<html><body><A class=eResources href="http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.473/event_detail.asp">The Blank Slate</A> <A class=eResources href="http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.473/event_detail.asp">The Modern Denial of Human Nature</A> October 7, 2003 Transcript prepared from a tape recording <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>5:15 p.m. </DIV></TD> <TD colSpan=2> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration  </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>5:30 </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Introduction: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Charles Murray, AEI </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Lecture: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Steven Pinker, Harvard University </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>6:30 </DIV></TD> <TD colSpan=2> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment and Reception </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MR. MURRAY: Good evening. My name is Charles Murray. I'm the W.H. Brady Fellow here at AEI, and I am standing in tonight for Chris DeMuth, who is in Portugal. It is my great privilege to do so, especially given tonight's Bradley speaker, Professor Steven Pinker. It may seem rash to say in 2003 that you know what the most important issue of the 21st century is going to be, but I will say it anyway. I think the most important issue is going to be--call it the neogenetic revolution, that combination of things involved with understanding how the brain works and understanding how genes make up the human animal. Steven Pinker has been at the forefront of understanding this revolution, both in a technical sense, publishing the usual long list of technical articles and technical books, but also, and I think even more valuably, taking this expert knowledge and making it accessible to a wider audience, because there is no topic on which it is more important that a wide audience have a valid understanding of what is going on than the understanding of how genes work and determining human behavior and understanding how the mind works. Many of you will know Professor Pinker for his books, "The Language Instinct" of 1994, "How the Mind Works" in 1997, "Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language" in October 1999. His most recent book and the one that he will be talking about tonight is "The Blank Slate." He is a native of Montreal, received his B.A. from McGill University and his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard. Subsequently, after stints at Stanford and Harvard, he spent 21 years cheek by jowl with Noam Chomsky at MIT. Perhaps that's not quite the right way to characterize their relationship. [Laughter.] And just last year, he moved back to Harvard as the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Please join me in welcoming Professor Steven Pinker. [Applause.] MR. PINKER: Thank you very much, Charles, and thanks to all of you for coming. I'm going to talk about my recent book, "The Blank Slate." I've already spoken about it many times on that indispensable institution of modern publishing called the author publicity tour, and people often ask, What is it like? And those of you have been on the tour I think can confirm that this cartoon captures it well: "Yes, a lot of people ask me that. The restroom is down the hall on the right." [Laughter.] "The Blank Slate" is a book about human nature, a topic of perennial fascination, because everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate how other people will react to their surroundings, and that means we all need theories, implicit or explicit, about what makes people tick. So much depends on our theory of human nature. In our personal lives, we use it to win friends and influence people, to manage our relationships, to bring up our children, to control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning guide our policies in education. Its assumptions about motivation guide our policies in law and government. And because a theory of human nature delineates what we can achieve easily, what we can achieve only with pain and effort, and what we cannot achieve at all, it's tied to our values, what we think we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society. Because of this tie to values, it should come as no surprise that for thousands of years, theories of human nature were inextricably tied up with religion, and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition had a theory of human nature covering many of the topics that we would today consider part of the subject matter of psychology and biology. For example, the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature was a modular theory, positing that the mind is composed of a number of faculties, such as a capacity for love, a moral sense, and a capacity for choice or free will. And though our decision faculty is not the effect of any prior cause, it has an innate tendency towards sin. There's a theory of perception and cognition in our religious tradition, namely, that we are in touch with reality because God designed our faculties to give us an accurate rendition of the world. And there's even a theory of mental health, that psychological well-being comes from accepting God's purpose, loving God, and loving our fellow humans for the sake of God. Now, the Judeo-Christian theory grew out of an interpretation of specific events narrated in the Bible. For example, the doctrine of free will comes from the story in which Adam and Eve were punished for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, implying that they could have chosen otherwise, therefore, free will exists. Today, no scientifically literate person can believe that the events narrated in the Book of Genesis actually took place. That means that there's been a need for a new theory of human nature less tied to the interpretation of events narrated in the Bible. And a major point of "The Blank Slate" is that the secular theory of human nature that has become the conventional wisdom in our intellectual mainstream is composed of three doctrines, each of which can be linked to a dead white European male. [Laughter.] The first is the doctrine that gives the book its title, the blank slate or tabula rasa, conventionally associated with this man, the English philosopher John Locke. Now that Locke's works are available on the Internet, one can verify that he didn't actually use the expression "blank slate," but he did use a similar metaphor. He said, "Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? To this I answer, in one word, from experience." Now, the blank slate was not just an empirical hypothesis, but it had a good deal of emotional and moral appeal in Locke's time. It implied that dogmas, such as the divine right of kings, could not be treated as self-evident truths that were just implanted in the brain, but had to be justified by experiences that people shared and, hence, could debate. It undermined the hereditary royalty and aristocracy who could claim no innate wisdom or virtue if their minds started out as blank as everyone else's. And, by the same token, it undermined the institution of slavery because slaves could no longer be held to be innately inferior or subservient. And this sensibility was, I think, captured in a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker about ten years ago, which I think Charles will appreciate, where one king says to the other, "I don't know anything about the bell curve, but I say hereditary is everything." [Laughter.] The blank slate continues to be an influential doctrine. Through most of the 20th century, psychology tried to explain all of human behavior using a couple of simple mechanisms of association and conditioning. The social sciences have tried to explain all of human experience in terms of culture, conceived of as an autonomous force that can't be identified with anything in the minds of individual flesh and blood human beings. And here is, I think, a representative quotation from a well-known 20th century social scientist: "With the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless. Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired from his culture, from the manmade part of the environment, from other human beings." And that is a quote from the famous anthropologist and public intellectual Ashley Montague. Just to show how widespread this sentiment is, I'll give you another quote from an influential 20th century figure. "When kids go to school at the age of six, there's an empty bucket there. And someone by the time they're 18 will fill that bucket. Is it going to be a parent? Is it going to be a good educator? Or is it going to be some other scum out there who's going to fill that bucket?" [Laughter.] And that is a quote from perhaps the next governor of California. [Laughter.] In fact, does anyone know? Is he the next governor of California? Have the returns come in yet? Or it's too early. Not yet. Okay. [Laughter.] MR. PINKER: You heard it here first. There's another doctrine that makes up the conventional wisdom about human nature, and my name for it comes from a poem by John Dryden, "The Conquest of Grenada," which begins, "I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran." Now, the noble savage, though, is more often associated with this gentleman, the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. And here's what Rousseau wrote: "So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel and requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed; whereas, nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state. The example of the savages seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in this condition and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps towards the decrepitness of the species." Now, you can never really understand someone writing in an earlier century unless you know who he was arguing against. And in Rousseau's case, he referred to so many authors, but I think there was one author in particular that he had in mind--this man, who painted a rather different picture of life in a state of nature. He wrote, "Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, therein that condition which is called war, and such a war is of every man against every man. In such condition there is no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and, consequently, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is, worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This, of course, is the famous quotation from Thomas Hobbes in "Leviathan." Now, Rousseau's alternative of the noble savage was also a doctrine with considerable emotional appeal. It implied that there was no need for a domineering Leviathan, an armed government and police force, to keep us from each other's throats. If we're basically nasty, then conflict is a permanent part of the human condition; whereas, if we're basically noble, we can work for a utopian society of the future. Children are born savages, so if our inner savage is nasty, it means bringing up children will be in an arena of discipline and conflict; whereas, if we're basically noble, it means that bringing up children is a matter of providing them with opportunities to develop their potential. The noble savage also is not ancient history but continues to be an influential idea. I think we see it in the respect for everything natural and a distrust of anything manmade--natural foods, natural childbirth, natural medicines. We see it in the unfashionability of authoritarian styles of child rearing which were popular just a couple of generations ago. And we see it in the common understanding of our social problems as repairable defects in our institutions as opposed to a more traditional view that would ascribe them to the inherent tragedy of the human condition. And the third doctrine that makes up the conventional wisdom is associated with another French philosopher, Rene Descartes, who wrote the following: "When I consider my mind, I cannot distinguish any parts, but apprehend it to be clearly one and entire. But it is quite otherwise with corporeal objects, for there is not one of them imaginable by me which my mind cannot easily divide into parts. This is sufficient to teach me that the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body"--an idea which several centuries later was ridiculed as the doctrine of the ghost in the machine by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, a term which was later co-opted as the name of an album by the rock group The Police. The ghost in the machine was an appealing doctrine. People don't like to think of themselves as a heap of glorified clockwork. Machines are insensate and have some workaday purpose, like grinding corn or sharpening pencils. Humans, we like to think, are sentient and have some higher purpose, such as love, worship, and the pursuit of knowledge and beauty. Machines follow the ineluctable laws of physics; whereas, behavior, we like to think, is freely chosen. With choice comes optimism about possibilities for the future, and with choice comes responsibility and the power to hold others accountable for their actions. Finally, if, as Descartes said, the mind is entirely separate from the body, that holds out the hope that the mind can survive the death of the body, an idea whose appeal I think is all too obvious. Again, the ghost in the machine is an influential doctrine today. We see it in the fact that freedom, dignity, and responsibility are often seen as incompatible with the biological understanding of the mind, which is often denounced as reductionist or determinist. I think the people who use these words don't have a very clear idea of what they mean by them, but everyone understands them to refer to something bad. We see it in the stem cell debate where some of the theologians who've weighed in on this controversy have framed it in terms of ensoulment, when ensoulment takes place in embryonic development, which means that perhaps one of the most promising medical technologies of the 21st century is being debated in terms of when the ghost first enters the machine. And we see it in everyday thinking and speech. It's hard to get away from in common sense. When we refer to John's body or John's brain, it presupposes that there is some entity, John, which is separate from the body and brain that it possesses. Or when journalists speculate about brain transplants, whereas, in fact, they really should call them body transplants, because as Dan Dennett (ph) once pointed out, this is the one such operation in which you really want to be the donor, not the recipient. [Laughter.] Well, it should come as no surprise that I think that this whole set of ideas is deeply problematic, beginning with the blank slate. The problem with the blank slate is that it doesn't do anything. No one can deny the central importance of learning, socialization, and culture in all aspects of human life. The question is: How do they work? There has to be some kind of innate machinery present in order to do the learning to create and transmit and acquire the culture. When Locke said there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, the appropriate reply came from Leibnetz, who said, "Except for the intellect itself." And, indeed, the modern sciences, in trying to work out what is contained in the intellect itself, have posed threats to the doctrine of the blank slate. My own field, cognitive science, has tried to lay out the innate mechanisms that must be present in order to accomplish the learning that humans are capable of, including some basic concept of a stable object and lawful causation; a number sense with which we grasp the concept of quantity; a number of spatial representations that allow us to keep track of objects and find our way in the world; a theory of mind or intuitive psychology by which we try to impute thoughts and feelings to other people; a language instinct that allows us to communicate these thoughts and feelings to others; and the executive systems of the frontal lobes that receive information from the rest of the brain and execute decision rules that determine how the whole person behaves. Evolutionary psychology has undermined the blank slate by showing that beneath the unquestioned fact of cross-cultural variation, the fact that societies differ from one another, there is also a bedrock of human universals, ways of thinking and feeling and behaving that can be found in all of the cultures documented by ethnographers. The anthropologist Donald Brown has recently compiled a list of them, and they number some 300 so far, everything from aesthetics, affection, anthropomorphization, and antonyms, all the way down to value contrasts, weaning, weapons, attempts to control the weather, and a word for the color white. Evolutionary psychology has undermined the blank slate in another way by showing that many human drives can't be understood simply as ways of maximizing our well-being in our own lifetime, but can only be understood as adaptations for survival and reproduction in an ancestral environment, the one in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history. Perhaps the most obvious example is our taste for sugar and fat, which sends many people to an early grave from unhealthy diets, but which clearly had an adaptive rationale in an environment in which starvation was always a real possibility and in which these nutrient-packed substances were in short supply and one could never eat too much of them. Recently, we've developed a technology to crank out mass quantities of the stuff. Our tastes haven't caught up, and so we eat more of them than is good for us. Another example is the thirst for revenge, which is the source of much human suffering in the form of blood feuds and vendettas and cycles of violence, but which had a rationale in a world in which one couldn't dial 911 to get Leviathan to show up to settle your scores for you, but a reputation for toughness and a resolve to retaliate against injuries was one's only defense against being a permanent punching bag. And less obviously, our desire for attractive mates needs an explanation. The humorist Fran Leibowitz I think once posed a profound paradox for psychology when a reporter asked her why she had never gotten married. She said, "People who marry someone that they're attracted to are making a terrible mistake. You really should marry your best friend. You like your best friend more