Critiques the blank-slate view that humans are born blank and that experience can inscribe anything on the mind, and explains human nature through research in cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology. A perspective I was absorbed in during my twenties.

Preface

Part I. The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

Chapter 1. The Official Theory

Sacred, superstitious theories pervasive in modern society:

Chapter 2. Silly Putty

A behavioral psychology joke:

There is an old joke in psychology. After making love, a behaviorist says, “That was great for you. How was it for me?” —p52

Chapter 3. The Last Wall to Fall

Four bridges connecting biology and culture:

Cognitive science
Neuroscience
Behavioral genetics
Evolutionary psychology

The first bridge. Cognitive science:

The first bridge between biology and culture is cognitive science, the science of the mind. … Here are five ideas from the cognitive revolution that transformed how we think and talk about the mind.

Idea 1: The mental world can be grounded in the physical world through the concepts of information, computation, and feedback.

Idea 2: The mind is never a blank slate. A blank slate can do nothing.

Idea 3: Finite combinatorial programs in the mind can generate infinite behavior.

Idea 4: Beneath the superficial differences scattered across cultures lie universal mental mechanisms.

Idea 5: The mind is a complex system comprising many interacting parts. …

The cognitive revolution’s idea of the mind as a system of universal, generative computational modules thoroughly demolishes the way questions have been framed through centuries of debate about human nature. Are humans flexible or preprogrammed? Is behavior universal or culturally variable? Are actions learned or innate? Are we fundamentally good or evil? Such questions are now considered misconceived. Humans behave flexibly because they are preprogrammed: the human mind contains combinatorial software capable of generating unlimited thoughts and actions. Behavior may vary across cultures without the design of the mental programs generating it varying. We successfully learn intelligent behavior because we possess innate systems that make learning possible. Everyone has both good and bad motives, but not everyone translates them into the same actions. —p72-86

The second bridge. Neuroscience:

The second bridge between mind and matter is neuroscience, particularly cognitive neuroscience, which studies how cognition and emotion are implemented in the brain. In The astonishing hypothesis, his book about the brain, Francis Crick proposed that all our thoughts and feelings, joys and pains, dreams and hopes depend on the brain’s psychological activity. Neuroscientists, tired of such an obvious idea, mocked his book, but Crick was right. Anyone who reflects on the hypothesis even briefly cannot help being astonished. …

We all feel there is a single ‘Self’ managing everything. But this is an illusion our brains work hard to create, much like the feeling that our visual field richly displays every detail across its full extent. …

One of the most dramatic demonstrations that the unified self is an illusion came from neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry. (See Split-brain.) —p87-91

The third bridge. Behavioral genetics:

The third bridge between biology and mind is behavioral genetics, the study of how genes affect behavior. —p95

The fourth bridge. Evolutionary psychology:

The fourth bridge between biology and culture is evolutionary psychology, the study of the mind’s phylogenetic history and adaptive functions. Evolutionary psychology offers the hope of understanding the mind’s design or purpose—not in a mystical or teleological sense, but in the engineering sense widespread in the natural world. We see this evidence of engineering everywhere: in eyes that seem designed to form images, hearts that seem designed to pump blood, and wings that seem designed to fly. —p105

Love, will, and conscience have traditionally belonged to the soul’s job description, always set against merely ‘biological’ functions. If these too are ‘biological’—features of evolutionary adaptations implemented in brain circuits—the ghost (the ghost in the machine) has even less to do and might as well retire permanently on a pension. —p116

Chapter 4. Culture Vultures

An amusing passage:

(Human culture) sanctions perverse sexual customs such as parents arranging marriages for their five-year-old children. —p118

Much of culture is simply accumulated local wisdom:

Much of what we call culture is merely wisdom accumulated locally—how to make artifacts, choose food, distribute windfalls, and so on. Some anthropologists, including Marvin Harris, argue that practices seemingly as arbitrary as a lottery may actually solve ecological problems. As he notes, cows are sacred in India, and because they provide food (milk and butter), fuel (dung), and power (plowing), the custom of protecting them checked the temptation to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. —p125

A defense of reductionism. (See Praise of reductionism.)

