The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. The book was nominated for the 2003 Aventis Prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Summary
Pinker
argues that modern science has challenged three "linked dogmas" that
constitute the dominant view of human nature in intellectual life:
Pinker claims these fears are non sequiturs,
and that the blank slate view of human nature would actually be a
greater threat if it were true. For example, he argues that political
equality does not require sameness, but policies that treat people as
individuals with rights; that moral progress does not require the human mind to be naturally free of selfish
motives, only that it has other motives to counteract them; that
responsibility does not require behavior to be uncaused, only that it
respond to praise and blame; and that meaning in life does not require
that the process that shaped the brain
must have a purpose, only that the brain itself must have purposes. He
also argues that grounding moral values in claims about a blank slate
opens them to the possibility of being overturned by future empirical
discoveries. He further argues that a blank slate is in fact
inconsistent with opposition to many social evils since a blank slate
could be conditioned to enjoy servitude and degradation.
Pinker states that evolutionary and genetic inequality arguments
do not necessarily support right-wing policies. For example, if everyone
is equal in ability it can be argued that it is only necessary to give
everyone equal opportunity. On the other hand, if some people have less
innate ability, then redistribution policies should favor those with
less innate ability. Further, laissez-faire economics is built upon an assumption of a rational actor,
while evolutionary psychology suggests that people have many different
goals and behaviors that do not fit the rational actor theory. "A rising
tide lifts all boats" is often used as an argument that inequality need
not be reduced as long as there is growth. Evolutionary psychology
suggests that low status itself, apart from material considerations, is
highly psychologically stressful and may cause dangerous and desperate
behaviors, which suggests that inequalities should be reduced. Finally,
evolutionary explanations may also help the left create policies with
greater public support, suggesting that people's sense of fairness
(caused by mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism)
rather than greed is a primary cause of opposition to welfare, if there
is not a distinction in the proposals between what is perceived as the
deserving and the undeserving poor.
Pinker also gives several examples of harm done by the belief in a blank slate of human nature:
Totalitariansocial engineering.
If the human mind is a blank slate completely formed by the
environment, then ruthlessly and totally controlling every aspect of the
environment will create perfect minds.
Inappropriate or excessive blame of parents since if their children
do not turn out well this is assumed to be entirely environmentally
caused and especially due to the behavior of the parents.
Release of dangerous psychopaths who quickly commit new crimes.
Construction of massive and dreary tenement complexes since housing and environmental preferences are assumed to be culturally caused and superficial.
Persecution
and even mass murder of the successful who are assumed to have gained
unfairly. This includes not only individuals but entire successful
groups who are assumed to have become successful unfairly and by
exploitation of other groups. Examples include kulaks in the Soviet Union; teachers and "rich" peasants in the Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and intellectuals under the Khmer Rouge.
Psychologist David Buss stated "This may be the most important book so far published in the 21st century."
Psychologist David P. Barash wrote "Pinker's thinking and writing are first-rate ... maybe even better than that."
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins stated "The Blank Slate is ... a stylish piece of work. I won't say it is better than The Language Instinct or How the Mind Works, but it is as good—which is very high praise indeed."
Philosopher Daniel Dennett
wrote "[Pinker] wades resolutely into the comforting gloom surrounding
these not quite forbidden topics and calmly, lucidly marshals the facts
to ground his strikingly subversive Darwinian claims—subversive not of
any of the things we properly hold dear but subversive of the phony
protective layers of misinformation surrounding them."
Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom endorsed the book in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, writing that it will have "an impact that extends well beyond the scientific academy".
English philosopher A. C. Grayling wrote in Literary Review
that "Pinker's case is convincing and cogent, and he does a service in
presenting the arguments, and the associated scientific evidence, in
such an accessible fashion. Given the importance of the questions he
discusses, his book is required reading".
Magazine Kirkus Reviews wrote that the book makes "a rich, sophisticated argument that may leave pious souls a little uneasy".
