The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (review)

Humans come to behave and think in different ways from other species despite what might seem to be similar environmental experiences. The best example is language. Even the most dedicated and deranged pet owners who talk continuously to their pets fail miserably in getting their dog or cat to speak while even the most careless and neglectful parent almost always has a child who speaks normally. Children bring something to the language-learning environment that no other animal has. They seem to bring a set of language-specific constraints that creates a universal grammar and which greatly facilitates the language acquisition process. In his early writings Steven Pinker certainly embraces this point of view as well. He and Paul Bloom have also advanced the additional argument that natural language should be seen as an adaptation selected for in the course of evolution.

P then took his nativist and evolutionary perspective for language and extended it to perception, cognition, and emotion (Pinker 1997). In The blank slate he further argues that most folks, both within and outside of the academy, don’t get it and feel oddly beholden to the view of humans as having no intrinsic natures, containing nothing in their initial cognitive makeup that guides development or constrains the adult form. He sees this misconception as further reinforced by a mistaken dualism, ‘the ghost in the machine’, that allows the mind to escape any biological limits and by romantic and unrealistic notions of humans as ‘noble savages’ corrupted by the evils of society. Most centrally, however, P argues that views of humans having rich intrinsic natures are morally, socially, and politically acceptable. The blank slate is an attempt to convince the reader that it really is OK to be a nativist and an evolutionary psychologist without being a racist, supporting eugenics, or making a political statement. It is unfortunate that this extremely important central message may get lost by those who become sidetracked with concerns about the status of evolutionary psychology.

At the abstract level the evolutionary psychology view seems eminently reasonable. There is no magic line that says that organs and systems outside of the brain could evolve in ways that allow organisms to adapt to their niches, while those inside the brain could not. There is also no magic line that says that as one moves inward from the sensory transducers to ‘higher’ levels of processing there is a point at which structures and systems could not be adaptations. No one doubts that the eye evolved for picking up and processing light and indeed different organisms have quite different visual systems tailored for their niches, in some cases changing in their properties as they change their niches in development (e.g. Loew & Sillman 1993). The same is true for the ear, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. Moreover, the structures that first process the information coming in from those transducers are similarly clearly adaptations for the information they receive. It seems bizarre and arbitrary to assume that all adaptations would cease as that information is processed at higher and higher levels.

What is not at all obvious, however, is the detailed nature of the adaptations that govern our cognitive and emotional lives. Indeed, even for language, there is much more controversy around whether any of the universal structural properties of languages could have been predicted from even the most exhaustive analyses of the niches inhabited by pre- and postlinguistic hominids. Unlike thorns which clearly serve the function of protecting plants, or wings which aid flight, it is much more difficult to say how our human set of constraints on subjacency relations are more adaptive than another variant that could have been built in instead. Indeed, even by some evolutionary accounts, such constraints may not have been differentially adaptive. Instead, they may be more like social conventions such as driving on a particular side of the road. Something had to be done to solve the...