Reductionism should also be applied to the study of mind:

Our understanding of life was enriched by discovering that living bodies consist not of the movements of protoplasm but of clockwork-precise molecular movements, and that birds fly by exploiting physical laws rather than defying them. Similarly, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can be enriched by discovering that our minds are not blank slates, shapeless masses, or mysterious ghosts, but complex neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning. —p140

Chapter 5. The Slate’s Last Stand

Evidence that seems to support the blank slate:

There can be no learning without mechanisms for learning:

As a matter of simple logic, learning cannot exist without innate mechanisms for learning. … Learnability theory—the mathematical analysis of how learning works—shows that the generalizations a learner can draw from finite input are infinite in number. —187

Part II. Fear and Loathing

Chapter 6. Political Scientists

‘Political’ scientists, rather than people studying political science:

How low can people sink? Mocking an opponent’s sex life sounds like something from a vicious satirical novel about academia. Yet Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin, and Leon Kamin, bringing up sociologist Steven Goldberg’s (AnswerMe) view that women are adept at manipulating others’ emotions, commented, “How pathetically this reveals Goldberg’s susceptibility to seduction!” They later targeted a chapter in Donald Symons’s (AnswerMe) pioneering The evolution of human sexuality, which shows that in every society sex is generally regarded as a woman’s service or favor. Their verdict: “When reading sociobiology, one cannot shake the feeling of being a voyeur peering into the author’s autobiographical memoirs.” Rose apparently enjoyed this joke so much that fourteen years later he quoted it again in Lifelines: Biology beyond determinism. —p210-211

Chapter 7. The Holy Trinity

Part III. Human Nature with a Human Face

Our moral concepts will be revised in light of biological facts:

As in the century after Galileo Galilei’s death, our moral concepts will be revised in light of biological facts. Because facts are facts, and because the blank slate’s moral credentials are counterfeit. —p251

Concerns about human nature can be summarized as four fears:

If people differ innately, oppression and discrimination will be justified. See Fear of inequality.
If people are innately immoral, hope of improving the human condition will be futile. See Fear of imperfectibility.
If people are products of biological laws, free will becomes a myth and we can no longer hold people responsible for their actions. See Fear of determinism.
If people are products of biological laws, life loses its meaning and purpose. See Fear of nihilism.

Part IV. Know Thyself

Chapter 12. In Touch with Reality

Chapter 13. Out of Our Depths

On education policy:

Education is a sure way to remedy the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world. Education policy should address the following: providing students with the cognitive tools most important for understanding the modern world and most distant from our innate intuitive equipment. The dangerous errors we have witnessed in this chapter would highlight, for example, the importance of economics, evolutionary biology, probability, and statistics in high school and university curricula. —p414

The limits of human cognition:

If the mind is a biological organ rather than a window onto reality, there will be truths literally beyond thought’s reach, and there must be limits to how well we can understand scientific discoveries.

Chapter 14. The Many Roots of Our Suffering

Two forms of biological altruism:

Kin-directed altruism
Reciprocal altruism

The evolution of self-deception:

Sometimes parents want their children to believe they are acting for the children’s benefit; children want their parents to believe they are needy rather than greedy; lovers want each other to believe they are always faithful; and nonrelatives want each other to believe they are valuable partners in cooperation.