In 2017, Malhar Mali wrote a review of the book in Areo Magazine,
expressing concern for what he sees as a revival of the blank slate
view of human development. Mali writes "it strikes me as troubling that
there are still those of us who are willing to believe that it is mostly
culture and society which shape the individual—and that by focusing
only on fixing our systems can we alleviate human suffering", and that
it is "concerning is that this book came out 15 years ago and yet we are
still bogged down in the conversations that Pinker spent a considerable
time in rebutting".
Behavioral psychologistHenry D. Schlinger wrote two critical reviews of the book that emphasized the importance of learning.
Another behavioral psychologist, Elliot A. Ludvig, criticized Pinker's
description of behaviorism and interpretations of behaviorist research.
Biologist H. Allen Orr argued that Pinker's work often lacks scientific rigor, and suggests that it is "soft science".
Anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen argued that most of Pinker's arguments were flawed since they employed a strawman fallacy
argumentation style, and selectively picked supporting evidence as well
as foils. He wrote: "perhaps the most damaging weakness in books of the
generic Blank Slate kind is their intellectual dishonesty (evident in
the misrepresentation of the views of others), combined with a faith in
simple solutions to complex problems. The paucity of nuance in the book
is astonishing." Similarly, biologist Patrick Bateson
criticized Pinker for focusing on refuting the belief that all human
characteristics are determined by a person's environment. He argued that
this belief was "a caricature... used to sustain yet another round of
the tedious and increasingly irrelevant nature-nurture debate."
Like Eriksen, Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker, also claimed that Pinker's arguments constituted a strawman fallacy, stating "[m]any pages of The Blank Slate
are devoted to bashing away at the Lockean-Rousseauian-Cartesian
scarecrow that Pinker has created." Menand notes that Pinker misquotes
and misunderstands Virginia Woolf
as saying "In or about December 1910, human nature changed," (Pinker's
response was "Woolf was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or
in any year thereafter.") Woolf actually wrote "On or about December
1910 human character changed," and she was writing about fiction,
critiquing literary realism compared to the modernist movement.
Overall, one survey found that those social scientists who
described themselves as left-leaning were much less open to integrating
evolutionary biology into their work in the ways that Pinker desired.
Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics,
and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition,
visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language, the neural
basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Other
experimental topics he works on are the psychology of cooperation and of
communication, including emotional expression, euphemism, innuendo,
and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared
understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the
other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on.
Pinker has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding -ed to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.
Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought
(2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and
include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an
innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide. Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature
(2010) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined
over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of
this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution
brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that the human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his next book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021).
Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community. His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal.
His father, Harry, worked in real estate and was a lawyer. His mother,
Roslyn, was originally a homemaker, but later became a guidance
counsellor and a high-school vice-principal. In an interview, Pinker
described his mother as "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who]
knows everything". His brother, Robert, worked for the Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect. Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has served as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. In the early 2010s, he gave lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.
Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau. Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a "cultural Jew". Pinker is an avid cyclist.
Linguistic career
Pinker in 2011
Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with
his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent
scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather
than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus
correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.
In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition
in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two
books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series
of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and
locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development
(1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire
the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure
(1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process,
the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences,
such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different
combinations of complements and indirect objects".
He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers
to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words
from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb
"bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words,
like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".
In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince
published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the
past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a
series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This
included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language.
Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative
remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules
to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against
connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words
and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the
older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology.
He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default
rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed'
for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular
verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory
individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting
the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule.
This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be
expressed as Vpast → Vstem
+ d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further
argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be,
have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand
least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of
frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every
irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to
memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the
common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that
falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future
generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.
In 1990 Pinker, with Paul Bloom, published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection.
The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language
evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that
see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of Homo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould.
The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the
evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting
the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve?" The article also presaged Pinker's argument in The Language Instinct.
In 2006 Pinker provided to Alan Dershowitz, a personal friend of Pinker's who was Jeffrey Epstein's
defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a
federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts
via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to
the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all
federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped.
