wilson of discussing "the salutary advantages of genocide" and of making "institutions such as slavery. . . seem natural in human societies because of their 'universal' existence in the biological kingdom. " In
{110} case the connection wasn't clear enough, one of the signatories wrote elsewhere that "in the last analysis it was sociobiological scholarship . . . that provided the conceptual framework by which eugenic theory was transformed into genocidal practice" in Nazi Germany. 12
One can certainly find things to criticize in the final chapter of Sociobiology. We now know that some of Wilson's universals are inaccurate or too coarsely stated, and his claim that moral reasoning will someday be superseded by evolutionary biology is surely wrong. But the criticisms in "Against 'Sociobiology'" were demonstrably false. Wilson was called a "determinist,'" someone who believes that human societies conform to a rigid genetic formula. But this is what he had written:
The first and most easily verifiable diagnostic trait [about human societies] is statistical in nature. The parameters of social organization . . . vary far more among human populations than among those of any other primate species. . . . Why are human societies this flexible? 13
Similarly, Wilson was accused of believing that people are locked into castes determined by their race, class, sex, and individual genome. But in fact he had written that "there is little evidence of any hereditary solidification of status"14 and that "human populations are not very different from one another genetically. "15 Moreover:
Human societies have effloresced to levels of extreme complexity because their members have the intelligence and flexibility to play roles of virtually any degree of specification, and to switch them as the occasion demands. Modern man is an actor of many parts who may well be stretched to his limit by the constantly shifting demands of the environment. 16
As for the inevitability of aggression -- another dangerous idea he was accused of holding -- what Wilson had written was that in the course of human evolution "aggressiveness was constrained and the old forms of primate dominance replaced by complex social skills. "17 The accusation that Wilson (a lifelong liberal Democrat) was led by personal prejudice to defend racism, sexism, inequality, slavery, and genocide was especially unfair -- and irresponsible, because Wilson became a target of vilification and harassment by people who read the manifesto but not the book. 18
At Harvard there were leaflets and teach-ins, a protester with a bullhorn calling for Wilson's dismissal, and invasions of his classroom by slogan-shouting students. When he spoke at other universities, posters called him the "Right- Wing Prophet of Patriarchy" and urged people to bring noisemakers to {111} his lectures. 19 Wilson was about to speak at a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when a group of people carrying placards (one with a swastika) rushed onto the stage chanting, "Racist Wilson, . ou can't hide, we charge you with genocide. " One protester grabbed the microphone and harangued the audience while another doused Wilson with a pitcher of water.
As the notoriety of Sociobiology grew in the ensuing years, Hamilton and Trivers, who had thought up many of the ideas, also became targets of picketers, as did the anthropologists Irven DeVore and Lionel Tiger when they :ried to teach the ideas. The insinuation that Trivers was a tool of racism and right-wing oppression was particularly galling because Trivers was himself a political radical, a supporter of the Black Panthers, and a scholarly collaborator of Huey Newton's. 20 Trivers had argued that sociobiology is, if anything, a force for political progress. It is rooted in the insight that organisms did not evolve to benefit their family, group, or species, because the individuals making up those groups have genetic conflicts of interest with one another and would be selected to defend those interests. This immediately subverts the comfortable belief that those in power rule for the good of all, and it throws a spotlight on hidden actors in the social world, such as females and the younger generation. Also, by finding an evolutionary basis for altruism, sociobiology shows that a sense of justice has a deep foundation in people's minds and need not run against our organic nature. And by showing that self-deception is likely to evolve (because the best liar is the one who believes his own lies), sociobiology encourages self-scrutiny and helps undermine hypocrisy and corruption. 21 (I will return to the political beliefs of Trivers and other "Darwinian leftists" in the chapter on politics. )
Trivers later wrote of the attacks on sociobiology, "Although some of the attackers were prominent biologists, the attack seemed intellectually feeble and lazy. Gross errors in logic were permitted as long as they appeared to give
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? some tactical advantage in the political struggle. . . . Because we were hirelings of the dominant interests, said these fellow hirelings of the same interests, we were their mouthpieces, employed to deepen the [deceptions] with which the ruling elite retained their unjust advantage. Although it follows from evolutionary reasoning that individuals will tend to argue in ways that are ultimately (sometimes unconsciously) self-serving, it seemed a priori unlikely that evil should reside so completely in one set of hirelings and virtue in the other. "22
The "prominent biologists" that Trivers had in mind were Gould and Lewontin, and together with the British neuroscientist Steven Rose they became the intellectual vanguard of the radical science movement. For twenty-five years they have indefatigably fought a rearguard battle against behavioral genetics, sociobiology (and later evolutionary psychology), and the neuro-science of politically sensitive topics such as sex differences and mental
{112} illness. 23 Other than Wilson, the major target of their attacks has been Richard Dawkins. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins covered many of the same ideas as Wilson but concentrated on the logic of the new evolutionary theories rather than the zoological details. He said almost nothing about humans.
