The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
I will let Dawkins comment:
When put like that, this dialectical biology seems to make a lot of sense. Perhaps even I can be a dialectical biologist. Come to think of it, isn’t there something familiar about that cake? Yes, here it is, in a 1981 publication by the most reductionist of sociobiologists:
“… If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc. With minor exceptions such as the cherry on top, there is no one-to-one mapping from words of recipe to ‘bits’ of cake. The whole recipe maps onto the whole cake.”
I am not, of course, interested in claiming priority for the cake…. But what I do hope is that this little coincidence may at least give Rose and Lewontin pause. Could it be that their targets are not quite the naively atomistic reductionists they would desperately like them to be?29
Indeed, the accusation of reductionism is topsy-turvy because Lewontin and Rose, in their own research, are card-carrying reductionist biologists who explain phenomena at the level of genes and molecules. Dawkins, in contrast, was trained as an ethologist and writes about the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. Wilson, for his part, is a pioneer of research in ecology and a passionate defender of the endangered field that molecular biologists dismissively refer to as “birdsy-woodsy” biology.
All else having failed, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin finally pinned a damning quotation on Dawkins: “They [the genes] control us, body and mind.”30 That does sound pretty deterministic. But what the man wrote was, “They created us, body and mind,” which is very different.31 Lewontin has used the doctored quotation in five different places.32
Is there any charitable explanation of these “gross errors,” as Trivers called them? One possibility may be Dawkins’s and Wilson’s use of the expression “a gene for X” in discussing the evolution of social behavior like altruism, monogamy, and aggression. Lewontin, Rose, and Gould repeatedly pounce on this language, which refers, they think, to a gene that always causes the behavior and that is the only cause of the behavior. But Dawkins made it clear that the phrase refers to a gene that increases the probability of a behavior compared with alternative genes at that locus. And that probability is an average computed over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time, and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived in. This nonreductionist, nondeterminist use of the phrase “a gene for X” is routine among geneticists and evolutionary biologists because it is indispensable to what they do. Some behavior must be affected by some genes, or we could never explain why lions act differently from lambs, why hens sit on their eggs rather than eat them, why stags butt heads but gerbils don’t, and so on. The point of evolutionary biology is to explain how these animals ended up with those genes, as opposed to genes with different effects. Now, a given gene may not have the same effect in all environments, nor the same effect in all genomes, but it has to have an average effect. That average is what natural selection selects (all things being equal), and that is all that the “for” means in “a gene for X.” It is hard to believe that Gould and Lewontin, who are evolutionary biologists, could literally have been confused by this usage, but if they were, it would explain twenty-five years of pointless attacks.
How low can one go? Ridiculing an opponent’s sex life would seem to come right out of a bad satirical novel on academic life. But Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin bring up a suggestion by the sociologist Steven Goldberg that women are skilled at manipulating others’ emotions, and they comment, “What a touching picture of Goldberg’s vulnerability to seduction is thus revealed!”33 Later they mention a chapter in Donald Symons’s groundbreaking book The Evolution of Human Sexuality which shows that in all societies, sex is typically conceived of as a female service or favor. “In reading sociobiology,” they comment, “one has the constant feeling of being a voyeur, peeping into the autobiographical memoirs of its proponents.”34 Rose was so pleased with this joke that he repeated it fourteen years later in his book Lifelines: Biology Beyond Determinism.35
ANY HOPE THAT these tactics are a thing of the past was dashed by events in the year 2000. Anthropologists have long been hostile to anyone who discusses human aggression in a biological context. In 1976 the American Anthropological Association nearly passed a motion censuring Sociobiology and banning two symposia on the topic, and in 1983 they did pass one decreeing that Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa was “poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading.”36 But that was mild compared with what was to come.
In September 2000, the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel sent the executives of the association a letter (which quickly proliferated throughout cyberspace) warning of a scandal for anthropology that was soon to be divulged in a book by the journalist Patrick Tierney.37 The alleged perpetrators were the geneticist James Neel, a founder of the modern science of human genetics, and the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, famous for his thirty-year study of the Yanomamö people of the Amazon rainforest. Turner and Sponsel wrote:
This nightmarish story—a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele)—will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As another reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.