In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges
against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard
colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in an
interview with BuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.
Pinker's 1994 The Language Instinct was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky's
theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the
controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural
selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several
widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that
people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking,
the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages.
Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific
problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that
it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other
species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.
Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced"
by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open
up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech
perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman. Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book Words and Things (1958) was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct.
There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the linguistic nativist
views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds
that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with
research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition.
The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related
claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested
by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate.
Sampson argues that "while it may seem attractive to argue the nature
side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better
support the creativity and nobility of the human mind." Sampson denies
there is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn
language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.
The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been questioned in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds, the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct
excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for
innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social
Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development
is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while
Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with
neural nets, Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense
verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't
support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy
trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play."
Pinker lecturing to humanists in the United Kingdom (2018)
Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate
(2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex
human nature with many mental faculties that are genetically adaptive
(Pinker is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism).
Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works,
in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations
among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate
around The Blank Slate, Pinker called Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions "wonderful", and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies.
In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language
(1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular
phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively,
and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two. "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book. Critiqueing the book from the perspective of generative linguisticsCharles Yang, in the London Review of Books, writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole".
The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view
unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's
land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues
that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes,
governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that
attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be
learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All
Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at
the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian
revolution."
In The Stuff of Thought
(2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words
related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves
on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is
how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how a mind
adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.
Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language
that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier
musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the
capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for
music may be a spandrel
– a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted
through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected
for. In How the Mind Works, Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant's
view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but
that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor
cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake",
stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music
is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll, experts in music cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection, social bonding, and cognitive development;
he questions the assumption that music is the antecedent to language,
as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display
music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music.
Pinker has also been critical of "whole language" reading instruction techniques, stating in How the Mind Works, "...the
dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken]
language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into
the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct." In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of The Language Instinct, Pinker cited Why Our Children Can't Read by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted:
One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in The Language Instinct:
the "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be
explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their
spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it
instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called
"whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth
chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading
is not.
Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I
think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of
speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters.
Detail from "Mars" in Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch, c. 1475 – 1480. Pinker used the image in The Better Angels of Our Nature to illustrate violence in the Middle Ages.
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, Pinker
argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel
punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching,
pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple
scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human
nature has changed. In his view, it is more likely that human nature
comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them,
the "better angels of our nature". He outlines several "major historical
declines of violence" that all have their own social/cultural/economic
causes.
Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its
arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical
evidence compelling.
This and other aspects drew criticism, including the use of deaths per
capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the
interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people. Archaeologist David Wengrow summarized Pinker's approach to archaeological science as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along".
Pinker and Nils Brose speaking at a neuroscience conference
Pinker identifies as a liberal who is critical of some aspects of the political left. He supports same-sex marriage, a universal basic income, the legalization of drugs, the taxation of carbon, and the abolition of capital punishment. Pinker is a strong supporter of the Democratic Party.
However, Pinker has argued that the far-left has created an atmosphere
of intellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and
helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he
described as an epidemic of censorship at universities. He was a signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate
which argued that discussion of political issues was being silenced by a
widespread "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming
and ostracism, and a tendency to dissolve complex issues into a binding
moral certainty."
Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding
the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social
commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate. According to West, the doctrine of tabula rasa remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy" a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".
In January 2005 Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers.
Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands
and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end"
may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science. In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke
on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor of the proposition that
the gender difference in representation in elite universities was
"explainable by some combination of biological differences in average
temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias".
In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in The New York Times. He discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book The Blank Slate. Pinker has been criticised for using the data of scientific racists (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the blogger Steven Sailer, with journalist Angela Saini
stating that "for many people, Pinker's willingness to entertain the
work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has
gone beyond the pale". Pinker has stated that he condemns racism.
