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Nobody will hear from it ever again. Sociobiologists claim that all societies wage war, have hierarchies and are patriarchal. Slavery is also common among insects, in particular ants. After reading a number of these books, I was struck by the following fact: they never defend slavery. But all such societies also have slavery. Or rather pseudoscience, since this kind of sociobiology cannot stand closer scrutiny.Enter Steven Pinker, stage right. Sociobiology is a branch of Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology which became controversial about 35 years ago, when some scientists started applying it to humans.
"The Blank Slate" does live up to its name. So are rapes by upper class and middle class men. Yet, we never hear sociobiologists claim that slavery is adaptive, genetic, and so on. The reason is simple: it's no longer politically feasible to defend slavery, hence you can't say *that's* adaptive.
Today, science fills the same social function. It's a hard sell indeed. Are we to believe the author, rapists are always losers and nobodies. That raped women are often seen as whores, while rapists get away, is common in all patriarchal societies.
Indeed, some sociobiologists claim that *abolitionism* is genetic. His defense of the rogue entomologist Thornhill, who really should have stayed with his beloved scorpion flies, says it all. Is it really necessary to point out the utter absurdity of all this. By *sociobiological* standards, slavery should be seen as a human universal. No, more: it's obnoxious, since Pinker cannot possibly be unaware of the real state of affairs. In other words, sociobiology when applied to humans was simply a new version of the claim that the status quo is genetically predetermined and hence natural. The usual attacks on Margaret Mead are included, ignoring anthropological and archaeological evidence for the existence of egalitarian, peaceful and matrifocal societies (covered in some of my other reviews). Well, thank you.
The rest of the book argues the usual sociobiological case on war, gender inequality, genetic determinism, etc. Yes, indeed. Who knows, maybe in 35 years, they will at least stop trivializing Herrnstein.The most despicable part of Pinker's book is his view of rape. Some insects, after all, rape. Therefore, the author concludes, there is no patriarchy at work in rape cases. Pinker is apparently a demoralized liberal who attempts to sell sociobiology to other liberals.
(Based on hypergamy). However, you can still trivialize racism, something Pinker does when defending a coded racist statement made by Richard Herrnstein in 1973, and again when defending the decidedly less coded racist work "The Bell Curve", incidentally co-authored by the very same Herrnstein. True, but sociobiologists nevertheless believe that genes constrain our behaviour to such a large extent, that the vernacular expression "genetic determinism" is perfectly apt. Rape is also condoned by many communities as a form of punishment against "loose" women. I guess we could make a trade off and call it "epigenetic constraints". Why not. The "usual case" on the latter issue is denial.
The ideological function of sociobiology is obvious. If and when American society changes in a more liberal direction, this kind of sociobiology will be cast aside. The sociobiologists claimed that war, violence, gender inequality and social hierarchies were "human universals" and therefore "adaptive traits", moulded by our biological evolution. Why isn't slavery a "human universal". After all, sociobiological theory predicts that they shouldn't. Thornhill explicitly believes that privileged men don't rape. And so is sociobiology. More on that later.
He also claims that rape increases only when law and order breaks down (as in war). And, of course, you can still attack feminism. Frankly, the book is interesting only in the sense that it might tell us something about the political climate in certain elite circles in contemporary America. The idea that only "losers" and "nobodies" rape, and then mostly behind the back of their superiors during war time, it's patently ridiculous. In times past, religion was used to justify the status quo. In the real world, rape is often encouraged by the officer corpse during war as a way of terrorizing and humiliating the enemy. In Sweden, one of the most gender-equal societies in the world, even the attacks on feminism would be out of order. Obviously biased research is used to "prove" that men and women think and act differently due to genetic differences.
Later, Pinker defends Randy Thornhill's idea that rape is an adaptive trait selected for by evolution. Changing these things was assumed to be difficult, perhaps so difficult that it became positively harmful (especially feminism was seen as dangerous). Pinker points out that no scientist actually believes that gene X absolutely determines behaviour Y.
(Please note the disingenous line of argument: apparently, patriarchy is universal.except in cases of rape). Pinker admits that rapists often walk, but argues that this has absolutely nothing to do with patriarchy either.
Apparently, the Western court system is enlightened and presumes that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. It seems America still has a long way to go towards real enlightenment and civilization.
And so on.To repeat: sociobiology is simply the latest ideology of status quo domination, a kind of "Social Darwinism lite". "Politics", cry the sociobiologists.
They are stupid, too, since they risk being injured by the woman or her relatives, and ostracized by the community at large. What else to call it.
Zero stars.