The radical scientists' case against Wilson and Dawkins can be summed up in two words: "determinism" and "reductionism. "24 Their writings are peppered with these words, used not in any technical sense but as vague terms of abuse. For example, here are two representative passages in a book by Lewontin, Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin with the defiantly Blank Slate title Not in Our Genes:
Sociobiology is a reductionist, biological determinist explanation of human existence. Its adherents claim . . . that the details of present and past social arrangements are the inevitable manifestations of the specific action of genes. 25
[Reductionists] argue that the properties of a human society are . . . no more than the sums of the individual behaviors and tendencies of the individual humans of which that society is composed. Societies are "aggressive" because the individuals who compose them are "aggressive," for instance'. 26
The quotations from Wilson we saw earlier in the chapter show that he never expressed anything close to these ridiculous beliefs, and neither, of course, did Dawkins. For example, after discussing the tendency in mammals for males to seek a greater number of sexual partners than females do, Dawkins devoted a paragraph to human societies in which he wrote:
What this astonishing variety suggests is that man's way of life is largely determined by culture rather than by genes. However, it is still possible that human males in general have a tendency towards promiscuity, and females a tendency to monogamy, as we would predict on evolutionary grounds. Which of these tendencies wins in particular societies depends on details of cultural circumstance, just as in different animal species it depends on ecological details. 27
What exactly do "determinism" and "reductionism" mean? In the precise sense in which mathematicians use the word, a "deterministic" system is one whose states are caused by prior states with absolute certainty, rather than probabilistically. Neither Dawkins nor any other sane biologist would ever dream of proposing that human behavior is deterministic, as if people must {113} commit acts of promiscuity, aggression, or selfishness at every opportunity. Among the radical scientists and the many intellectuals they have influenced, "determinism" has taken on a meaning that is diametrically opposed to its true meaning. The word is now used to refer to any claim that people have a tendency to act in certain ways in certain circumstances. It is a sign of the tenacity of the Blank Slate that a probability greater than zero is equated with a probability of 100 percent. Zero innateness is the only acceptable belief, and all departures from it are treated as equivalent.
So much for genetic determinism. What about "reductionism" (a concept we examined in Chapter 4) and the claim that Dawkins is "the most reductionist of sociobiologists," one who believes that every trait has its own gene?
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin try to educate their readers on how living things really work according to their alternative to reductionism, which they call "dialectical biology":
Think, for example, of the baking of a cake: the taste of the product is the result of a complex interaction of components -- such as butter, sugar, and flour -- exposed for various periods to elevated temperatures; it is not dissociable into such-or-such a percent of flour, such-or-such of butter, etc. , although each and every component. . . has its contribution to make to the final product. 28
I will let Dawkins comment:
When put like that, this dialectical biology seems to make a lot of sense. Perhaps even / can be a dialectical biologist. Come to think of it, isn't there something familiar about that cake? Yes, here it is,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? in a 1981 publication by the most reductionist of sociobiologists:
". . . If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc.
With minor exceptions such as the cherry on top, there is no one-to-one mapping from words of recipe to 'bits' of cake. The whole recipe maps onto the whole cake. "
I am not, of course, interested in claiming priority for the cake. . . . But what I do hope is that this little coincidence may at least give Rose and Lewontin pause. Could it be that their targets are not quite the nai? vely atomistic reductionists they would desperately like them to be? 29
Indeed, the accusation of reductionism is topsy-turvy because Lewontin and Rose, in their own research, are card- carrying reductionist biologists who {114} explain phenomena at the level of genes and molecules. Dawkins, in contrast, was trained as an ethologist and writes about the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. Wilson, for his part, is a pioneer of research in ecology and a passionate defender of the endangered field that molecular biologists dismissively refer to as "birdsy-woodsy" biology.
