Science and Inquiry discussion

For October 2020, we will be reading The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker.

Please use this thread to post questions, comments, and reviews, at any time.

Started this. The style is a bit more serious than his earlier popular books, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, How the Mind Works, and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, but so is the subject matter. I always like Pinker for his sense of humour, and he seems to have backed off of the humour a little in this one.

I enjoyed reading this book many years ago. Steven Pinker is one of my favorite authors. Here is my review.

I heard Steven Pinker speak a couple of years ago. Well, he is a much more impressive writer than he is as a speaker.

I'm finding it more interesting than I expected. Liked the section on what identical and non-identical twins can tell us, and also the review of Jared Diamond's ideas on the subject.

Steve wrote: "I'm finding it more interesting than I expected. Liked the section on what identical and non-identical twins can tell us, and also the review of Jared Diamond's ideas on the subject."

Check out The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. She really digs deep into this.

Also check out Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley. Pinker quotes him several times in this book. Ridley has written a whole follow-up book on this issue called The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture.

I too read this book many years ago. In it Steven Pinker broached an idea that remains heretical sixteen years later: That such a thing as a “human nature” actually exists; that we, like other animals shaped by natural selection, have certain innate predispositions daily influencing our attitudes and behaviors.

Evolutionary biology, neuroresearch, genetics, studies of identical twins raised apart, and cultural universals to name only a few lines of supporting evidence point us toward this conclusion. Yet however much educated people may “accept” this evidence in principle nearly all of us continue to resist its inevitable personal and social implications. We simply find them too depressing for consideration; they threaten too much of what we wish were true.

I think Blank Slate makes an excellent springboard for a deeper conversation. Would anyone like to discuss these ideas further?

Jane wrote: "...Yet however much educated people may “accept” this evidence in principle nearly all of us continue to resist its inevitable personal and social implications. We simply find them too depressing for consideration; they threaten too much of what we wish were true."

Apparently, this resistance is also one of those innate predispositions. There must be reasons for such unremovable mental setups, as the sensation of a 'free will' for instance, to evolve in humans.

Jane, you wrote: “Apparently this resistance is also one of those innate predispositions. There must be reasons for such unremovable mental setups, as the sensation of a ‘free will’ for instance, to evolve in humans.”

You make excellent points. First, perhaps we humans are predisposed to ignore our own depressing impotence so that hope can “spring eternal.” A disposition toward hope would seem a powerful evolutionary advantage. An animal that struggles despite overwhelming odds might just live to reproduce after all.

Second, the blank slate view of humankind does appear aligned with free will. How could human choice be truly free if heredity constrained it? We just seem naturally disposed to view ourselves as free agents even though nature, nurture, and a touch of quantum mechanical randomness really do determine how we, like other animals, behave in a given situation. What evolutionary function then could an illusion of free will serve? I have no idea.

But let’s consider one social consequence of a belief in innate predispositions for a moment. For our will to be truly free our actions at any moment must be unencumbered of constraints. Once we admit the possibility of an inherited predisposition, such as a disposition toward violence, the notion of individual responsibility weakens. Wasn’t it this very point that allowed Clarence Darrow to secure life imprisonment for Leopold and Loeb instead of their execution?

Jane, may I ask how you might resolve this conundrum of holding people legally responsible for their actions—as I think society must—while acknowledging that many factors including genetic predispositions determine their behavior? Can you or other book club members suggest additional personal or social consequences beside loss of civic responsibility that might follow from a rejection of the blank slate view?

Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Jim.

Innate predispositions are definitely a thorny problem for the law. In several other books such as Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, it's pointed out that brain scans can show that we make decisions several milliseconds before we consciously realize it. Sam Harris has a pretty good discussion about this in Free Will. It makes a good case against punishing people for straying from society's laws & for rehabilitation in many cases. Society seems to be moving in that direction intellectually, although it's doing a poor job of it in practice in the US.

Jim wrote: "Innate predispositions are definitely a thorny problem for the law. In several other books such as Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, it's pointed out that brain sc..."

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us about Ourselves
This one which I believe is our November book (?) addresses this also.

Free will is such an interesting topic! Jane, you asked, "What evolutionary function then could an illusion of free will serve?" I don't pretend to know. But perhaps the illusion of free will assuaged ancient humankind's fear of losing control. Not being masters of their fate was a scary thing. It's that same fear that drove our ancestors to assign gods to the terrors of nature, these gods who - if prayed to correctly - would protect them. I think throughout history, humankind needed to believe in free will, and are we today so different?

In chapter 9 Pinker writes (summarizing Singer, 1981): "Egoistic, sexist, racist, and xenophobic attitudes are logically inconsistent with the demand that everyone respect a single code of behavior."

Back when the book was written I might have thought we (the world) were on a rising trajectory toward that goal.

A couple of paragraphs later he writes: "These are just a few of the ways in which moral and social progress can ratchet upwards."

The ratchet seems a good analogy today. Perhaps we are backing up and dropping down before we resume our upward progress.

Steve wrote: "Perhaps we are backing up and dropping down before we resume our upward progress."

Let's hope.

I just finished this book last week. I haven't written a review yet (not sure I'll write a full review of this one), but overall, I really liked it.

This is one of Pinker's more wide-ranging books. He covers topics from politics to parenting to art. For this reason, it felt like a much more important and serious book than his books that focused on linguistics. I did miss, however, some of the linguistic humour and wordplay of his earlier books.

While I think that the latter chapters on specific topics were a bit unnecessary, at the end of the day I think they were worth inclusion.

Most of all, I really appreciate Pinker's intellectual honesty. He is very open to examining all sides of his assertions and avoids dogma.