than you're apt to like anyone you happen to find physically attractive. You wouldn't pick your best friend because they have a cute nose. That's all you're doing when you're getting married. You're saying, `I'm going to spend the rest of my life with you because of your lower lip.'" [Laughter.] Now, this really is a profound observation, and I think the resolution to this paradox comes from research in evolutionary psychology showing that the physical cues to beauty are actually indicators of underlying health, fertility, and fitness. By being attracted to people displaying those physical signs as potential mates, we're maximizing the chances that our genes will combine with the fittest other genes available when we have children with them. Neuroscience has undermined the blank slate by showing that there's a complex genetic patterning to the brain, an example being this diagram, which is not an oil refinery but, rather, a diagram of the primate visual system, comprising some 50 distinct areas interconnected in precise ways, laid out by molecular cues during the course of embryonic development. And it's not just the overall block and arrow diagram of the brain that's under genetic influence, but some of its fine structure as well. I'm going to describe a recent study by the neuroscientist Paul Thompson at UCLA, who used MRI to measure the distribution of gray matter across the cerebral cortex of a sample of individuals and then correlated them in pairs and plotted the correlation in false color so that a lack of a significant correlation would be plotted as deep blue, and then all of the other colors showed various degrees of statistically significant correlation between how much gray matter one person has in a particular part of the brain and how much another person has. When you pair people at random, by definition the correlations are zero, and so in the left panel, the view of the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere, and a top view of the brain show uniform correlation of zero. This is what happens in people who share half their genes, namely, fraternal twins. And as you can see, most of the surface of the brain shows a statistically significant correlation. This is what happens in identical twins, people who share all their genes, and as you can see, even more of the brain is in pink, red, yellow, and green, showing very high degrees of statistically significant correlation. Now, these correlations, all we know so far is that the anatomy is correlated, but there's reason to believe that the correlations in anatomy have functional consequences that I think are best summed up in another New Yorker cartoon, this one by Charles Addams, showing two guys with identical contraptions in their lap in the waiting room of a patent attorney. And the caption is, "Separated at birth, the Malliefert twins meet accidentally." [Laughter.] MR. PINKER: Now, this is only something of an exaggeration because studies of identical twins who were given up for adoption at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they do have sometimes astonishing similarities. My favorite example is the pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany, the other was brought up by a Jewish adoptive father in Trinidad. When they met each other in the lab in their 40s in Minnesota, they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulets. Both of them had rubber bands around their wrists. Both of them, it turned out, liked to dip butter toast in coffee. Both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after. [Laughter.] And both liked to pretend to sneeze in crowded elevators to watch people jump. [Laughter.] Now, surely some of these are coincidences that come about whenever you scrutinize two autobiographies in enough detail. But objective measures of behavioral traits confirm that there are high correlations between identical twins even when reared apart. They correlate strongly in measures of intelligence, in measures of personality, and in consequential real-world behavior, such as susceptibility to gambling, addiction, tendency to get divorced, brushes with the law, number of hours of television watched, and so on. Which leads to what behavioral geneticists call the first law of behavioral genetics, which is that all behavioral traits are partially heritable. The noble savage has been undermined by recent research in the sciences of human nature. Behavioral genetics has shown that among the heritable traits are having an antagonistic personality, a tendency toward violent crime, and a lack of conscience, or psychopathy. Neuroscience has begun to identify brain mechanisms associated with aggression, and evolutionary psychology and anthropology have underscored the ubiquity of conflict in human affairs as one would expect as the output of a Darwinian process. I'll give you two examples. Here's a graph from the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley plotting the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of societies; that is, if you're a man, what are the chances that you will die at the hands of another man as opposed to passing away of natural causes, as they say, peacefully in one's sleep? The red bars are a number of pre-state societies, hunter-gatherer and hunter-horticultural societies in the Amazon rain forest and New Guinea highlands, and the rates range from about 10-percent chance to almost a 60-percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man. The tiny little blue bar at the lower left-hand corner plots the same statistic for the United States and Europe in the 20th century, and it includes all of the casualties of both world wars. So not to put too fine a point on it, but when it comes to life in a state of nature, Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong. Well, what about our own culture? Have we somehow managed to bring up a generation of peaceable individuals who never even think about committing a violent act? Well, that seems rather unlikely, and a number of social psychologists have put that idea to the test by coming out and asking people: Have you ever fantasized about killing someone you don't like? [Laughter.] You can think about it yourself. Don't raise your hands. Just--[Laughter.] The data from a number of studies are that about a third of men and about 15 percent of women frequently think about killing people they don't like, most often romantic rivals, stepparents, and people who've humiliated them in public. And about three-quarters of men and more than 60 percent of women at least occasionally think about killing people they don't like. And when I first described this result to Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason, who's in this room, he said, "Yeah, and the rest of them are lying." [Laughter.] But it's the ghost in the machine that I think has had to withstand the most severe threats. Cognitive science has shown that this formerly mysterious power called intelligence can be explained in mechanistic terms by thinking of beliefs as a kind of information; thinking as a kind of computation, not the kind that your PC or Macintosh does but presumably a kind of massively parallel, fuzzy, and analog computation, but computation nonetheless; and that desires can be understood in cybernetic terms as mechanisms of feedback and control. Artificial intelligence has shown that we can actually build intelligent systems out of matter, most famously the computer program Deep Blue, which defeated the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, seven years ago. And neuroscience has undermined the ghost in the machine through what Francis Crick has called "the astonishing hypothesis," the idea that all of our thoughts and feelings and experiences consist of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. And though many people do find this an astonishing hypothesis, there is increasing evidence that it's correct. We know that the mind is an electrical system, that if we--if a neurosurgeon sends an electrical current into the cerebral cortex, the patient can have a vivid life-like experience indistinguishable from reality. The brain is a chemical system, as we see from the effects of recreational and therapeutic drugs and in natural variations in neurotransmitters and hormones which can produce marked changes in personality and emotion. Through surgery, we know that the mind is a physical system. Most dramatically, in the case of split brain surgery in which a surgeon in treating epilepsy might section the corpus callosum joining the two cerebral hemispheres, leaving the person to have two independent consciousnesses co-residing in the same skull, as if you could bisect the soul with a knife. We know that damage to the brain can remove a part of the person. As the result of a stroke or other brain injury, a person may lose the ability to recognize a face or to make a moral decision, showing that Descartes was wrong when he said the mind is one and indivisible. We know the brain has a staggering complexity, a hundred billion neurons interconnected by a hundred trillion synapses, which is fully commensurate with the staggering complexity of human thought and behavior. And there's every reason to believe that when the physiological activity of the brain stops, the person