All else having failed, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin finally pinned a damning quotation on Dawkins: "They [the genes] control us, body and mind. "30 That does sound pretty deterministic. But what the man wrote was, "They created us, body and mind," which is very different. 31 Lewontin has used the doctored quotation in five different places. 32
Is there any charitable explanation of these "gross errors," as Trivers called them? One possibility may be Dawkins's and Wilson's use of the expression "a gene for X" in discussing the evolution of social behavior like altruism, monogamy, and aggression. Lewontin, Rose, and Gould repeatedly pounce on this language, which refers, they think, to a gene that always causes the behavior and that is the only cause of the behavior. But Dawkins made it clear that the phrase refers to a gene that increases the probability of a behavior compared with alternative genes at that locus. And that probability is an average computed over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time, and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived in. This nonreductionist, nondeterminist use of the phrase "a gene for X" is routine among geneticists and evolutionary biologists because it is indispensable to what they do. Some behavior must be affected by some genes, or we could never explain why lions act differently from lambs, why hens sit on their eggs rather than eat them, why stags butt heads but gerbils don't, and so on. The point of evolutionary biology is to explain how these animals ended up with those genes, as opposed to genes with different effects. Now, a given gene may not have the same effect in all environments, nor the same effect in all genomes, but it has to have an average effect. That average is what natural selection selects (all things being equal), and that is all that the "for" means in "a gene for X. " It is hard to believe that Gould and Lewontin, who are evolutionary biologists, could literally have been confused by this usage, but if they were, it would explain twenty- five years of pointless attacks.
How low can one go? Ridiculing an opponent's sex life would seem to come right out of a bad satirical novel on academic life. But Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin bring up a suggestion by the sociologist Steven Goldberg that women are skilled at manipulating others' emotions, and they comment, "What a touching picture of Goldberg's vulnerability to seduction is thus revealed! "33 Later they mention a chapter in Donald Symons's groundbreaking book The Evolution of Human Sexuality which shows that in all societies, sex is typically conceived of as a female service or favor. "In reading sociobiology," they comment, "one has the constant feeling of being a voyeur, peeping into
{115} the autobiographical memoirs of its proponents. "34 Rose was so pleased with this joke that he repeated it fourteen years later in his book Lifelines: Biology Beyond ~Determinism. 35
Any hope that these tactics are a thing of the past was dashed by events in the year 2000. Anthropologists have long been hostile to anyone who discusses human aggression in a biological context. In 1976 the American Anthropological Association nearly passed a motion censuring Sociobiology and banning two symposia on the topic, and in 1983 they did pass one decreeing that Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa was "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading. "36 But that was mild compared with what was to come.
In September 2000, the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel sent the executives of the association a letter (which quickly proliferated throughout cyberspace) warning of a scandal for anthropology that was soon to be divulged in a book by the journalist Patrick Tierney. 37 The alleged perpetrators were the geneticist James Neel, a founder of the modern science of human genetics, and the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, famous for his thirty- year study of the Yanomamo? people of the Amazon rainforest. Turner and Sponsel wrote:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? This nightmarish story -- a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele) -- will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As another reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.
The accusations were truly shocking. Turner and Sponsel charged Neel and Chagnon with deliberately infecting the Yanomamo? with measles (which is often fatal among indigenous peoples) and then withholding medical care in order to test Neel's "eugenically slanted genetic theories. " According to Turner and Sponsel's rendition of these theories, polygynous headmen in foraging societies were biologically fitter than coddled Westerners because they possessed "dominant genes" for "innate ability" that were selected when the headmen engaged in violent competition for wives. Neel believed, said Turner and Sponsel, that "democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental
{116} supports for the weak," is a mistake. They reasoned, "The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females. "
The accusations against Chagnon were just as lurid. In his books and papers on the Yanomamo? , Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in a killing had more wives and offspring than those who had not. 38 (The finding is provocative because if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in which humans evolved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected over evolutionary time. ) Turner and Sponsel accused him of fabricating his data, of causing the violence among the Yanomamo? (by sending them into a frenzy over the pots and knives with which he paid his informants), and of staging lethal fights for documentary films. Chagnon's portrayal of the Yanomamo? , they charged, had been used to justify an invasion of gold miners into their territory, abetted by Chagnon's collusion with "sinister" Venezuelan politicians. The Yanomamo? have unquestionably been decimated by disease and by the depredations of the miners, so to lay these tragedies and crimes at Chagnon's feet is literally to accuse him of genocide. For good measure, Turner and Sponsel added that Tierney's book contained "passing references to Chagnon . . . demanding that villagers bring him girls for sex. "
