Gay men usually have a part of the brain (the third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus) that is smaller than normal. This part of the brain is recognized as playing a role in sex differences.“To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be correct but as a thought it is immoral to think.”
“Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature—that behavior is caused by thoughts and feelings—is embedded in the very way we think about people.”
In a nutshell
Genetic science and evolutionary psychology show that human nature is not simply a result of socialization by our environment.
In a similar vein
Louann Brizendine The Female Brain (p 52)
Hans Eysenck Dimensions of Personality (p 90)
William James The Principles of Psychology (p 162)
Anne Moir & David Jessel Brainsex (p 204)
V. S. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain (p 232)
The well-worn debate about “nature vs nurture” concerns whether we come into the world already wired to have certain traits or talents, or are totally molded by our culture and environment. In the 1960s and 1970s, parents took on board the expert advice of behavioral psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists that environment was everything. They did their bit in creating a more peaceful, less sexist world by not letting their boys play with toy guns and giving them dolls instead. Anyone who has had children, however, knows that from day one each child is innately different to their siblings. Leading experimental and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker wrote The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature to correct many wild claims about how malleable the human mind is, and to expose the myth that all our behaviors are the result of socialization.
Pinker likens our unwillingness to admit the fact of biologically determined human nature to the Victorians not wanting to discuss sex, and adds that it distorts public policies, scientific research, and even how we see each other. Yet he does not simply take the position that “genes are everything and culture is nothing.” Rather, his intention is to reveal the facts about how much human nature is shaped by patterns already in the brain, compared to the extent to which we are shaped by culture and environment.
Enlightenment philosopher John Stuart Mill pointed out the importance of experience and the malleability of the human mind, picturing it as a sheet of paper ready to be written on, an idea that became known as the “blank slate.” Pinker defines this concept as implying “that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.” This contains the logical assumption that everyone is equal, and today we rightly accept that, barring severe mental or physical handicap, anyone can reach any station in life.
However, this acceptance also brought with it the view that the forces of biology play no role in accounting for how people are. In a famous passage from Behaviorism (1924), John B. Watson boasted that if he was given a dozen healthy infants he could shape them into anything he wanted as adults, whether doctor, artist, beggar, or thief.
Even though behaviorism is no longer psychological orthodoxy, its idea of a perfectly blank mental slate has stubbornly remained. It has become “the secular religion of modern intellectual life,” Pinker says. Quite understandably, we don’t want to go back to a time in which biological differences between people are highlighted, because this seemingly allows for racial, gender, or class discrimination and prejudice. However, the irony is that the vacuum the blank slate idea creates has allowed it to be used and abused by totalitarian regimes, which believe they can fashion the masses into anything they want. Pinker asks: How many more “human reengineering” projects do we need to go through before the blank slate idea is finally laid to rest?
Pinker points out that the human mind could never have been blank because it was forged through Darwinian competition over thousands of years. People whose brains made them cunning problem solvers with acute senses naturally triumphed over others and their genes lived on. Minds that were too malleable were “selected out” of existence.
Evolutionary biologists and some enlightened anthropologists have shown that a range of “socially constructed” factors such as emotions, kinship, and differences between the sexes are in fact to a large extent biologically programmed. Donald Brown mapped out what he calls “human universals,” traits or behaviors found in societies around the globe, regardless of level of development. These include conflict, rape, jealousy, and dominance, but also, as we would expect, conflict resolution, a sense of morality, kindness, and love. Human beings can be brutish and smart and loving because we have inherited the neurological makeup of people who engaged in skirmishes and battles and survived, yet who were also able to live in close community and be peacemakers. “Love, will and conscience,” Pinker concludes, “are ‘biological’ too—that is, evolutionary adaptations implemented in the circuitry of the brain.”
A variety of research by neuroscientists has found just how minutely set our brains are when we are born. For example:
Gay men usually have a part of the brain (the third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus) that is smaller than normal. This part of the brain is recognized as playing a role in sex differences.
Einstein’s brain had large and unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which are important in spatial and numbering intelligence. In contrast, studies on the brains of convicted murderers found their brains to have a smaller than average prefrontal cortex, which governs decision making and inhibits our impulses.
Identical twins separated at birth have been found to have very similar levels of general intelligence, verbal and mathematical skills, plus personality traits such as introversion or extroversion, agreeableness, and general life satisfaction. They even have the same personality quirks and behaviors such as gambling and television watching. This can be attributed not only to having exactly the same genetic material, but to the fact that the actual physiology of their brains (the valleys and folds and size of certain parts) is almost exactly the same.
Many conditions once thought caused by a person’s environment alone have now been found to have genetic roots. These include schizophrenia, depression, autism, dyslexia, bipolar illness, and language impairment. Such conditions run in families and cannot be predicted easily from environmental factors.
Psychologists are able to divide personality into five main dimensions: introverted or extraverted; neurotic or stable; incurious or open to new things; agreeable or antagonistic; and conscientious or undirected. All five dimensions can be inherited, with 40–50 percent of our personality related to these genetic tendencies.
Pinker acknowledges our fear that if genes affects the mind, then we are completely controlled by genes in our thinking and behavior. However, genes only entail a certain probability—they determine nothing.
Pinker compares the belief in a blank slate to the cosmology of Galileo’s time, when people believed that the physical universe rested on a moral framework. In the same way, today’s moral and political sensitivities have meant that scientific fact—the biological basis of human nature—has been swept aside in favor of ideology. We are afraid that these facts will lead to a “meltdown of values” and a loss of control over the sort of society we want to live in.
In response, Pinker recalls a line from Chekhov: “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.” Only by sticking to the facts about who and what we are, supplied by biology, genetic science, and evolutionary psychology, can we move forward. There may be many aspects of human nature we don’t like to admit, but denying them does not make them go away.
The Blank Slate is a big, fat book that will take you a while to read and fully understand. It is an intellectual tour de force, and may well shatter some of your cherished opinions or shift them to firmer scientific ground. It is easy to see why Pinker is in the top echelon of popular science writers today—his work combines scientific gravitas with a highly enjoyable style.
Born in 1954 in Montreal, Canada, Steven Pinker has degrees from McGill University and Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in experimental psychology. He is best known for his research into language and cognition.
Other books include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Visual Cognition (1985), Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992), and Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999). Until 2003 Pinker was a professor of psychology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.