The Blank Slate Read online

  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 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 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 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 th
ese 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 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 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, you 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 tried 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 neuroscience of politically sensitive topics such as sex differences and mental 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 hav
e 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 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