goes out of existence. Despite concerted efforts by 19th century scientists, no one has been able to figure out a way to communicate with the dead. Now, this idea, although the evidence behind it is recent, the idea itself I think was--began to be glimpsed more than a hundred years ago, and my favorite example is a remarkable passage from the "Brothers Karamazov," in which Dmitri Karamazov has been visited in his prison cell by a medical researcher, and he is now recounting to his brother what he has learned. He said, "Imagine, inside, in the nerves, in the head, there are sort of little tails. I look at something with my eyes, and when they begin quivering, those little tails, an image appears, that is, an object or an action, dammit. That's why I see and then think because of those tails, not because I've got a soul and that I am some sort of image and likeness. Rockyton (ph) explained it all to me yesterday, Brother, and it simply bowled me over. It's magnificent, Alyosha, the science. A new man's arising. That I understand. And yet I am sorry to lose God." Now, many people have had this kind of reaction. They've been sorry to lose God or to lose the values that are traditionally associated with God. And there's been a widespread fear and loathing of human nature. Some of it has come from the academic left, most notably in the reaction to E.O. Wilson's book "Sociobiology," which first presented these ideas to the public about 25 years ago, an example being the manifesto by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called "Against Sociobiology," which said, among other things, "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 also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany." Because of these accusations, Wilson was often hounded by picketers and protesters when he spoke on college campuses, an example being this poster from the mid-1980s that read, "Come and hear Edward O. Wilson, sociobiologist and the prophet of right-wing patriarchy." Near the bottom it says, "Bring noisemakers." But for all this, the right-wing patriarchy wasn't so happy to have E.O. Wilson as its prophet in the first place, and there were also denunciations from the religious and cultural right, an example being the following quote from Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard. He wrote that, "Biological theories of the mind are sure to give you the creeps because whether a behavior is moral, whether it signifies virtue, is a judgment that the new science and materialism in general cannot make." He contrasted it with the Judeo-Christian view, according to which human beings are "persons from the start endowed with a soul, created by God, and infinitely precious." And this is the common understanding the new science means to undo. Well, this is a very articulate statement of this concern. Not all the statements have been quite that articulate, an example being Tom DeLay's theory of the cause of the Columbine High School shootings five years ago, when he said that, "Such outbursts of violence are inevitable because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud." And another example would be testimony delivered to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee by a creationist study group that cited the lyrics of the following rock song: "You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do it on The Discovery Channel." [Laughter.] Well, a good part of the book tries to address these concerns, and despite the fact that sometimes they're couched in rather silly language, they are serious concerns, and they, I think, ought to be taken seriously, and I've argued that the fears of a biological understanding of human nature number four: the fear of inequality, the fear of imperfectibility, the fear of determinism, and the fear of nihilism. I'll explain what I mean by each of those. I'll also show that all of them are non sequiturs. They come about because these ideas are so novel, not because they actually follow from the empirical discoveries. And I'll also point out that even if there were dangers in emphasizing too strong a notion of human nature, there are also dangers in denying human nature. And for that reason we should study human beings objectively without trying to put a moral thumb on either side of the scale. Well, let me begin with the fear of inequality. This comes from a basic mathematical fact that zero equals zero equals zero. If we're blank slates, we must be equal, but if the mind has any innate organization, then different races, sexes, or individuals could be biologically different, and that would condone discrimination and oppression. Well, I think once you see the argument stated in black and white, it's easy to see what's wrong with it, and it's an argument that Charles Murray has made numerous times, which is that one shouldn't confuse the notion of fairness with the notion of sameness; that when the Declaration of Independence announced "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal," they were not saying "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are clones." Rather, a commitment to political equality is foremost a recognition of certain human universals, giving rise to universal human interests; as the Declaration continues, that "people are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." A commitment to political equality is also a decision to prohibit discrimination against individuals based on the statistical averages of certain groups they might belong to, such as their race, ethnicity, or sex. One can maintain this commitment regardless of what the facts turn out to be about group differences, a point that I should also attribute to Christina Sommers, who made it in her book "Who Stole Feminism?" Now, I mentioned that there are downsides of denying human nature, and there are downsides of denying the possibility of individual differences, which is to treat more successful people as larcenists. The idea is if everyone starts out identical but some people end up with more stuff than others, they must have stolen more of their fair share. And this has been a stimulus to persecution and other crimes, notably in Lenin's Soviet Union, in which the kulaks(ph), the so-called rich peasants, were persecuted; in the Cultural Revolution in China; and, indirectly, in many cases of ethnic persecution in which ethnic minorities who've set up social conditions in which their talented members can prosper, would then be seen by the surrounding majority as parasites and bloodsuckers and be targets of expulsions or pogroms or genocide, examples being the overseas Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, the Indians in East Africa and the South Pacific, the Ebos in Nigeria, and the Jews in Europe. The second fear is the fear of imperfectibility, dashing the age-old dream of the perfectibility of humankind, and it runs more or less as follows: If ignoble traits are innate, such as selfishness, violence, prejudice, or rape, that would make them unchangeable, and so attempts at social reform and human improvement would be a waste of time. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and will just foul it up no matter what you do? Well, I think this, too, is a non sequitur because ignoble motives do not automatically lead to ignoble behavior, as we saw in the survey of homicidal fantasies that I mentioned earlier in the talk. And the reason that they don't is precisely because the mind is not a blank slate, but a complex system of many parts, some of which can counteract others, such as a moral sense, a set of cognitive faculties that can acquire a knowledge of history, and the executive systems of the frontal lobes that can apply the moral sense and a knowledge of history to inhibit behavior. Indeed, the undeniable social progress that has taken place over the centuries did not come about from a denial or a rewriting of human nature but, rather, from taking one part of it and stretching its range of application. This is an argument that I owe to the philosopher Peter Singer, who, in his book "The Expanding Circle," cited evidence that all human cultures show some capacity for sympathy, an ability by people to treat other people as having interests that are as valuable as their own. The problem is that the default setting for the sense of sympathy is to extend it only to one's own family or clan, and people outside that very small circle are treated generally as less than human and can be exploited with impunity. But over the centuries, one can see the moral circle expanding to embrace larger and larger groups of people, to embrace other clans within the tribe, the entire nation, other races, both sexes, and most recently, as in the universal declaration of human rights, all of humanity. And so this expansion of moral sense did not require that human nature be erased or denied but, rather, that a knob or a slider be adjusted that controls the size of the circle that embraces those entities that we treat as equivalent to our own. I've been emphasizing that a denial of human nature has a dark side. In the case of the perfectibility of mankind, I think the dark sides are rather severe, and I'll mention three of them. Despite the fact that the perfectibility of mankind seems to be such a rosy and benevolent