The accusations were truly shocking. Turner and Sponsel charged Neel and Chagnon with deliberately infecting the Yanomamö with measles (which is often fatal among indigenous peoples) and then withholding medical care in order to test Neel’s “eugenically slanted genetic theories.” According to Turner and Sponsel’s rendition of these theories, polygynous headmen in foraging societies were biologically fitter than coddled Westerners because they possessed “dominant genes” for “innate ability” that were selected when the headmen engaged in violent competition for wives. Neel believed, said Turner and Sponsel, that “democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental supports for the weak,” is a mistake. They reasoned, “The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females.”
The accusations against Chagnon were just as lurid. In his books and papers on the Yanomamö, Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in a killing had more wives and offspring than those who had not.38 (The finding is provocative because if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in which humans evolved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected over evolutionary time.) Turner and Sponsel accused him of fabricating his data, of causing the violence among the Yanomamö (by sending them into a frenzy over the pots and knives with which he paid his informants), and of staging lethal fights for documentary films. Chagnon’s portrayal of the Yanomamö, they charged, had been used to justify an invasion of gold miners into their territory, abetted by Chagnon’s collusion with “sinister” Venezuelan politicians. The Yanomamö have unquestionably been decimated by disease and by the depredations of the miners, so to lay these tragedies and crimes at Chagnon’s feet is literally to accuse him of genocide. For good measure, Turner and Sponsel added that Tierney’s book contained “passing references to Chagnon… demanding that villagers bring
him girls for sex.”
Headlines such as “Scientist ‘Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory’” soon appeared around the world, followed by an excerpt of Tierney’s book in The New Yorker and then the book itself, titled Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon?39 Under pressure from the publisher’s libel lawyers, some of the more sensational accusations in the book had been excised, watered down, or put in the mouths of Venezuelan journalists or untraceable informants. But the substance of the charges remained.40
Turner and Sponsel admitted that their charge against Neel “remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no ‘smoking gun’ in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel.” That turned out to be an understatement. Within days, scholars with direct knowledge of the events—historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers—demolished the charges point by point.41
Far from being a depraved eugenicist, James Neel (who died shortly before the accusations came out) was an honored and beloved scientist who had consistently attacked eugenics. Indeed, he is often credited with purging human genetics of old eugenic theories and thereby making it a respectable science. The cockamamie theory that Turner and Sponsel attributed to him was incoherent on the face of it and scientifically illiterate (for example, they confused a “dominant gene” with a gene for dominance). In any case there is not the slightest evidence that Neel held any belief close to it. Records show that Neel and Chagnon were surprised by the measles epidemic already in progress and made heroic efforts to contain it. The vaccine they administered, which Tierney had charged was the source of the epidemic, has never caused contagious transmission of measles in the hundreds of millions of people all over the world who have received it, and in all probability the efforts of Neel and Chagnon saved hundreds of Yanomamö lives.42 Confronted with public statements from epidemiologists refuting his claims, Tierney lamely said, “Experts I spoke to then had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing in public now.”43
Though no one can prove that Neel and Chagnon did not inadvertently introduce the disease in other places by their very presence, the odds are strongly against it. The Yanomamö, who are spread out over tens of thousands of square miles, had many more contacts with other Europeans than they did with Chagnon or Neel, because thousands of missionaries, traders, miners, and adventurers move through the area. Indeed, Chagnon himself had documented that a Catholic Salesian missionary was the likely source of an earlier outbreak. Together with Chagnon’s criticism of the mission for providing the Yanomamö with shotguns, this earned him the missionaries’ undying enmity. Not coincidentally, most of Tierney’s Yanomamö informants were associated with the mission.