Their views are heavily embellished, if not wholly fictional, so they must believe them themselves to avoid detection through stumbling, sweating, or contradicting themselves. Shameless liars may get away with outright lies to complete strangers, but they cannot maintain friendships that way, because no friend would trust their promises. The price of an honest-looking face is being unable to lie with an honest expression. To lie, part of the mind must therefore be designed to believe its own advertising. At the same time, another part registers enough objective facts to keep this self-image from becoming disconnected from reality. —p463

The importance of suffering:

The richness and intensity of our emotions testify to how precious and fragile our bonds with them (family and friends) are. In short, removing the possibility of suffering would bring not harmonious, perfect happiness, but a deficit of consciousness. —p470

Chapter 15. The Sanctimonious Animal

The moral emotions by Jonathan Haidt

Part V. Hot Buttons

Chapter 16. Politics

Chapter 17. Violence

Contrary to the noble savage theory, human history has been a history of war. See Violent nature of human.

Dehumanization tactics that facilitate atrocities:

Atrocities are often accompanied by dehumanization tactics: contemptuous name-calling, degrading living conditions, humiliating clothing, and spreading “gallows humor” that belittles suffering. These tactics flip our mental switches, reclassifying a “human” as “nonhuman” and making it easy to torture or kill someone, as we boil lobsters alive. …

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo showed that dehumanization tactics can readily push a person outside another’s moral circle even among students at elite universities (see Stanford prison experiment). …

Recent studies of soldiers in combat and mobs participating in ethnic massacres show that they often kill joyfully, sometimes in states of “exhilaration” or “ecstasy.” —p561-563

We must acknowledge human violence:

Many intellectuals turn away from the evolutionary logic of violence for fear that acknowledging it is equivalent to accepting or endorsing it. Instead, they seek the comforting delusion of the noble savage, believing violence is an arbitrary product of learning or a pathogen invading from outside. But rejecting violence’s logic makes it easy to forget how readily it can arise; ignoring the mental faculties that ignite it makes it easy to overlook those that can extinguish it. As with many of our concerns, the problem of violence lies in human nature, and so does the solution. —p588

Chapter 18. Gender

Difference and inequality are different:

Why are people so afraid of the idea that male and female minds are not identical in every respect? Would we really live better if we were all androgynous? The fear is that difference means inequality: if the sexes differ in any way, men will be better or more dominant and monopolize all the fun.

This is biologically entirely mistaken. … From the gene’s perspective, having a male body and having a female body are equally good strategies, at least on average. … Is it better to be the size of a male baboon with fifteen-centimeter canines, or the size of a female baboon without them? The moment we ask, we see the question’s meaninglessness. A biologist would say that male adaptations are better for solving male problems, and female adaptations for solving female problems.

Three facts about gender equality:

First, preventing women from pursuing their ambitions or discriminating against them on the basis of sex is an injustice that should be prohibited immediately, wherever it occurs. Second, there is no doubt that women faced widespread discrimination in the past and that it continues in some areas today. … Third, asking whether women are capable of becoming scientists, CEOs, national leaders, or top experts in every field is meaningless. This was settled completely years ago: as with men, some women are capable and some are not.

The only question is whether the proportions of capable men and women must be equal. —p618-619

A critique of equal representation by sex:

Gottfredson (AnswerMe) points out: “Insisting on equal representation of the sexes as a means of social justice would bar many men and women from the jobs they like best and push them into jobs they do not like.” —p627

A critique of the claim that rape has nothing to do with sex (see Against our will):

The foremost moral imperative in contemporary intellectual analyses of rape is to declare that rape has absolutely nothing to do with sex. This mantra appears whenever rape is discussed. … Since the 1960s, most educated people have come to believe that sex should be regarded as natural, rather than shameful or dirty. Sex is natural, and what is natural is good, so sex is good. But rape is bad. Therefore rape is not sex. Its motives must arise from social institutions rather than human nature. …

I think the claim that rape has nothing to do with sex will someday remain as a historical example of extraordinary popular delusion and crowd madness. It is absurd on its face, unworthy of its present sacred status, contradicted by abundant evidence, and obstructs the only moral goal concerning rape: eliminating it.

Consider two obvious facts. First, men often want sex with women who do not want sex with them. They deploy every technique humans use to influence other humans—courtship, seduction, flattery, lying, sulking, payment, and so on. Second, some men use violence to get what they want and are indifferent to the suffering they cause. … If some men did not use violence to obtain sex, that would be a truly extraordinary fact, contradicting thousands of things we know about humans.