In a November 2009 article for The New York Times, Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays, criticizing his analytical methods. Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Advanced NFL Stats
addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that
differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing
opinions.
In an appearance for BBC World Service's Exchanges At The Frontier programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature)
could have expressed in our biology either through genetic or
epigenetic expression. Pinker responded that it was unlikely since "some
of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable
by biological evolution, which has a speed limit measured in
generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of
these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred
in, say, 50 years".
Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's
sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence
and warfare in response to a lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015.
In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, Pinker posited that Enlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right. In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha
said that Enlightenment philosophy had immoral consequences such as
inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide, and that
Pinker downplayed them. Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived the
causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of
suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of
humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease,
ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial
conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that
allows anyone to rise above this state." In a 2019 story in Current Affairs, proprietor Nathan Robinson criticised Pinker, saying that he misrepresents his critics' arguments against his work.
In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America
requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its
list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics.
The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of
people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the
immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems
that created them", citing as examples six of Pinker's tweets.
Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more
importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being
threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of
ideas." Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker.
The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America declined
to strike Pinker from its lists and issued a response letter stating
that "It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of
its members, nor their expression."
In December 2024, Pinker resigned from the board of honorary members of the Freedom from Religion Foundation
over what he and several colleagues viewed as the Foundation's
"quasi-religious" approach to defining gender. His resignation was
followed by those of Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins.
Awards and distinctions
Pinker was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.
He wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary,
published in 2011. In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been
the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study",[122] was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the Annals of Improbable Research.
Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the level of the individual or gene.
Early authors such as V. C. Wynne-Edwards and Konrad Lorenz
argued that the behavior of animals could affect their survival and
reproduction as groups, speaking for instance of actions for the good of
the species. In the 1930s, Ronald Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane proposed the concept of kin selection, a form of biological altruism from the gene-centered view of evolution,
arguing that animals should sacrifice for their relatives, and thereby
implying that they should not sacrifice for non-relatives. From the
mid-1960s, evolutionary biologists such as John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, and Richard Dawkins argued that natural selection
acted primarily at the level of the gene. They argued on the basis of
mathematical models that individuals would not altruistically sacrifice fitness
for the sake of a group unless it would ultimately increase the
likelihood of an individual passing on their genes. A consensus emerged
that group selection did not occur, including in special situations such
as the haplodiploid social insects like honeybees (in the Hymenoptera),
where kin selection explains the behaviour of non-reproductives equally
well, since the only way for them to reproduce their genes is via kin.
In 1994 David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober
argued for multi-level selection, including group selection, on the
grounds that groups, like individuals, could compete. In 2010 three
authors including E. O. Wilson, known for his work on social insects especially ants, again revisited the arguments for group selection.
They argued that group selection can occur when competition between two
or more groups, some containing altruistic individuals who act
cooperatively together, is more important for survival than competition
between individuals within each group. A large group of ethologists conceded that while inclusive fitness may be debatable, it was still a useful theory in practice.
However, the vast majority of behavioural biologists have not been
convinced by renewed attempts to revisit group selection as a plausible
mechanism of evolution.
Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution in his book, Origin of Species. Darwin also made the first suggestion of group selection in The Descent of Man
that the evolution of groups could affect the survival of individuals.
He wrote, "If one man in a tribe... invented a new snare or weapon, the
tribe would increase in number, spread, and supplant other tribes. In a
tribe thus rendered more numerous there would always be a rather better
chance of the birth of other superior and inventive members."
Once Darwinism had been accepted in the modern synthesis
of the mid-twentieth century, animal behavior was glibly explained with
unsubstantiated hypotheses about survival value, which was largely
taken for granted. The naturalistKonrad Lorenz had argued loosely in books like On Aggression (1966) that animal behavior patterns were "for the good of the species", without actually studying survival value in the field. Richard Dawkins noted that Lorenz was a "'good of the species' man" so accustomed to group selection thinking that he did not realize his views "contravened orthodox Darwinian theory". The ethologistNiko Tinbergen
praised Lorenz for his interest in the survival value of behavior, and
naturalists enjoyed Lorenz's writings for the same reason. In 1962, group selection was used as a popular explanation for adaptation by the zoologist V. C. Wynne-Edwards. In 1976, Richard Dawkins wrote a well-known book on the importance of evolution at the level of the gene or the individual, The Selfish Gene.
