The Evolutionary War
Published: October 13, 2002
(Page 2 of 2)
Many battles of the science wars that Pinker re-enacts were fought over the degree of genetic determination of intelligence. He contends that individual differences in intelligence have a strong genetic component, though he is vague about how strong, citing a wide range of values. He does allow that most intellectual differences among races are probably due to unequal experience, but maintains that cognitive traits distinguishing the sexes well up from the genes. In his discussions of intelligence, two salient questions remain unexplored: Is intelligence a single trait that can be simply measured? And, if we could gauge it reliably, can we sensibly parcel out its genetic and experiential components? Any test calibrated on Newton's genius would surely consign Darwin to the country parsonage he once contemplated. While techniques exist for estimating the heritable component of differences in intelligence, geneticists like Lewontin conclude that only the befuddled would attempt this. Gene-environment interaction is dynamic, and the components only artificially separable. The experience that evoked Darwin's genius would merely have made Newton seasick. Genes count, but differently in different environments. Moreover, the brain's neural construction is far too complex to be genetically preplanned in any detail; so early experience and chance must sculpture the synaptic connections in the developing infant. Recent studies indicate that young children whose mothers constantly talk to them show marked improvements in grammar and vocabulary later on, while children deprived of the experience of language in early years never learn to use it adequately despite any program sealed in their genes.
Pinker sometimes mentions objections like these, but flicks them away or drowns out their significance in the monotone mantra of the genes. He focuses on ''dirty tricks'' and political biases of leftish scientists who reject his genetic version of human nature. He charges Lewontin with using a ''doctored'' quotation from an opponent (careless, inconsequential misquotation, it seems to me) and derides Gould's Marxism -- which most biologists take to be faux Marxism that merely adds rhetorical flourish to serious ideas. He is somewhat less irritated by neoconservatives like Irving Kristol, Leon Kass and Tom Wolfe, since their metaphysics has no sting.
Pinker's fundamental argument depends on theoretical suppositions that require closer inspection, but he confidently rests on this unstable platform what he considers the prescient conceptions of the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Milton Friedman and Richard Posner. Thus Hobbes believed that cooperative impulses of individuals would succumb to innate aggressiveness and selfishness were not those softer inclinations steeled by the deterrent force of the state. And today free markets have turned private vices into public virtues. Pinker urges that an appreciation of a genetically fixed human nature will serve even in the arts, exposing there the bareness of both the modernist and the postmodern aesthetic. (Yeats, Eliot and Borges, it seems, are missing from reading lists at M.I.T.) With the triumph of evolutionary theory, Pinker sees a new scientific, cultural and political alignment near, one that accepts a more constrained conception of human nature and adopts corresponding social and economic policies, but does not neglect the genetically less endowed -- in short, a compassionate conservatism.
Drawing (Ray Bartkus)