He documents how the radical politics of academia resisted tooth and nail the findings of these newer disciplines, and their attempt to synthesize what we know about human culture with what we know about human biology. So Pinker's advice is to separate our values -- political and social -- from science, and thereby strengthen the independent validity of these values, as well as allow science to proceed and not be stifled by politically-based fears.To take one example, Pinker points out that to accept that men and women have biologically-based differences is not to believe that, because of these differences, men and women are consigned to only certain social roles, or are supposed to be "unequal". Pinker attacks the blank slate on the basis of several relatively new academic disciplines: cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, just to name a few. Steven Pinker's wide ranging book "The Blank Slate" is a tour-de-force of the rising new disciplines in the academy that are slowly overturning the social constructionist mode of analysis which has dominated intellectual life for most of the past century.Pinker takes aim at the phenomenon he describes in his title, which he breaks into its composite parts: (1) a "blank slate" view of the mind, whereby the mind has no innate characteristics, and is simply a tabula rasa onto which ideas and experiences are poured, (2) the "noble savage" view of humanity based on Rousseau, whereby the primitive or feral is equated with the "good", and (3) the "ghost in the machine" conception of consciousness based on Descartes, whereby consciousness is seen as being separate from physicality, and standing apart from physical mental processes. Pinker is entertaining and witty in making his points. Pinker points out that to the extent we tie our political and social values to false ideas about human beings, we actually make adherence to these values more tenuous -- because future scientific findings could undermine them, if we see the values based on science itself (or, rather, a misconceived understanding of science).
This is not a biological determinst perspective, but instead one which takes into account the biological factors as well as the social ones.
The resistance was, and is, almost entirely political in nature, and is based on a fear of the truth.
Instead, our values regarding gender equality should be de-coupled from biology.
Taken together, these three ideologies have led to the dominance of the "social science model" -- a view which sees human behavior as not resting at all on a physical, biological or evolutionary basis, but rather being the product of "socially constructed realities".
The value of gender equality is a political and social value, and it should not depend on actual biological identity between men and women, or an idea that gender differences are social constructs that are not at all based on biology.
The fear is that if human behavior is not entirely socially conditioned, but is to some degree innate, this will be used to justify social evils such as racism, sexism, violence, inequality and so on.
Pinker spends chapter after chapter examining several of these fears, and deflating them.Pinker's overarching thesis is that human behavior is definitely conditioned by evolution and genetics, but that this evolution has taken place in the context of human culture.
This allows us to affirm gender equality in its own right as a human social and political value, regardless of what biology teaches us about biological differences between the sexes, while at the same time preventing political fears relating to gender equality from stifling the progress that science is making in further understanding human behavior as it relates to bio-evolutionary differences between female and male humans.The book is a fantastic read.
Readers will be rewarded with a sneak peek at what the future holds in terms our academic and intellectual life, and the emerging new consensus about the nature of human beings.
You'll learn a great deal from this book, and have fun along the way. The terrible consequences of such a position are--or should be--obvious to all, yet they remain in place too often.Pinker's academic specialty is linguistics, specifically language acquisition in children, and therefore his book is especially good in addressing linguistics, language, cognitive sciences, etc.
range of subjects, but his approach is united by a long overdue task: to revive the idea that humans share a common nature. Pinker's book covers a wide ().
Pinker shows, among other things, that the three quasi-official doctrines of contemporary intellectual/academic life (the blank slate, the noble savage, the ghost in the machine) are logically weak and morally suspect--despite their being championed by progressives.One wonders why the progressives never realized the following: if there is no shared human nature, we can throw out the idea of a human rights violation. This idea goes back all the way to Aristotle at least; however, the idea of a common human nature has taken a beating over the years, especially in the humanities and social sciences.
Perhaps the mantra of "diversity" has been mindlessly bleated too many times, and academics ceased seeing the shared human nature--based upon genes--that exists despite our many (mostly superficial) differences.As you'd expect, Pinker's book has been "controversial", but largely among the uninformed.specifically, those who haven't bothered to read any science, even books written by specialists for the layman. But he's a genuine polymath, and part of this book's charm is that Pinker, while obviously extremely learned, wears that learning lightly.
He writes with clarity and verve.
Yet, the dissenters were right. This book covers a lot of ground: philosophy, genetics, cognition, sociology and academic infighting. Steven Pinker, writing with persuasiveness and craft, shows why the doctrine of the "Blank Slate" became so important to 20th century intellectuals that they were willing to lie, cheat, libel and even threaten those who dissented. Given what science now knows of genetics, the idea that people are blank slates at birth is simply untenable. getAbstract finds that the author, despite a few hints of personal prejudices (ah, there's human nature again), does an excellent job of grappling with enormously challenging subjects.
Pinker seems determined to position himself as a public intellectual, as evidenced by his radio and television appearances, but that doesn't mean he has to stoop so low to do it. (Do we really need to see another insulting mischaracterization of post-modernism.
His arguments hit you at a visceral level, not a cerebral one. The conclusions Pinker reaches in this book are by and large valid, but he too often arrives at them through shallow rationalizations and cherry-picked facts.
In actuality this does make for a fun read, with a wealth of pejorative anecdotes and contrived dichotomies, but it's more in the style of Rush Limbaugh than academia.Indeed, the author's purpose seems to be to twist his arguments to where he can rant against some of his pet peeves in philosophy, society, and science, often by rehashing hackneyed stereotypes and tired arguments. For example, if he agrees with you, he quotes your luminaries; if he doesn't he rants against your lunatic fringe.
Statistics are likewise an exercise in skewing data to fit pre-determined outcomes. Does it strengthen his thesis).
The book is valuable in that it demonstrates that an impressive pedigree and an exhaustive bibliography may make for good reading, but don't necessarily make for good scholarship.
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