Ms. Siv

Why the nature-nurture debate wont go away - Steven Pinker
The Boston Globe, 13 Oct 2002.

Excerpts ....

When the British Educator Richard Mulcaster wrote in 1582 that ''Nature makes the boy toward, nurture sees him forward,'' he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since. People's beliefs about the roles of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics. Do adolescents engage in violence and substance abuse because of the way their parents treated them as toddlers? Are people inherently selfish and aggressive, which would justify a market economy and a strong police, or could they become peaceable and cooperative, allowing the state to wither and a spontaneous socialism to blossom? Is there a universal aesthetic that allows great art to transcend time and place, or are people's tastes determined by their era and culture? With so much at stake, it is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke such strong feelings. .....

By now most thinking people have come to distrust any radical who would seem to say that the mind is a blank slate that is filled entirely by its environment, or that genes control our behavior like a player piano. Many scientists, particularly those who don't study humans, have gone further and expressed the hope that the nature-nurture debate will simply go away. Surely, they say, all behavior emerges from an inextricable interaction between heredity and environment during development. Trying to distinguish them can only stifle productive research and lead to sterile polemics.
But moderation, like all things, can be taken to extremes. The belief that it's simplistic to distinguish nature and nurture is itself simplistic. The contributions of this opposition to our understanding of mind and society are far from obvious, and many supposedly "reasonable" compromises turn out, under closer scrutiny, to be anything but. .....

Let's consider some of the ''reasonable'' beliefs of the radical moderates.

Reasonable Belief No. 1 : No one believes in the extreme ''nurture'' position that the mind is a blank slate. .........

Reasonable Belief No. 2 : For every question about nature and nurture, the correct answer is ''Some of each.'' ........

Reasonable Belief No. 3 : Disentangling nature and nurture is a hopeless task, so we shouldn't even try. ..............

The human brain has been called the most complex object in the known universe. No doubt many hypotheses that pit nature against nurture as a dichotomy, or that fail to distinguish the ways in which they might interact, will turn out to be simplistic or wrong. But that complexity does not mean we should fuzz up the issues by saying that it's all just too complicated to think about, or that some hypotheses should be treated a priori as necessarily true, necessarily false, or too dangerous to mention. As with other complex phenomena like inflation, cancer, and global warming, when it comes to the development of a human being we have no choice but to try to disentangle the causes.

For complete article (I have only presented a very small part of it), please go to
&lt; <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/boston_globe_ideas_section_sibl.html" target="_blank">http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/boston_globe_ideas_section_sibl.html</a> &gt;

- Sivakami.

abe smith

Pinker made a lot of wildly-unsupported generalizations in that article, some of which have been called in the december issue of DISCOVER's letters-column about his article. ("The Blank Slate") Members here of EyeEye wd profit from reading his article & sharpening their wits's claws on his assertions.

Vorkosigan

Where are these wild assertions and the steady replies? Are they accessible to Netizens?

Vorkosigan

ps418

I have yet to see a review of TBS which documents any 'wildly-unsupported' claims on the part of Pinker. In fact, the reviews have thus far been overwhelmingly positive. You can read dozens of reviews and articles on Pinker's book on <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate.html" target="_blank">the book's homepage.</a>

Patrick