doctrine, it really isn't in practice. For one thing, it opens the door to totalitarian social engineering. If people are blank slates, leaders are apt to think, well, we damn well better control what gets written on those slates instead of leaving it up to chance. And some of the most authoritarian and despotic regimes of the 20th century explicitly embraced the blank slate. For example, Mao Tse-tung had a famous saying: "It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written." The Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for the deaths of a quarter of their countrymen, had a slogan: "Only the newborn baby is spotless." And less horrifically, but still significant, we see an allusion to the blank slate in a quote from Le Corbusier that, "City planners should begin with a clean tablecloth. We must build places where mankind will be reborn." Well, let me show you what he had in mind. [Laughter.] MR. PINKER: This is a picture of Paris, of central Paris, or at least what Paris would have looked like if Le Corbusier had been granted his wish to bulldoze it and start all over again with a clean tablecloth. It's an idea that has come to be known as authoritarian high modernism, the conceit that cities and societies could be planned from the top down based on scientific principles rooted in a theory of human needs. The problem was that the theory of human needs was basically the blank slate, that every human needs so many cubic feet of air per minute to breathe, so many gallons of water for bathing, so many quarts for drinking, a place to eat, so many square feet in which to sleep, a way to commute to work, and that was pretty much it. The most efficient way to satisfy those needs is to stack people up in concrete highrises interconnected by freeways. Now, of course, what Le Corbusier and other planners left out was the rest of human nature, such as the need for intimate social interactions in public places, squares -- [tape ends]. -- effect of natural light on mood, the need for visual effects manifested in ornamentation and design, the need for human scale and the feeling of safety that it brings and so on. And though Le Corbusier did not get his way and flatten Paris to begin all over again, it was his disciplines who were responsible for the notorious wasteland of Brasilia and who were also responsible for the so-called urban renewal movement of the late '50s and '60s, in which many vibrant neighborhoods in American cities really were bulldozed and replaced by cityscapes much like this one. A complementary downside of perfectibility is a lack of appreciation for democracy. Many of the authoritarian dictatorships of the 20th century were actually based on a rather romantic view of human nature. They were led by idealistic, charismatic leaders who based their authority on a claim of moral superiority to their predecessors. And they argue that their repressive measures would spontaneously wither and that the state would gradually disappear, leaving people to cooperate spontaneously in a state of utopian anarchism. And the result has been some of the worst, most repressive dictatorships known to history. In contrast, democracy is based on a rather jaundiced view of human nature, which is beautifully summed up in the quotation from James Madison that I'm sure many of you are familiar with: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary." And it's this thinking, this jaundiced view of human nature, that motivates a permanent need for a government of laws and not men, and also for the checks and balances thought to be permanently necessary to counteract the ambition and self-deception of political leaders, thought to be a consequence of an unchanging human nature. The third downside of perfectibility I think is a distortion of human relationships, most notably parenting, since it's parents above all who are thought to write on a blank slate. I'm going to give you a quotation from a mother who was interviewed for an article on the parental advice industry in a recent story in the Boston Globe. She said to the reporter, "I'm overwhelmed with parenting advice. I'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so I can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they'll grow up to be healthy adults. And I'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual play so they'll grow up smart. And there are all kinds of play: play for finger dexterity, word games for reading success, large motor play, small motor play. I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids." I think anyone who has recently been a parent knows exactly what this frazzled mom is going through. Well, here are some sobering facts about parenting recently assembled by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris. First of all, most studies of the effect of parenting on which the experts base their advice are useless. They're useless because they don't control for heritability. They measure some correlation between what parents do and how their kids turn out, and they assume that correlation implies causation. It must be the parents who caused them to be that way. Parents who bathe their children in language have kids who grow up to have better verbal skills. Parents who spank their children have kids who grow up to be more violent. Parents who are neither too strict nor too lax have children who grow up to be better adjusted and so on. They don't even consider the possibility that parents and children might be correlated because they are related, they share genes, and that the studies may be showing nothing more than that articulate people have articulate children and violent people have violent children and well-adjusted people have well-adjusted children. Well, how do you tease these apart? You redo the studies with appropriate genetic controls, such as looking at twins or adoptees. When you do that, the results are bracing. First of all, you find that siblings separated at birth end up pretty much as similar as siblings reared together. Now, remember the Malliefert twins, separated at birth, meet each other in the waiting room of the patent attorney with those identical Rube Goldberg devices. Okay. Well, now think, what would have happened if the Malliefert twins had been raised together, they had not been separated at birth? Well, then you would think they should be even more similar because not only would they share their genes, but they'd also share their parental environment and all of the parenting practices that comprise it. In fact, they don't. Siblings separated at birth end up as similar as siblings reared together. And a complementary finding comes from a complementary methodology. If twins separated at birth are a case where you have same genes, different environment, then adopted siblings are cases where you have same environment or at least similar environment, but no shared genes. The result there is that when adopted siblings are tested in adulthood, they are uncorrelated in most measures of intelligence and personality; that is, they are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. So these two findings suggest that all of those years of growing up in the same home with the same parents, the same parenting philosophy and so on leaves no lasting mark on intelligence and personality. It suggests that children are shaped not by parents but in part, though only in part, by genes; in part by aspects of the environment other than parents, such as the culture, both the surrounding culture of the nation as a whole and the children's own culture, which we call their peer group; and to an extent that most people don't appreciate, I think by chance. Chance events in the development of the brain in utero, whether the growth cones of some axons zigged or zagged, and perhaps chance events as we live our lives, whether you were dropped on your head, whether you inhaled a virus, whether you got the top bunk bed or the bottom bunk bed. Now, when many people hear these findings, their first reaction is: So you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my kids? Well, of course it matters. It matters for many reasons, and I'll just mention two. First of all, it's never okay to beat or abuse or neglect or belittle a child because those are horrible things for a big strong person to do to a small helpless person that's in their charge. Parenting, above all, is an ethical responsibility. Also, let's say I were to tell you that you don't have the ability to shape the personality of your spouse. Now, only a newlywed believes that you can--[Laughter.] --change the personality of your spouse. Nonetheless, your reaction probably would not be: Oh, so you're saying it doesn't matter how I treat my spouse? Well, it matters how you treat your spouse to the quality of your marriage, and so it matters how you treat your child to the quality of your relationship with the child, both to the nature of family life in the home and to the lifelong relationship that the parent and child have when the child leaves the home and reflects back on how they were treated and what kind of relationship they have with their parents. And I think it's a good sign of how pervasive the blank slate is that people conceptualize the parent-child relationship as a matter of shaping