It was at that time generally agreed that this was the case even for eusocial insects such as honeybees, which encourages kin selection, since workers are closely related.
Experiments from the late 1970s suggested that selection involving groups was possible.
Early group selection models assumed that genes acted independently,
for example a gene that coded for cooperation or altruism. Genetically
based reproduction of individuals implies that, in group formation, the
altruistic genes would need a way to act for the benefit of members in
the group to enhance the fitness of many individuals with the same gene.
But it is expected from this model that individuals of the same species
would compete against each other for the same resources. This would put
cooperating individuals at a disadvantage, making genes for cooperation
likely to be eliminated. Group selection on the level of the species is
flawed because it is difficult to see how selective pressures would be
applied to competing/non-cooperating individuals.
Kin selection between related individuals is accepted as an explanation of altruistic behavior. R.A. Fisher in 1930 and J.B.S. Haldane in 1932
set out the mathematics of kin selection, with Haldane famously joking
that he would willingly die for two brothers or eight cousins.
In this model, genetically related individuals cooperate because
survival advantages to one individual also benefit kin who share some
fraction of the same genes, giving a mechanism for favoring genetic
selection.
Inclusive fitness theory, first proposed by W. D. Hamilton
in the early 1960s, gives a selection criterion for evolution of social
traits when social behavior is costly to an individual organism's
survival and reproduction. The criterion is that the reproductive
benefit to relatives who carry the social trait, multiplied by their
relatedness (the probability that they share the altruistic trait)
exceeds the cost to the individual. Inclusive fitness theory is a
general treatment of the statistical probabilities of social traits
accruing to any other organisms likely to propagate a copy of the same
social trait. Kin selection theory treats the narrower but simpler case
of the benefits to close genetic relatives (or what biologists call
'kin') who may also carry and propagate the trait. A significant group
of biologists support inclusive fitness as the explanation for social
behavior in a wide range of species, as supported by experimental data.
An article was published in Nature with over a hundred coauthors.
One of the questions about kin selection is the requirement that
individuals must know if other individuals are related to them, or kin recognition.
Any altruistic act has to preserve similar genes. One argument given by
Hamilton is that many individuals operate in "viscous" conditions, so
that they live in physical proximity to relatives. Under these
conditions, they can act altruistically to any other individual, and it
is likely that the other individual will be related. This population
structure builds a continuum between individual selection, kin
selection, kin group selection and group selection without a clear
boundary for each level. However, early theoretical models by D.S.
Wilson et al. and Taylor
showed that pure population viscosity cannot lead to cooperation and
altruism. This is because any benefit generated by kin cooperation is
exactly cancelled out by kin competition; additional offspring from
cooperation are eliminated by local competition. Mitteldorf and D. S.
Wilson later showed that if the population is allowed to fluctuate, then
local populations can temporarily store the benefit of local
cooperation and promote the evolution of cooperation and altruism.
By assuming individual differences in adaptations, Yang further showed
that the benefit of local altruism can be stored in the form of
offspring quality and thus promote the evolution of altruism even if the
population does not fluctuate. This is because local competition among
more individuals resulting from local altruism increases the average
local fitness of the individuals that survive.
Another explanation for the recognition of genes for altruism is that a single trait, group reciprocal kindness,
is capable of explaining the vast majority of altruism that is
generally accepted as "good" by modern societies. The phenotype of
altruism relies on recognition of the altruistic behavior by itself. The
trait of kindness will be recognized by sufficiently intelligent and
undeceived organisms in other individuals with the same trait. Moreover,
the existence of such a trait predicts a tendency for kindness to
unrelated organisms that are apparently kind, even if the organisms are
of another species. The gene need not be exactly the same, so long as
the effect or phenotype is similar. Multiple versions of the gene—or
even meme—would have virtually the same effect. This explanation was given by Richard Dawkins as an analogy of a man with a green beard.
