Word: pinkering
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...think this compromise has stopped the arguments, think again. Scientists and philosophers are still getting steamed up over the issue, but now they're fighting over percentages, over how much of human character is shaped by genes and how much by environment. And according to Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we continue to give far too much credit to the latter. In a series of articles, a lecture tour and especially in a new book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking), Pinker argues that ignorance, prejudice and political correctness...
Anyone who has read Pinker's earlier books--including How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct--will rightly guess that his latest effort is similarly sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, richly footnoted and fun to read. It's also highly persuasive. The view that environment is paramount began, he says, with the philosophers of the Enlightenment: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rene Descartes and John Stuart Mill. And it was reinforced in the 1950s by Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, who said that all human behavior was simply a set of conditioned responses...
...backlash was understandable, says Pinker. Once you suggest that human nature is in any way hardwired, it's easier for the unscrupulous to write off entire groups as genetically inferior--as the Nazis did with Jews, Poles, Gypsies and gays. If have-nots are genetically lacking in drive or intelligence or ambition, what's the point of fighting poverty...
...This was Gould at his best--profundity with a light touch, made all the more poignant because in 1982 he survived a nasty cancer. Steve Gould cheated death, at least for a while, and while he did, he enriched our appreciation of life in all its manifestations. --By Steven Pinker...
...Eulogy By STEPHEN PINKER...