formless matter like putty. When told that that may not be possible, the first reaction is not to think of any other reason why you might be nice to your children; if you can't shape their personality, it doesn't what you do at all. Let me go over the other two fears a little more quickly. The fear of determinism is the anxiety that if behavior is caused by a person's biology, he can't be held responsible for it. And just to show that this fear is not entirely groundless, here's a headline from the Wall Street Journal of about ten years ago that kind of captures the anxiety: "Man's Genes Made Him Kill, His Lawyers Claim." [Laughter.] And you can trade your favorite lawyer jokes here. Well, how do you address this fear? I mean, will we have ingenious defense lawyers getting everyone off the hook by pointing to a bad pixel in an MRI scan or their genetic heritage or evolutionary history? Well, no. Let's think back on what you mean when you want to hold someone responsible. What does that even mean? Well, it means that you impose contingencies on their behavior: reward, punishment, credit, blame, and so on. If you rob a liquor store, we're going to put you in jail. We do that because we hope that by doing so we'll reduce the frequency of people robbing liquor stores. So these contingencies are themselves causes of behavior. They're environmental causes of behavior, but they're still causes of behavior. They don't appeal to some mysterious concept of free will or a capricious ghost but, rather, to parts of the brain that can anticipate the consequences of behavior and inhibit it accordingly. We can keep this influence on the brain systems for inhibition, namely, hold people responsible, even as we come to understand the brain systems for temptation. Moreover, the bogus defenses for bad behavior that ingenious defense lawyers have dreamed up over the past few decades are more likely to be environmental than biological in the first place, such as the abuse excuse, which got the Menendez brothers off the hook in their first trial in which their lawyer argued that the reason that they shot their mother and father to death was that they had a history of emotional and physical abuse as children; the black rage syndrome, offered by the lawyer William Kuntzler to defense the Long Island Railroad gunman, saying that he burst under the pressure of living in a racist society, and that's why he started to shoot passengers on the train at random; the "patriarchy made me do it" defense, offered by lawyers defending rape suspects, saying that they were victims of a misogynistic culture or were inflamed by pornographic images; and perhaps the oldest, and my favorite, from West Side Story, the explanation offered by the Jets to the local police sergeant, "Dear Kindly Sergeant Krupke/You gotta understand/It's just our bringin' upke/That gets us out of hand/Our mothers all are junkies/Our fathers all are drunks. Golly Moses, naturally we're punks." Finally, we come to the fear of nihilism, the fear that biology strips life of meaning and purpose. It says that everything that we hold precious--love, beauty, morality--are just figments of a brain pursuing selfish evolutionary strategies. Here's an illustration of the fear of nihilism from the comic strip "Arlo and Janis," in which our hero, Arlo, is awake one night, racked by existential doubt, pacing the floors. He says to his young son, "Why am I here?" And the boy says, "To pass on your genes." Are you still here? [Laughter.] MR. PINKER: Admittedly, for many people this is not a satisfying answer to the question, "Why am I here?" [Laughter.] MR. PINKER: Now, there are--to deal with this, I think you have to separate the religious and secular versions of this fear because they are--I think they're quite different. The religious version is that people need to believe in a soul which seeks to fulfill God's purpose and is rewarded or punished in an afterlife, and if people stopped believing in a soul, we would see, in Nietzsche's words, "the total eclipse of all values." Well, one response, I think, to the religious fear is that a belief in an immortal soul is actually not such an ennobling concept because a belief in a life to come necessarily devalues life on Earth. Think about why you sometimes remind yourself of the cliche "Life is short." That is a prompt to bury the hatchet in some pointless dispute, to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to vow to use your time productively instead of squandering it. I think one could argue that nothing gives life more meaning than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious gift. As for God's purpose, have you ever noticed that, in practice, God's purpose is always conveyed by other human beings? Well, I think this opens the door to a certain amount of mischief. I'm going to show you an infamous headline from the satirical newspaper The Onion that appeared almost exactly two years ago. Some of you may be familiar with it: "Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell." [Laughter.] MR. PINKER: "`We expected external paradise for this,' said suicide bombers." Well, it was criticized for being in bad taste, which, of course, it was. But things in bad taste can sometimes make a good point, in this case that even if there are people who can only be deterred from horrific acts by the threat of spending eternity in hell, there are certainly people who are tempted to commit horrific acts by the promise of spending eternity in heaven. What about the secular fear of nihilism? My favorite response to this comes from the opening scene of Woody Allen's movie "Annie Hall," which you may recall that the five-year-old Woody Allen has been taken to the family doctor by his mother because he is depressed. The doctor says, "Why are you depressed, Alvy?" And his mother says, "It's something he read." "Something he read, huh?" And Alvy says, "The universe is expanding." "The universe is expanding?" "Well, if the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart, and that would be the end of everything." His mother says, "What about your business? He stopped doing his homework." And Alvy says, "What's the point?" Well, the response, the wise response, as so often happens in life, comes from one's mother, who said, "What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding." [Laughter.] Indeed, Brooklyn is not expanding. I think the appropriate response to Alvy and people with the secular fear of nihilism is that it's based on a confusion of time scales, confusion of human time, years and decades, namely, what is meaningful to us and how we want to live our lives today given the brains we have, and evolutionary time, hundreds of thousands or millions of years, the process that determines how and why our brain gives us those thoughts to begin with. Another way of putting it is that even if in some metaphorical sense our genes are selfish, that does not mean that we are selfish. And even if the process of evolution is amoral and without a purpose, it doesn't mean that we are amoral and without a purpose. There's an old saying that people who appreciate sausages and legislation should not see them being made. The same may be true of the human moral sense. And I'll make one more point, which is, even if morality is a product of the human moral sense, it doesn't mean that it is a figment concocted out of the blue; but, rather, morality has an inherent logic that the human moral sense can be thought to implement. This is an ancient argument, but, again, I'll illustrate it with a contemporary example, again, from the comic pages, from the late lamented strip "Calvin and Hobbes," in which Calvin, seeming to bear out the worst fear of nihilism, announces, "I don't believe in ethics anymore. As far as I'm concerned, the ends justify the means. Get what you can while the getting's good, that's what I say. Might makes right. The winners write the history books. It's a dog-eat-dog world so I'll do whatever I have to and let others argue about whether it's right or not." "Hey, why'd you do that?" And Hobbes explains, "You were in my way. Now you're not. The ends justify the means." And Calvin says, "I didn't mean for everyone, you dolt. Just me." [Laughter.] Well, there you have the illogic of moral nihilism, namely, that as soon as one is dependent on the behavior of other people, it is incoherent to insist that they follow a code of behavior that one is not willing to follow oneself simply because there is nothing privileged about one person's position in the universe compared to anyone else's. And it's this notion of the interchangeability of perspectives or the interchangeability of interests that really lies at the heart of moral systems, such as the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative, and others. So, to sum up, I've argued that the dominant theory of human nature in modern intellectual life has been based on the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine. These ideas are being challenged by the modern sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution. These challenges have also been seen to threaten important moral values, but, in fact, that doesn't follow. On the contrary, I think a better understanding of what makes us tick and of our place in nature can