Green-bearded men are imagined as tending to cooperate with each other
simply by seeing a green beard, where the green beard trait is
incidentally linked to the reciprocal kindness trait.
Kin selection or inclusive fitness is accepted as an explanation for cooperative behavior in many species, but the scientist David Sloan Wilson
argues that human behavior is difficult to explain with only this
approach. In particular, he claims it does not seem to explain the rapid
rise of human civilization. Wilson has argued that other factors must
also be considered in evolution. Wilson and others have continued to develop group selection models.
Early group selection models were flawed because they assumed
that genes acted independently; but genetically based interactions among
individuals are ubiquitous in group formation because genes must
cooperate for the benefit of association in groups to enhance the
fitness of group members.
Additionally, group selection on the level of the species is flawed
because it is difficult to see how selective pressures would be applied;
selection in social species of groups against other groups, rather than
the species entire, seems to be the level at which selective pressures
are plausible. On the other hand, kin selection is accepted as an
explanation of altruistic behavior.
Some biologists argue that kin selection and multilevel selection are
both needed to "obtain a complete understanding of the evolution of a
social behavior system".
In 1994, David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober
argued that the case against group selection had been overstated. They
considered whether groups can have functional organization in the same
way as individuals, and consequently whether groups can be "vehicles"
for selection.
They do not posit evolution on the level of the species, but selective
pressures that winnow out small groups within a species, e.g. groups of
social insects or primates. Groups that cooperate better might survive
and reproduce more than those that did not. Resurrected in this way,
Wilson & Sober's new group selection is called multilevel selection
theory.
In 2010, Martin Nowak, C. E. Tarnita and E. O. Wilson
argued for multi-level selection, including group selection, to correct
what they saw as deficits in the explanatory power of inclusive
fitness.
A response from 137 other evolutionary biologists argued "that their
arguments are based upon a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory and a
misrepresentation of the empirical literature".
Wilson compared the layers of competition and evolution to nested sets of Russian matryoshka dolls. The lowest level is the genes, next come the cells, then the organism
level and finally the groups. The different levels function cohesively
to maximize fitness, or reproductive success. The theory asserts that
selection for the group level, involving competition between groups,
must outweigh the individual level, involving individuals competing
within a group, for a group-benefiting trait to spread.
Multilevel selection theory focuses on the phenotype because it looks at the levels that selection directly acts upon.
For humans, social norms can be argued to reduce individual level
variation and competition, thus shifting selection to the group level.
The assumption is that variation between different groups is larger than
variation within groups. Competition and selection can operate at all
levels regardless of scale. Wilson wrote, "At all scales, there must be
mechanisms that coordinate the right kinds of action and prevent
disruptive forms of self-serving behavior at lower levels of social
organization."
E. O. Wilson summarized, "In a group, selfish individuals beat
altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat
groups of selfish individuals."
Wilson ties the multilevel selection theory regarding humans to another theory, gene–culture coevolution,
by acknowledging that culture seems to characterize a group-level
mechanism for human groups to adapt to environmental changes.
MLS theory can be used to evaluate the balance between group selection and individual selection in specific cases.
An experiment by William Muir compared egg productivity in hens,
showing that a hyper-aggressive strain had been produced through
individual selection, leading to many fatal attacks after only six
generations; by implication, it could be argued that group selection
must have been acting to prevent this in real life. Group selection has most often been postulated in humans and, notably, eusocialHymenoptera that make cooperation a driving force of their adaptations over time and have a unique system of inheritance involving haplodiploidy that allows the colony to function as an individual while only the queen reproduces.