Now apply common sense to the idea that men promote the interests of all men through rape. A rapist risks injury from a woman defending herself. In traditional societies, he risks torture, mutilation, or death at the hands of her relatives. In modern societies, he risks a long prison sentence. Yet rapists take these risks for billions of men they have never met? … The idea that all men are waging a savage war against all women collapses before the simple fact that men have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, and live caring for those women rather than other men. Biologically: each individual’s genes are passed into other people’s bodies, half of whom are of the opposite sex. …

What of the more basic question of whether sex is among a rapist’s motives? … Most people agree that a woman has the right to say no at any point during sexual activity, and that a man who persists is committing sexual assault. Does his motive suddenly change at that point from having sex to oppressing women? —p628-641

Women’s clothing:

Every woman has the right to dress as she wishes. But the immediate question is not what rights women might enjoy in a perfect world, but how to maximize their safety in the world we inhabit. Suggesting that women in dangerous situations take care about whether they might elicit unintended male responses or send signals they do not intend is so commonsensical that any normal adult would think so—unless indoctrinated by rape-prevention programs teaching women that “sexual assault is not an act aimed at sexual gratification” or that “appearance and attractiveness have nothing to do with rape.” —p645

Conclusion:

The women’s movement matters as a movement for political and social equality, but not as an academic faction devoted to eccentric doctrines about human nature. Eliminating discrimination against women matters; believing that men and women are born with interchangeable minds does not. Freedom of choice matters; insisting that women occupy 50% of every profession does not. Eliminating sexual assault matters; the theory that rapists act in collusion with all men does not. —p648-649

Chapter 19. Children

The tendency to think of biological determinism as soon as genes are mentioned:

At the mention of genes, people suddenly lose their reason and their ability to distinguish 50% from 100%, “some” from “all,” “influences” from “determines.” Diagnosing this intellectual impairment is simple: if genetic influence must be zero for theological reasons, all nonzero values are equally heretical. —p662

Three laws of behavioral genetics:

The three laws of behavioral genetics may be among the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. … They are:

First law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.

Second law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.

Third law: A substantial part of the variation in complex behavioral traits is not explained by genes or families. —p652

Briefly: genes 50%, shared environment 0%, nonshared environment 50% (with some leeway: genes 40–50%, shared environment 0–10%, nonshared environment 50%). A simple way to remember this: identical twins are 50% alike whether raised together or apart. —p666

A critique of environmental determinism:

The Freudian school theorized that who we become is determined by how successfully we experience weaning, toilet training, and identification with the same-sex parent, and warned that letting babies sleep in their parents’ bed could damage their sexual desires. They all proposed that various psychological disorders could be blamed on mothers: autism on maternal coldness, schizophrenia on maternal double binds, anorexia on mothers’ pressure for perfect daughters. Low self-esteem was blamed on “toxic parents,” and every other problem on a “dysfunctional family.” Psychotherapy patients idle for fifty minutes trying to recall childhood conflicts; biographers excavate their subjects’ childhoods to find the roots of success and misery. —p668

Myths about early childhood education:

The governors of Georgia and Missouri asked their state legislatures for millions of dollars to distribute Mozart CDs to every new mother. (They confused experiments on infant brain development with a dubious experiment claiming that listening to Mozart for a few minutes benefited adults.) …

Cognitive neuroscience expert John Brewer demonstrated in The myth of the first three years that these astonishing claims had no scientific basis. No psychologist has ever reported that any process of cognitive or language development is completed at age three. Depriving animals of stimulation (by sewing their eyes shut or confining them in monotonous cages) can impede brain development, but there is no evidence that special stimulation—stimulation not encountered in a normal habitat—accelerates it. —p676-677

Conclusion:

Not everyone accepts the influence of fate, genes, peer groups, and other forces beyond individual control. One mother told the Chicago Tribune: “I pray to God this isn’t true. The thought that all this love I pour into my child doesn’t matter at all is too horrible.” As with other discoveries about human nature, people pray to God that it is not true. But truth is independent of our wishes, and sometimes pushes us to rely on those wishes.