clarify those values by showing that political equality does not require sameness but, rather, policies that treat people as individuals with rights; that moral progress does not require that the mind is free of selfish motives, only that it has other motives to counteract them; that responsibility does not require that behavior is uncaused, only that it responds to contingencies of credit and blame; and that meaning in life does not require that the process that shapes the brain have a purpose, only that the brain itself have a purpose. Finally, I've argued that grounding values in a blank slate is a mistake. It's a mistake because it makes our values hostages to forfeit, implying that someday empirical discoveries could make them obsolete. And it's a mistake because it conceals the downsides of denying human nature, including persecution of the successful; totalitarian social engineering; an exaggeration of the effects of the environment, such as in parenting and the criminal justice system; a mystification of the bases of responsibility, democracy, and morality; and the devaluating of human life on Earth. With that I'll end. Thank you very much. [Applause.] MR. MURRAY: Thank you very much, Steven. We will have time for questions. We have someone with a microphone to amplify them, so please wait until she arrives. And when she does, please give your name and tell us who you are before asking questions. And [inaudible]. MR. : Yes, thanks very much for the talk. Maybe it's just me, but I guess I didn't understand completely why we need the belief in the blank slate to get some of the predictions that you seem to have from the hypothesis. I'll just give you one example, I think, and that is, you know, totalitarianism relying on indoctrination. I'm not really sure why that requires a blank slate in the sense that, you know, whatever your initial views are, whether there's something there or it's blank, if I make it more costly for people to get certain types of information, let's say anti-government information, and less costly or subsidize them getting pro-government information, I imagine people at the margin are going to be a little bit easier to control than they would have been otherwise. You may have questions about, you know, the elasticity or what's the rate of response that's there, but that doesn't seem to me that's dependent on the starting point. I mean, I could have a blank slate and say that they're very responsive to information or have them have a lot of information. And it seems like that's not true just for the question of totalitarianism and indoctrination, but parents and other types of things there. And I'm not really clear, you know, when you go through and talk about, you know, indoctrination and give the quotes from Mao and whoever, why the two are really connected MR. PINKER: Well, I don't think they are logically connected, although they--since we've had authoritarian regimes with all kinds of philosophies. But I think for it to be truly totalitarian, it's not a coincidence that Lenin and Mao and Stalin and the Khmer Rouge all invoked some notion of the blank slate. And that is that if you believe in a blank slate, that is an invitation to control all aspects of human life, not just to set up an incentive structure, which, of course, every government does, but, rather, to control how children are raised right from birth, relationships between the sexes, the arts, clothing, public behavior and so on. If you believe that humans are malleable, then you will be tempted, I think, as these, at least in their own minds, these despots were tempted, to control all aspects of human life rather than just have a repressive police force. For example, in China, you know, the same-sex dormitories, control of clothing, control of child-rearing, that level of infiltration into the minutiae of personal life I think more naturally coheres with the idea of the blank slate. MR. : But even if people aren't blank slates, I'm not sure that that doesn't imply I may want to control all the information that they received, anyway, in order to have them be more sympathetic to the government than they otherwise would have been. I'm not sure whether it's a blank slate or not that they could [inaudible] prediction. MR. PINKER: Yes. I certainly don't wish to maintain that there is a necessary logical connection and without a blank slate you have a--you don't have authoritarian measures. I think it's easier with a blank slate to be convinced of the rectitude of the repressive measures as opposed to being cynical about them. You could always have a kind of government that just says, well, people have original sin and we're going to control their behavior through incentives, positive and negative, we'll stay in power by restricting information, lying if necessary, have an utterly cynical, say Orwellian philosophy of repression. But to have a philosophy of repression that the leaders themselves can sincerely believe is morally justified I think more naturally leads one to a blank slate. The people are going to be influenced by their environment, anyway; we may as well have an influence by the right kind as opposed to the wrong kind of environment. So this sort of pervasive ideology as a basis for totalitarianism I think harmonizes a bit more with a blank slate. But, again, I'm not disagreeing that it is not a logical connection. Yes? MR. : Thank you very much. I'm sort of not altogether inclined to say this is the cartoon approach to human nature because it was very funny and certainly educated me, amongst others, on many of these theories. But I want to take you up on point. It seems to me a lot of what you're saying is sort of negative debunking. You're saying that there are certain theories that people have held, these theories no longer hold, empirical knowledge and theoretical advances tell us differently. But I wonder what you are planning to substitute, I mean, a positive theory of human nature. It seems to me that's a lot more difficult to do in the sense of, you know, when people say in ordinary conversation, "That's human nature," what they usually mean is, you know, something bad has happened and we're going to blame it on some deterministic cause that really reflects something that cannot be changed. But it doesn't really add up to a theory, a set of, say, essential properties that human beings possess, in virtue of which you can characterize them, say, as humans and not as something else. And I'm wondering whether--well, let me make the point a little bit differently, which is to say that if you think of people as being a repertoire of potential behavioral disposition, depending on what stimulus that gives them, somebody might be kind or somebody might be aggressive. A different set of stimuli will give--somebody might be happy or they might be sad. And you have this huge repertoire of possible behavior that can be triggered by all sorts of different stimuli, and you wonder, well, what's essential about this? Where is the human nature in all of this? What ultimately is your theory of positive human nature? MR. PINKER: Yes, well, the positive theory of human nature would be basically the totalitarian--the totality of the cognitive and behavioral sciences, what's the consensus that emerges out of that. I have tried to synthesize that in a cohesive story in my earlier book, "How the Mind Works," and in the middle chapters of "The Blank Slate," where, if I were to try to sum it up in a sentence or two, the idea is that the mind is a--human nature is a collection of interacting psychological faculties, that is, ways of conceptualizing different aspects of the world, such as space, number, causation, objects, other minds; a set of emotions and drives, such as sexual desire, a variety of fears, a desire for esteem, a desire for status, an ability to form friends, reciprocity--whose rationale can be found in the process of evolution, in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and which shows quantitative variation around a bell curve in just about every trait within a population, but little, if any, qualitative variation. So there, in a very long sentence, would be a theory of human nature where each one of those faculties, like how fear works, how the desire for esteem works, what sexual desire consists of and how it might differ among men and women, would be fleshed out. And indeed I've tried to flesh them out. Yes? MS. WACHTEL: Bonnie Wachtel. This organization, American Enterprise Institute, puts out a magazine, and they had a terrific issue a month or so ago which was devoted to the topic of religion. And one of the articles there was indicating--tying the scientific revolution to Christianity and indicating that the scientific revolution really came out of a desire to understand the glory of what God had created. And I think for those who choose to believe in God and take it along that path, there is nothing inconsistent with a belief in God with what you have been talking about because, again, it just has to do with an understanding of what God has created. However, that is not my question. [Laughter.] MS. WACHTEL: And maybe someone else who knows more about that could elaborate. My question is this: I just found it very difficult to believe or accept what you seem to be putting