Wilson and Sober's work revived interest in multilevel selection. In a 2005 article,
E. O. Wilson argued that kin selection could no longer be thought of as
underlying the evolution of extreme sociality, for two reasons. First,
he suggested, the argument that haplodiploid
inheritance (as in the Hymenoptera) creates a strong selection pressure
towards nonreproductive castes is mathematically flawed. Second, eusociality
no longer seems to be confined to the hymenopterans; increasing numbers
of highly social taxa have been found in the years since Wilson's
foundational text Sociobiology: A New Synthesis was published in 1975. These including a variety of insect species, as well as two rodent species (the naked mole-rat and the Damaraland mole rat). Wilson suggests the equation for Hamilton's rule:
rb > c
(where b represents the benefit to the recipient of altruism, c the
cost to the altruist, and r their degree of relatedness) should be
replaced by the more general equation
rbk + be > c
in which bk is the benefit to kin (b in the original equation) and be
is the benefit accruing to the group as a whole. He then argues that,
in the present state of the evidence in relation to social insects, it
appears that be>rbk, so that altruism needs to
be explained in terms of selection at the colony level rather than at
the kin level. However, kin selection and group selection are not
distinct processes, and the effects of multi-level selection are already
accounted for in Hamilton's rule, rb>c, provided that an expanded definition of r, not requiring Hamilton's original assumption of direct genealogical relatedness, is used, as proposed by E. O. Wilson himself.
Spatial populations of predators and prey show restraint of
reproduction at equilibrium, both individually and through social
communication, as originally proposed by Wynne-Edwards. While these
spatial populations do not have well-defined groups for group selection,
the local spatial interactions of organisms in transient groups are
sufficient to lead to a kind of multi-level selection. There is however
as yet no evidence that these processes operate in the situations where
Wynne-Edwards posited them.
Rauch et al.'s analysis of host-parasite
evolution is broadly hostile to group selection. Specifically, the
parasites do not individually moderate their transmission; rather, more
transmissible variants – which have a short-term but unsustainable
advantage – arise, increase, and go extinct.
The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a
single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular
evolution. But, as J. L. Mackie suggested, when there are many different groups, each with a different evolutionarily stable strategy, there is selection between the different strategies, since some are worse than others.
For example, a group where altruism was universal would indeed
outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so
group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and
non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within
the group, so group selection would collapse.
Implications in population biology
Social behaviors such as altruism and group relationships can impact many aspects of population dynamics, such as intraspecific competition and interspecific
interactions. In 1871, Darwin argued that group selection occurs when
the benefits of cooperation or altruism between subpopulations are
greater than the individual benefits of egotism within a subpopulation.
This supports the idea of multilevel selection, but kinship also plays
an integral role because many subpopulations are composed of closely
related individuals. An example of this can be found in lions, which are
simultaneously cooperative and territorial.
Within a pride, males protect the pride from outside males, and
females, who are commonly sisters, communally raise cubs and hunt.
However, this cooperation seems to be density dependent. When resources
are limited, group selection favors prides that work together to hunt.
When prey is abundant, cooperation is no longer beneficial enough to
outweigh the disadvantages of altruism, and hunting is no longer
cooperative.
Interactions between different species can also be affected by
multilevel selection. Predator-prey relationships can also be affected.
Individuals of certain monkey species howl to warn the group of the
approach of a predator.
The evolution of this trait benefits the group by providing protection,
but could be disadvantageous to the individual if the howling draws the
predator's attention to them. By affecting these interspecific
interactions, multilevel and kinship selection can change the population
dynamics of an ecosystem.
Multilevel selection attempts to explain the evolution of altruistic behavior in terms of quantitative genetics. Increased frequency or fixation of altruistic alleles
can be accomplished through kin selection, in which individuals engage
in altruistic behavior to promote the fitness of genetically similar
individuals such as siblings. However, this can lead to inbreeding depression,
which typically lowers the overall fitness of a population. However, if
altruism were to be selected for through an emphasis on benefit to the
group as opposed to relatedness and benefit to kin, both the altruistic
trait and genetic diversity could be preserved. However, relatedness
should still remain a key consideration in studies of multilevel
selection. Experimentally imposed multilevel selection on Japanese quail
was more effective by an order of magnitude on closely related kin
groups than on randomized groups of individuals.
