a year ago i spoke to you about a book that i was just in the process of completing that has come out in the interim and i would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that
book inspired the book is called the blank slate based on the
all of its structure comes from socialization culture parenting experience the blank slate was an influential idea in the twentieth century here are a few
the human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none from the late scientist stephen jay gould there are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate
and some of them just come from common sense as many people have told me over the years anyone who 's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents it doesn't all come from the outside
oh and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child exposed to speech will acquire a human language whereas the house pet won 't presumably because of some innate different between them
and anyone who 's been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable
there are also i think increasing results from the scientific study of humans that indeed we're not born blank slates
one of them from anthropology is the study of human universals if you've ever taken anthropology you know that it's a kind of an occupational
pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be and that there are places out there where supposedly everything is the opposite to the way it is here but if you
instead look at what is common to the world 's cultures you find that there is an enormously rich set of
the anthropologist donald brown has tried to list them all and they range from aesthetics affection and age statuses
all the way down to weaning weapons weather attempts to control the color white and a
also genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured this is a recent study by the neurobiologist paul thompson and his colleagues in which they using
measured the distribution of gray matter that is the outer layer of the cortex in a large sample
of pairs of people they coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme in which
two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex this is what happens
people who share half of their dna fraternal twins as you can see large amounts of the brain are not purple showing that if one person has a thicker
bit of cortex in that region so does his fraternal twin and here 's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their dna namely clones or identical twins
and you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter now these aren't just
room of a patentattorney now the cartoon is not
such an exaggeration because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities
and this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth my favorite example is
a pair of twins one of whom was brought up as a catholic in a nazi family in germany the other brought up in a jewish family in
both of them liked to dip buttered toast in coffee both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after
and both of them liked to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump
the story might seem to good to be true but when you
now given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question why should it have been such an appealing notion
well there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial the foremost is that if we're blank slates then by definition we are equal because zero equals zero equals zero
but if something is written on the slate then some people could have more of it than others and according to this line of thinking that would justify discrimination and inequality
another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates we can perfect mankind the age old dream of the perfectibility of our species
just to make a long story short first of all the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness
he did not mean we hold these truths to be self evident that all men are clones rather that all men are equal in terms of their rights and that every
person ought to be treated as an individual and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to
also even if we were born with certain ignoble motives they don't automatically lead to ignoblebehavior that is because the human mind is a complexsystem with many parts and some of them can
others for example there's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to
profit from the lessons of history so even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed that's not the only thing in the skull and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them
in the book i go over controversies such as this one and a number of other hot buttons hot zones chernobyls third rails and so on
including the arts cloning crime free will education evolution gender differences god homosexuality infanticide inequality marxismmorality nazism parenting politics race religion
when i wrote a first draft of the book i circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments and here are some of the reactions that i got better get a security camera for your house
do you have tenure
well the book came out in october
and nothing terrible has happened i i like there was indeed reason to be nervous and there were moments in which i did feel nervousknowing the history
what has happened to people who 've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences there are many cases some of which i talk about in the book of people who have been
slandered called nazis physically assaulted threatened with criminalprosecution for stumbling across or arguing
about controversial findings and you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps my favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on
left handers and published some data showing that left handers are on average more susceptible to disease more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan it's not clear by the way since then whether that is an accurate
but the data at the time seemed to support that well pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters
ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals coming from irate left handers and their advocates and they were literally afraid to open their mail because of the
venom and vituperation that they had inadvertently inspired
well the night is young but the book has been out for half a year and nothing terrible has happened none of the dire professional consequences has taken place i
exiled from the city of cambridge but what i wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that
aroused the strongest response in the eighty odd reviews that the blank slate has received i'll just put that
few seconds and see if you can guess which two i would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably ninety percent of the reaction
the various reviews and radio interviews it's not violence and war it's not race it's not gender it's not marxism it's not
they are the arts
so let me tell you what aroused such irate responses and i'll let you decide if whether they the claims are really that outrageous let me start with the
i note that among the long list of human universals that i presented a few slides ago are
art there is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we
music dance poetry found in all cultures and many of the motifs and themes that
give us pleasure in the arts can be found in all human societies a preference for symmetrical forms the use of repetition and variation
even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world you have lines that are
now on the other hand in the second half of the twentieth century the arts are frequently said to be in decline and i have a collection
in our time i'll give you a couple of representative quotes we can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago
that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity that's a quote from t s eliot little more than fifty years ago and a more recent one
the possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical serious book stores are losing their franchise nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory
in the new republic about five years ago well in fact the arts are not in decline i don't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room
but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent there are
of course entirely new art forms and new media many of which you've heard over these few days by any
by the number of books sold by the number of books published the number of musical titles released the number of new albums and so on
the only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres
works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums in literarycriticism and analysis
they can get and i would like to suggest that it's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespreaddenial of human nature
a famous quotation can be found if you look on the web you can find it in literally scores of english core syllabuses
some debate as to what she actually meant by that but it's very clear looking at these syllabuses that the it's used now as a way of saying that all of the
forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries or millennia
the twentieth century were discarded the beauty and pleasure in art probably a human universal were began to be considered
or kitsch or commercial barnett newman had a famous quote that the impulse of modern art is the desire to
beauty which was considered bourgeois or tacky and here 's just one example i mean this is
indeed in movements of modernism and post modernism there was visual art without beauty
insight into the human condition
and here is an example of one of her analyses the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways
to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence
the question of temporality into the thinking of structure and marked a shift from the form of althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects
well you get the idea by the way this is one sentence you can actually parse it
well the argument in the blank slate was that elite art and criticism in the twentieth century although not the arts in general
have disdained beauty pleasure clarity insight and style people are staying away from elite art and criticism
a puzzle i wonder why well this turned out to be probably the most controversial claim in the book someone asked me whether i stuck it in in order to deflect
from discussions of gender and nazism and race and so on i won 't comment on that but it certainly
inspired an energeticreaction from many university professors well the other hot button is parenting and the starting point is the for that discussion was the fact that we
all been subject to the advice of the parenting industrialcomplex now here is here is a representative quote from a besieged mother
and there are all kinds of play clay for finger dexterity word games for reading success large motor play small motor play
i feel like i could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids i think anyone who 's recently been a parent can sympathize with this mother well here 's some sobering facts about parenting
most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless they're useless because they don't control for heritability
they measure some correlation between what the parents do how the children turn out and assume a causal relation that the parenting shaped the child
very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on
until the studies are redone with adoptive children who provide an environment but not genes to their kids we have no way of knowing whether these conclusions are valid
the genetically controlled studies have some sobering results remember the mallifert twins separated at birth then they meet in the patent office remarkably similar
well what would have happened if the mallifert twins had grown up together you might think well then they'd be even more similar because not only would they share their genes but they would also share their environment that would make them super similar right
wrong identical twins or any siblings who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together
a complementary finding from a completely different methodology is that adopted siblings reared together the mirror image of identical twins reared apart
they share their parents their home their neighborhood don't share their genes end up not similar at all ok two different
the culture of the country at large and the children 's own culturenamely their peer group as we heard from jill sobule earlier today that's what kids care about
and to a very large extent larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge by chance chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero chance events as you live your life
so let me conclude with a just a remark to bring it back to the theme of choices i think that the sciences of human nature behavioral genetics evolutionary psychology neuroscience cognitive science
are going to increasingly in the years to come upset various dogmas careers and deeply held political belief systems and that presents us with a choice the choice is whether
answer to that question which comes from a great artist of the nineteenth century anton chekhov who said
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