out with respect to abrogating the blank slate with respect to young children. It simply defies common sense, and the analogy to marriage really isn't a terribly good one because, in a marriage, one is not a captive audience. If you're familiar with the divorce rates in this country, you know that to be true. Whereas, for a small child that's not the case. And although you may not have good correlations statistically with respect to children raised in middle-class households, say, in Cleveland versus Florida, certainly if someone is raise in an abusive household or an extreme--as I say, it didn't have the ring of common sense to me. Could you elaborate on that a bit more? MR. PINKER: Let me deal with both observations. As to the first one, certainly I don't want to make the point of this talk or the book that atheism is correct. I think that if someone wanted to push a kind of very abstract conception of some kind of divine order, it would be very hard for me to argue against it. And I don't have any need to argue against it. I think there are good arguments against the soul considered as a different kind of stuff and matter which animates the mind and which can be separated from the physiology of the brain. And I also think that the idea that morality must be based on adherence to God's commandments as passed down through a chain of religious tradition also can be and ought to be debated. But it isn't that no conception of God is compatible with these, and I should also add that in some ways the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature is closer to the one that I'm advocating in "The Blank Slate" insofar as it posits conflicting psychological faculties such as conscience versus desire or temptation. As to the second one, the problem with common sense is that it hasn't been privy to the crucial experiment. Common sense comes from the fact that people have kids who they bring up and who are also biologically related to them. I think the common sense of many adoptive parents is actually quite different. Let me try to nibble away at common sense in a couple of other ways. You know, I receive lots of mail from adopted children and adoptive parents saying it has the ring of truth. It doesn't have the ring of truth if you have biological children. Then you're in no position to know. But think of a couple of things. Let's say you move from one country to another or one part of the country to another, so you have, let's say, a British accent and you bring your children up in the Deep South or in Boston. What accent will they end up with? The answer is they will not end up with the British access of their parents. They'll end up with a Boston access or the Southern accent or the California up-talk or whatever. It's not even that it's a compromise, an accent that's halfway between British and Alabama. It's 100 percent the accent of the peers. And that's true in most dimensions of socialization that the--how kids dress--forget kids. How adults dress, what music they listen, to is far more influenced by their peer group than by their parents. It's just that by the time we're adults, we get to call our colleagues and our professional associates "colleagues and professional associates" instead of "peer pressure." But, you know, I don't show up for work, you know, dressed up in, you know, a Mafia sharkskin suit or a polyester disco suit because of peer pressure. I just don't call it "peer pressure." I call it "fitting in with the people that I respect." Let me give you another way, I think, to challenge common sense. If you look at cases of immigration, if a child of immigrants is in a peer environment of native-born American children, they in the long run don't suffer at all. And I'm sure we all know people, some of us might be people whose parents were greenhorns all their lives, just never learned the native language, never learned how to drive, never figured out how banks work. But their children would end up without any handicap as long as they were immersed in a larger culture from which they could learn what they didn't get from their parents. Now, as for the extremes--let me make it clear. There are many reasons why child abuse is a horrible thing, and one of them might be that it leaves some permanent change on the personality of the child. That has to be proven, by the way, but whether or not it's true, it's a bad thing to beat up children or to sexually abuse them. Even if it does leave a permanent mark on their personality, what happens at the extremes isn't a guide to what happens, I think, over the normal range. I mean, foot binding changes the shape of the foot, but it doesn't mean that in normal circumstances children have ten toes in the shape of a foot because of parenting. There are many ways in which I think you can mess something up. That doesn't mean that the normal range is responsible for how a system, I think, spontaneously develops. And I think that's true in child rearing, but the common sense that says that parents shape their children is really, I think, an artifact of the 20th century. It's a part of the Freudian revolution that managed to survive even after many of Freud's other claims withered away. But the idea that how you were treated, say, until you were five determines your adult hang-ups and personality and so on is something that really doesn't have a whole lot of evidence behind it. And I think the behavioral genetic studies really kind of do it in, except, as I would submit, in the extreme cases. MR. : [inaudible] MR. PINKER: Again, there's a confound--multiple confounds between genes, culture--including peer group--and parenting. What happens when you tease them apart? To some extent, values are heritable, not by any means anywhere near 100 percent but much greater than 0 percent. Liberal-conservative orientation, for example, shows a heritability of about 0.4 to 0.6. So as--I think it was Gilbert and Sullivan who said every little child is born a little liberal or a little conservative. There's a grain of truth to that. But setting that component aside--again, it's nowhere near 100 percent--where does the rest of it come from? Does it come from parents? Well, think of the experiment. Parents have one set of values, kids have another set. Which one do they end up with? Which one's more influential? It's not so obvious to me that the answer is the parents. The most dramatic case, of course, would be the, quote, generation gap of the 1960s in which you could predict someone's political beliefs and their values much more by their peer group than by their parents. MR. MURRAY: One more question. MR. : [inaudible] all these studies be thrown out, you were saying that, well, they don't look at associated with the parents when it comes to being associated with articulateness. But then when you said where the correlations are so strong when you split siblings apart or put adopted kids together, you were talking about personality and IQ, not articulateness. And it seems to me articulateness might be a good one to--have there been studies of articulateness of kids raised--twins raised separately or--because that is a much better issue to me than whether--I mean, having raised a couple of kids, there's a lot more hard-wiring than I thought 20 years ago. But I still would like to believe, as a parent who's invested a lot, that there was some effect that I had on things like articulateness--I wasn't changing their IQ. I wasn't changing their basic personality. But I was changing some other things. MR. PINKER: Yes. I don't know of studies articulateness per se, although verbal IQ, which I imagine must be correlated with articulateness, is one of those measures that follows these three generalizations of non-zero effect of genes, near-zero effect of shared environment, and non-zero effect of something else, of chance. So verbal IQ I think partly I would expect to correlate with articulateness. But, you know, like, a lot of people, like, sort of, who are younger than many of the people, like, in this room, like, have a certain way of speaking, you know? [Laughter.] And, like, their parents, like, don't always talk that way. So, seriously, I think that a lot of that articulateness is maybe another factor which, when you think about it, might have indeed much more of an effect on peers than parents. And, granted, the study--I don't know of anyone who's done the study, but anecdotally it really seems that peers influence them more than parents do. MR. : [inaudible] MR. PINKER: That is certainly true, and I would certainly--it has to be said that parents have an enormous influence in terms of what school their children go to, who they hang around with, what city they live in, what part of the city they live in. That's an enormous way in which parents do affect the children via the peer group, undoubtedly, yes. [Applause.] MR. MURRAY: I have been to many Bradley Lectures over the years, and, Steve, I want to say this personifies, exemplifies what Bradley Lectures are supposed to be all about, and it was just magnificent. We will, as usual, have a reception immediately following, at which Professor Pinker can be badger with a number of other questions from parents. Thank you very much for coming, and thanks once again to Steven Pinker. [Applause.]</body></html>