Headlines such as "Scientist 'Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory'" soon appeared around the world, followed by an excerpt of Tierney's book in The New Yorker and then the book itself, titled Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. 39 Under pressure from the publisher's libel lawyers, some of the more sensational accusations in the book had been excised, watered down, or put in the mouths of Venezuelan journalists or untraceable informants. But the substance of the charges remained. 40
Turner and Sponsel admitted that their charge against Neel "remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no 'smoking gun' in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel. " That turned out to be an understatement. Within days, scholars with direct knowledge of the events -- historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers -- demolished the charges point by point. 41
Far from being a depraved eugenicist, James Neel (who died shortly before the accusations came out) was an honored and beloved scientist who had consistently attacked eugenics. Indeed, he is often credited with purging human genetics of old eugenic theories and thereby making it a respectable science. The cockamamie theory that Turner and Sponsel attributed to him was incoherent on the face of it and scientifically illiterate (for example, they confused a {117} "dominant gene" with a gene for dominance). In any case there is not the slightest evidence that Neel held any belief close to it. Records show that Neel and Chagnon were surprised by the measles epidemic already in progress and made heroic efforts to contain it. The vaccine they administered, which Tierney had charged was the source of the epidemic, has never caused contagious transmission of measles in the hundreds of millions of people all over the world who have received it, and in all probability the efforts of Neel and Chagnon saved hundreds of Yanomamo? lives. 42 Confronted with public statements from epidemiologists refuting his claims, Tierney lamely said, "Experts I spoke to then had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing in public now. "43
Though no one can prove that Neel and Chagnon did not inadvertently introduce the disease in other places by their very presence, the odds are strongly against it. The Yanomamo? , who are spread out over tens of thousands of square miles, had many more contacts with other Europeans than they did with Chagnon or Neel, because thousands of missionaries, traders, miners, and adventurers move through the area. Indeed, Chagnon himself had documented that a Catholic Salesian missionary was the likely source of an earlier outbreak. Together with Chagnon's criticism of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? mission for providing the Yanomamo? with shotguns, this earned him the missionaries' undying enmity. Not coincidentally, most of Tierney's Yanomamo? informants were associated with the mission.
The specific accusations against Chagnon crumbled as quickly as those against Neel. Chagnon, contrary to Tierney's charges, had not exaggerated Yanomamo? violence or ignored the rest of their lifestyle; in fact, he had meticulously described their techniques for conflict resolution. 44 The suggestion that Chagnon introduced them to violence is simply incredible. Raiding and warfare among the Yanomamo? have been described since the mid-1800s and were documented throughout the first half of the twentieth century, long before Chagnon set foot in the Amazon. (One revealing account was a first-person narrative called Yanodma: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians. )45 And Chagnon's main empirical claims have met the gold standard of science: independent replication. In surveys of rates of death by warfare in pre-state societies, Chagnon's estimates for the Yanomamo? fall well within the range, as we saw in the graph in Chapter 3. 46 Even his most controversial claim, that killers had more wives and offspring, has been replicated in other groups, though there is controversy over the interpretation. It is instructive to compare Tierney's summary of a book supposedly refuting Chagnon with the author's own words. Tierney reports:
Among the Jivaro, head-hunting was a ritual obligation of all males and a required male initiation for teenagers. There, too, most men died in {117} war. Among the Jivaro leaders, however, those who captured the most heads had the fewest wives, and those who had the most wives captured the fewest heads. 47
The author, the anthropologist Elsa Redmond, had actually written:
Yanomamo? men who have killed tend to have more wives, which they have acquired either by abducting them from raiding villages, or by the usual marriage alliances in which they are considered more attractive as mates. The same is true of Jivaro war leaders, who might have four to six wives; as a matter of fact, a great war leader on the Upano River in the 1930s by the name of Tuki or Jose Grande had eleven wives. Distinguished warriors also have more offspring, due mainly to their greater marital success. 48
Turner and Sponsel had long been among Chagnon's most vehement critics (and, not coincidentally, major sources for Tierney's book, despite their professed shock at learning of its contents). They are open about their ideological agenda, which is to defend the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Sponsel wrote that he is committed to "the anthropology of peace" in order to promote a "more nonviolent and peaceful world," which he believes is "latent in human nature. "49 He is opposed to a "Darwinian emphasis on violence and competition" and recently pronounced that "nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human prehistory and that intrahuman killing was . probably rare. "50 He even admits that much of his criticism of Chagnon comes from "an almost automatic reaction against any biological explanation of human behavior, the possibility of biological reductionism, and the associated political implications. "51