It is disappointing that there is no algorithm for raising a happy, capable child. But do we really want to specify our children’s traits in advance? Don’t we want every child to surprise us with unexpected talents and successes? People fear human cloning and recoil at the dubious promise that parents could design children through genetic engineering. Yet how different is that from the fantasy that parents can design children through upbringing? Realistic parents can actually feel relieved: instead of continually striving to stimulate, socialize, and improve their child’s personality, they can enjoy time together. Reading a storybook becomes more generous in spirit when it is for the child’s enjoyment, rather than to benefit their neurons. …

Finally, consider the question “Does this mean it doesn’t matter how I treat my children?” How unfortunate it would be if that were true! Of course parenting matters greatly. Harris explains why.

First, parents have enormous power over children, and their behavior matters enormously to children’s happiness. Parenting is above all an ethical responsibility. Hitting, ignoring, abusing, or neglecting children is wrong because it is terrible for a large, powerful person to treat a small, powerless one that way. …

Second, parents and children share a human relationship. Apart from newlyweds who believe they can change their spouse’s personality, no one asks, “Does this mean it doesn’t matter how I treat my husband or wife?” Spouses care for one another to build deep, satisfying relationships, not to change the other’s character as they wish. Imagine replying, on being told you cannot remake your spouse’s personality, “The thought that all this love I pour into him (or her) doesn’t matter at all is too horrible.” The same is true of parents and children. How you treat each other greatly affects the quality of your relationship. …

In thinking of children as blank slates, people often forget that children are human beings. —p696-699

Chapter 20. The Arts and Humanities

The evolution of art.

A critique of postmodernism.

The arts and humanities need an understanding of how the mind works:

A sound understanding of how the mind works is essential to the arts and humanities for at least two reasons.

One is that the real medium of every artist, whatever the genre, is human mental representation. Oil paint, sculpture, and printed words do not penetrate the brain directly. Artworks trigger cascades of neural activity, beginning with the senses and extending to thought, emotion, and memory. By precisely explaining these cascades, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience offer abundant information to anyone seeking to understand how artworks come into being. Vision research can illuminate painting and sculpture. Psychoacoustics and linguistics are opening new areas of music research. Linguistics offers insights into poetry, metaphor, and style. Research on mental imagery helps explain the techniques of narrative prose. Theory of mind (intuitive psychology) illuminates our ability to enjoy fictional worlds. Research on visual attention and short-term memory helps explain cinematic experience. Evolutionary aesthetics helps explain the feelings of beauty and pleasure accompanying all these perceptual acts. …

Another connection is far more important. What ultimately draws us to art, alongside sensory experience of its medium, is its emotional content and insight into the human condition. This leads to our biological predicament—mortality, limited knowledge and wisdom, differences among us, and conflicts of interest with friends, neighbors, family, and lovers. These are all topics in the science of human nature. —p730-731

Part VI. The Voice of the Species

What acknowledging human nature means:

Acknowledging human nature does not mean overturning our personal worldviews; even if it did, I have nothing else to recommend in their place. It means only that intellectual life should stop leading a double life, rejoin science, and with science’s help rejoin common sense. Otherwise it will grow ever further from the human world, intellectuals will become hypocrites, and everyone else will turn anti-intellectual. …

Sophisticated audiences mock easy comedies with obvious plots and happy endings. Life is never like that, so people expect art to address the painful dilemmas of the human condition.

Yet the same audiences demand tearful sentimentality from science. When criticizing scientific findings about human nature, only “pessimism” counts as a valid criticism, and scientific theories are treated as vehicles for sentimental uplift. —p739-740