In opposition to the ghost and the machine theory, cognitive science has shown that intelligence can be explained in mechanistic terms, Pinker said. The same statistic for the United States and Europe combined during the 20th century, including both World Wars, was infinitesimal by comparison. A study documenting warfare in various societies showed that in pre-state, or relatively uncivilized, areas such as the New Guinea highlands and the Amazon rainforest, the percentage of male deaths due to warfare ranged from around 10 to 60 percent. Neuroscience has identified brain mechanisms associated with aggression, and the resulting data conflicts with Rousseau’s theory as ignoble as Western civilization may seem at times, it remains leaps and bounds ahead of savage existence. The noble savage theory has been subjected to equally rigorous attacks from the brain and behavioral sciences, Pinker said. When they were reunited in their 40s at a Minnesota lab, both of them were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulets rubber bands around their wrists flushed the toilet before using it as well as after and intentionally sneezed in crowded elevators to watch other people jump. Take the remarkable case of this pair: one twin raised as a Catholic in Nazi Germany, the other by his Jewish father in Trinidad. Perhaps the most devastating argument against the blank slate comes from neuroscience, where research by APS William James Fellow Award winner Robert Plomin and others has shown that identical twins separated at birth share many astonishing similarities despite vastly different upbringings. For example, our desire for sugar and fat, resources whose scarcity once made their rapid consumption vital, has not diminished, though we can now reproduce them at large. Other human drives can only be understood within the context of evolution. “There have to be some innate mechanisms to do the learning, to achieve the socializing, to create and transmit the culture” upon which experiences are based, Pinker said.įrom a cognitive perspective, such mechanisms include a number sense a sense of spatial representation the ability to grasp the thoughts of others a language instinct and decision rules that govern behavior. “There’s something deeply wrong with all of this,” he said, “beginning with the blank slate.”Īs Pinker argued, this trilogy of theories becomes undone, repeatedly and irreparably, under the lenses of modern science - particularly, cognitive understanding, evolutionary psychology, and neurology. What unsettles Pinker isn’t that these theories hold sway but that they are accepted unconditionally despite increasing evidence against them. Rene Descartes’ belief in the division of soul and body - the ghost and the machine - is welcomed by optimists seeking transcendent pursuits of love, worship, beauty, and knowledge, as well as a soul that can survive the death of the body. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s account of the noble savage holds that “nothing could be more gentle than in his primitive state,” providing philosophical hope for a utopian society in which armed governments and police forces are unnecessary. Such a proposal is attractive to egalitarian spirits, as it undermines aristocratic claims of innate, superior wisdom. John Locke’s tabula rasa, or blank slate, compares the mind to white paper inscribed gradually by experience.
Each of the theories, while flawed, is not without its appeal. “Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means all of us have theories, tacit or explicit, about what makes people tick.”įor hundreds of years, three such theories - the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine - have provided the foundation for moral values and social conduct. “Everyone has a theory of human nature,” Pinker said. The blank slate, the dominant theory of human nature in modern intellectual life stating that humans are shaped entirely by their experiences and not by any preexisting biological mechanisms, is being challenged and soundly trounced by the cognitive, neural, and genetic sciences, said Steven Pinker, Harvard University, in his Keynote Address.
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