Also familiar from the radical science days is an irredentist leftism that considers even moderate and liberal positions reactionary. According to Tierney, Neel "was convinced that democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental support for the weak, violated natural selection"52 and was thus "a eugenic mistake. " But in fact Neel was a political liberal who had protested the diversion of money from poor children to research on aging that he thought would benefit the affluent. He also advocated increasing investment in prenatal care, medical care for children and adolescents, and universal quality education. 53 As for Chagnon, Tierney calls him "a militant anti-Communist and free-market advocate. " His evidence? A quotation from Turner (! ) stating that Chagnon is "a kind of right-wing character who has a paranoid attitude on people he considers lefty. " To explain how he came by these right-wing leanings, Tierney informs readers that Chagnon grew up in a part of rural Michigan "where differences were not welcomed, where {119} xenophobia, linked to anti-Communist feeling, ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support. " Unaware of the irony, Tierney concludes that Chagnon is an "offspring" of McCarthy who had "received a full portion of [McCarthy's] spirit. " Chagnon, in fact, is a political moderate who had always voted for Democrats. 54
An autobiographical comment in Tierney's preface is revealing: "I gradually changed from being an observer to being an advocate. . . . traditional, objective journalism was no longer an option for me. "55 Tierney believes that accounts of
Yanomamo? violence might be used by invaders to depict them as primitive savages who should be removed or assimilated for their own good. Defaming messengers like Chagnon is, in this view, an ennobling form of social action and a step for the cultural survival of indigenous peoples (despite the fact that Chagnon himself has repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the Yanomamo? ).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The decimation of native Americans by European disease and genocide over five hundred years is indeed one of the great crimes of history. But it is bizarre to blame the crime on a handful of contemporary scientists struggling to document their lifestyle before it vanishes forever under the pressures of assimilation. And it is a dangerous tactic. Surely indigenous peoples have a right to survive in their lands whether or not they -- like all human societies -- are prone to violence and warfare. Self-appointed "advocates" who link the survival of native peoples to the doctrine of the Noble Savage paint themselves into a terrible corner. When the facts show otherwise they either have inadvertently weakened the case for native rights or must e~ngage in any means necessary to suppress the facts.
No one should be surprised that claims about human nature are controversial. Obviously any such claim should be scrutinized and any logical and empirical flaws pointed out, just as with any scientific hypothesis. But the criticism of the new sciences of human nature went well beyond ordinary scholarly debate. It turned into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel. I think there are two reasons for this illiberal behavior.
One is that in the twentieth century the Blank Slate became a sacred doctrine that, in the minds of its defenders, had to be either avowed with a perfect faith or renounced in every aspect. Only such black-and-white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs. Only if it is theologically necessary for 100 percent of the differences in intelligence to be caused by the environment could anyone be incensed over the mathematical banality that as the proportion of variance due to nongenetic causes
{120} goes down, the proportion due to genetic causes must go up. Only if the mind is required to be a scraped tablet could anyone be outraged by the claim that human nature makes us smile, rather than scowl, when we are pleased.
A second reason is that "radical" thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all. That made it all the more pressing to discredit the heretics making the discoveries. If ordinary standards of scientific argumentation were not doing the trick, other tactics had to be brought in, because a greater good was at stake.
<< {121} >> Chapter 7
The Holy Trinity
Behavioral science is not for sissies. Researchers may wake up to discover that they are despised public figures because of some area they have chosen to explore or some datum they have stumbled upon. Findings on certain topics -- daycare, sexual behavior, childhood memories, the treatment of substance abuse -- may bring on vilification, harassment, intervention by politicians, and physical assault. 1 Even a topic as innocuous as left-handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications, are victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties. They were soon showered with abuse -- including the threat of a lawsuit, numerous death threats, and a ban on the topic in a scholarly journal -- from enraged lefthanders and their advocates. 2
Are the dirty tricks of the preceding chapter just another example of people taking offense at claims about behavior that make them uncomfortable? Or, as I have hinted, are they part of a systematic intellectual current: the attempt to safeguard the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine as a source of meaning and morality? The leading theoreticians of the radical science movement deny that they believe in a blank slate, and it is only fair that their positions be examined carefully. In addition, I will look at the attacks on the sciences of human nature that have come from their political opposites, the contemporary righ~t.
Could the radical scientists really believe in the Blank Slate? The doctrine might seem plausible to some of the scholars who live in a world of disembodied ideas. But could hardheaded boffins who live in a mechanistic world of neurons and genes really think that the psyche soaks into the brain from the surrounding culture? They deny it in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics their position is plainly in the tradition of the tabula rasa social {122} science of the
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