Humanity has developed extremely rapidly, arguably through gene-culture coevolution, leading to complex cultural artefacts like the gopuram of the Sri Mariammam temple, Singapore.
Gene-culture coevolution
(also called dual inheritance theory) is a modern hypothesis
(applicable mostly to humans) that combines evolutionary biology and
modern sociobiology to indicate group selection.
It is believed that this approach of combining genetic influence with
cultural influence over several generations is not present in the other
hypotheses such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection, making
gene-culture evolution one of the strongest realistic hypotheses for
group selection. Fehr provides evidence of group selection taking place
in humans presently with experimentation through logic games such as
prisoner's dilemma, the type of thinking that humans have developed many
generations ago.
Gene-culture coevolution allows humans to develop highly distinct
adaptations to the local pressures and environments more quickly than
with genetic evolution alone. Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson,
two strong proponents of cultural evolution, postulate that the act of
social learning, or learning in a group as done in group selection,
allows human populations to accrue information over many generations.
This leads to cultural evolution of behaviors and technology alongside
genetic evolution. Boyd and Richerson believe that the ability to
collaborate evolved during the Middle Pleistocene, a million years ago, in response to a rapidly changing climate.
In 2003, the behavioral scientist Herbert Gintis
examined cultural evolution statistically, offering evidence that
societies that promote pro-social norms have higher survival rates than
societies that do not.
Gintis wrote that genetic and cultural evolution can work together.
Genes transfer information in DNA, and cultures transfer information
encoded in brains, artifacts, or documents. Language, tools, lethal
weapons, fire, cooking, etc., have a long-term effect on genetics. For
example, cooking led to a reduction of size of the human gut, since less
digestion is needed for cooked food. Language led to a change in the
human larynx and an increase in brain size. Projectile weapons led to
changes in human hands and shoulders, such that humans are much better
at throwing objects than the closest human relative, the chimpanzee.
In 2015, William Yaworsky and colleagues surveyed the opinions of
anthropologists on group selection, finding that these varied with the
gender and politics of the social scientists concerned.
In 2019, Howard Rachlin
and colleagues proposed group selection of behavioural patterns, such
as learned altruism, during ontogeny parallel to group selection during
phylogeny.
The use of the Price equation to support group selection was challenged by van Veelen in 2012, arguing that it is based on invalid mathematical assumptions.
Advocates of the gene-centered view of evolution such as Dawkins and Daniel Dennett remain unconvinced about group selection. Dawkins suggests that group selection fails to make an appropriate distinction between replicators and vehicles. The evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne summarizes the arguments in The New York Review of Books in non-technical terms as follows:
Group selection isn't widely
accepted by evolutionists for several reasons. First, it's not an
efficient way to select for traits, like altruistic behavior, that are
supposed to be detrimental to the individual but good for the group.
Groups divide to form other groups much less often than organisms
reproduce to form other organisms, so group selection for altruism would
be unlikely to override the tendency of each group to quickly lose its
altruists through natural selection favoring cheaters. Further, little
evidence exists that selection on groups has promoted the evolution of
any trait. Finally, other, more plausible evolutionary forces, like
direct selection on individuals for reciprocal support, could have made
humans prosocial. These reasons explain why only a few biologists, like
[David Sloan] Wilson and E. O. Wilson (no relation), advocate group
selection as the evolutionary source of cooperation.
The psychologist Steven Pinker
states that "group selection has no useful role to play in psychology
or social science", since in these domains it "is not a precise
implementation of the theory of natural selection, as it is, say, in genetic algorithms or artificial life simulations. Instead [in psychology] it is a loose metaphor, more like the struggle among kinds of tires or telephones."
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