The specific accusations against Chagnon crumbled as quickly as those against Neel. Chagnon, contrary to Tierney’s charges, had not exaggerated Yanomamö violence or ignored the rest of their lifestyle; in fact, he had meticulously described their techniques for conflict resolution.44 The suggestion that Chagnon introduced them to violence is simply incredible. Raiding and warfare among the Yanomamö have been described since the mid—1800s and were documented throughout the first half of the twentieth century, long before Chagnon set foot in the Amazon. (One revealing account was a first-person narrative called Yanoáma: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians.)45 And Chagnon’s main empirical claims have met the gold standard of science: independent replication. In surveys of rates of death by warfare in pre-state societies, Chagnon’s estimates for the Yanomamö fall well within the range, as we saw in the graph in Chapter 3.46 Even his most controversial claim, that killers had more wives and offspring, has been replicated in other groups, though there is controversy over the interpretation. It is instructive to compare Tierney’s summary of a book supposedly refuting Chagnon with the author’s own words. Tierney reports:
Among the Jivaro, head-hunting was a ritual obligation of all males and a required male initiation for teenagers. There, too, most men died in war. Among the Jivaro leaders, however, those who captured the most heads had the fewest wives, and those who had the most wives captured the fewest heads.47
The author, the anthropologist Elsa Redmond, had actually written:
Yanomamo men who have killed tend to have more wives, which they have acquired either by abducting them from raiding villages, or by the usual marriage alliances in which they are considered more attractive as mates. The same is true of Jivaro war leaders, who might have four to six wives; as a matter of fact, a great war leader on the Upano River in the 1930s by the name of Tuki or José Grande had eleven wives. Distinguished warriors also have more offspring, due mainly to their greater marital success.48
Turner and Sponsel had long been among Chagnon’s most vehement critics (and, not coincidentally, major sources for Tierney’s book, despite their professed shock at learning of its contents). They are open about their ideological agenda, which is to defend the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Sponsel wrote that he is committed to “the anthropology of peace” in order to promote a “more nonviolent and peaceful world,” which he believes is “latent in human nature.”49 He is opposed to a “Darwinian emphasis on violence and competition” and recently pronounced that “nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human prehistory and that intrahuman killing was probably rare.”50 He even admits that much of his criticism of Chagnon comes from “an almost automatic reaction against any biological explanation of human behavior, the possibility of biological reductionism, and the associated political implications.”51
Also familiar from the radical science days is an irredentist leftism that considers even moderate and liberal positions reactionary. According to Tierney, Neel “was convinced that democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental support for the weak, violated natural selection”52 and was thus “a eugenic mistake.” But in fact Neel was a political liberal who had protested the diversion of money from poor children to research on aging that he thought would benefit the affluent. He also advocated increasing investment in prenatal care, medical care for children and adolescents, and universal quality education.53 As for Chagnon, Tierney calls him “a militant anti-Communist and free-market advocate.” His evidence? A quotation from Turner (!) stating that Chagnon is “a kind of right-wing character who has a paranoid attitude on people he considers lefty.” To explain how he came by these right-wing leanings, Tierney informs readers that Chagnon grew up in a part of rural Michigan “where differences were not welcomed, where xenophobia, linked to anti-Communist feeling, ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support.” Unaware of the irony, Tierney concludes that Chagnon is an “offspring” of McCarthy who had “received a full portion of [McCarthy’s] spirit.” Chagnon, in fact, is a political moderate who had always voted for Democrats.54
An autobiographical comment in Tierney’s preface is revealing: “I gradually changed from being an observer to being an advocate…. traditional, objective journalism was no longer an option for me.”55 Tierney believes that accounts of Yanomamö violence might be used by invaders to depict them as primitive savages who should be removed or assimilated for their own good. Defaming messengers like Chagnon is, in this view, an ennobling form of social action and a step for the cultural survival of indigenous peoples (despite the fact that Chagnon himself has repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the Yanomamö).
The decimation of native Americans by European disease and genocide over five hundred years is indeed one of the great crimes of history. But it is bizarre to blame the crime on a handful of contemporary scientists struggling to document their lifestyle before it vanishes forever under the pressures of assimilation. And it is a dangerous tactic. Surely indigenous peoples have a right to survive in their lands whether or not they—like all human societies—are prone to violence and warfare. Self-appointed “advocates” who link the survival of native peoples to the doctrine of the Noble Sav
age paint themselves into a terrible corner. When the facts show otherwise they either have inadvertently weakened the case for native rights or must engage in any means necessary to suppress the facts.
No ONE SHOULD be surprised that claims about human nature are controversial. Obviously any such claim should be scrutinized and any logical and empirical flaws pointed out, just as with any scientific hypothesis. But the criticism of the new sciences of human nature went well beyond ordinary scholarly debate. It turned into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel. I think there are two reasons for this illiberal behavior.
One is that in the twentieth century the Blank Slate became a sacred doctrine that, in the minds of its defenders, had to be either avowed with a perfect faith or renounced in every aspect. Only such black-and-white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs. Only if it is theologically necessary for 100 percent of the differences in intelligence to be caused by the environment could anyone be incensed over the mathematical banality that as the proportion of variance due to nongenetic causes goes down, the proportion due to genetic causes must go up. Only if the mind is required to be a scraped tablet could anyone be outraged by the claim that human nature makes us smile, rather than scowl, when we are pleased.