The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

The Ghost in the Machine, like the Noble Savage, arose in part as a reaction to Hobbes.

More sinisterly, we find Mao Zedong justifying his radical social engineering by saying, “It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.

The doctrine of Social Darwinism (or, as it ought to be called, Social Spencerism, for Darwin wanted no part of it) attracted such unsurprising spokesmen as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.3 Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton had suggested that human evolution should be given a helping hand by discouraging the less fit from breeding, a policy he called eugenics.4 Within a few decades laws were passed that called for the involuntary sterilization of delinquents and the “feebleminded” in Canada, the Scandinavian countries, thirty American states, and, ominously, Germany. The Nazis’ ideology of inferior races was later used to justify the murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals.

and the linguist Noam Chomsky, who believes that the word “learning” is misleading and we should say that children “grow” language instead.10

Even a topic as innocuous as left-handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications, are victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties. They were soon showered with abuse—including the threat of a lawsuit, numerous death threats, and a ban on the topic in a scholarly journal—from enraged lefthanders and their advocates.2

Men have a higher tolerance for pain and a greater willingness to risk life and limb for status, attention, and other dubious rewards. The Darwin Awards, given annually to “the individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion,” almost always go to men. Recent honorees include the man who squashed himself under a Coke machine after tipping it forward to get a free can, three men who competed over who could stomp the hardest on an antitank mine, and the would-be pilot who tied weather balloons to his lawn chair, shot two miles into the air, and drifted out to sea (earning just an Honorable Mention because he was rescued by helicopter).

The Natural History of Rape has already suffered the worst possible fate for a popular science book. Like The Descent of Man and The Bell Curve, it has become an ideological touchstone. People who wish to demonstrate their sympathy for rape victims and women in general have already learned that they must dismiss this book as sexist, reactionary pseudo-science. News stories that treat the book as a symptom of chauvinist cultural decay have greatly outnumbered reviews that assess it as science. Viewed sociologically, turning books into ideological touchstones can be useful. People can efficiently sort themselves out into like-minded cliques without bothering to read or think. However, there can be more to human discourse than ideological self-advertisement.

What about the more basic question of whether the motives of rapists include sex? The gender-feminist argument that they do not points to the rapists who target older, infertile women, those who suffer from sexual dysfunction during the rape, those who coerce nonreproductive sexual acts, and those who use a condom. The argument is unconvincing for two reasons. First, these examples make up a minority of rapes, so the argument could be turned around to show that most rapes do have a sexual motive. And all these phenomena occur with consensual sex, too, so the argument leads to the absurdity that sex itself has nothing to do with sex. And date rape is a particularly problematic case for the not-sex theory. Most people agree that women have the right to say no at any point during sexual activity, and that if the man persists he is a rapist—but should we also believe that his motive has instantaneously changed from wanting sex to oppressing women?

On the other side there is an impressive body of evidence (reviewed more thoroughly by the legal scholar Owen Jones than by Thornhill and Palmer) that the motives for rape overlap with the motives for sex:

• Coerced copulation is widespread among species in the animal kingdom, suggesting that it is not selected against and may sometimes be selected for. It is found in many species of insects, birds, and mammals, including our relatives the orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. • Rape is found in all human societies. • Rapists generally apply as much force as is needed to coerce the victim into sex. They rarely inflict a serious or fatal injury, which would preclude conception and birth. Only 4 percent of rape victims sustain serious injuries, and fewer than one in five hundred is murdered. • Victims of rape are mostly in the peak reproductive years for women, between thirteen and thirty-five, with a mean in most data sets of twenty-four. Though many rape victims are classified as children (under the age of sixteen), most of these are adolescents, with a median age of fourteen. The age distribution is very different from that of victims of other violent crimes, and is the opposite of what would happen if

rape victims were picked for their physical vulnerability or by their likelihood of holding positions of power. • Victims of rape are more traumatized when the rape can result in a conception. It is most psychologically painful for women in their fertile years, and for victims of forced intercourse as opposed to other forms of rape. • Rapists are not demographically representative of the male gender. They are overwhelmingly young men, the age of the most intense sexual competitiveness. The young males who allegedly have been “socialized” to rape mysteriously lose that socialization as they get older. • Though most rapes do not result in conception, many do. About 5 percent of rape victims of reproductive age become pregnant, resulting in more than 32,000 rape-related pregnancies in the United States each year. (That is why abortion in the case of rape is a significant issue.) The proportion would have been even higher in prehistory, when women did not use long-term contraception.97 Brownmiller wrote that biological theories of rape are “fanciful” because “in terms of reproductive strategy, the hit or miss ejaculations of a single-strike rapist are a form of Russian roulette compared to ongoing consensual mating.”98 But ongoing consensual mating is not an option for every male, and dispositions that resulted in hit-or-miss sex could be evolutionarily more successful than dispositions that resulted in no sex at all. Natural selection can operate effectively with small reprod...

For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, “Rape is a crime of violence but not sex.” This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from the nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class…. These girls say, “Well, I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy’s room without anything happening.” And I say, “Oh, really? And when you drive your car to New York City, do you leave your keys on the hood?” My point is that if your car is stolen after you do something like that, yes, the police should pursue the thief and he should be punished. But at the same time, the police—and I—have the right to say to you, “You stupid idiot, what the hell were you thinking?

Similarly, McElroy points out the illogic of arguments like Koss’s that women should not be given practical advice that “infringes more on women’s liberties than men’s”: The fact that women are vulnerable to attack means we cannot have it all. We cannot walk at night across an unlit campus or down a back alley, without incurring real danger. These are things every woman should be able to do, but “shoulds” belong in a Utopian world. They belong in a world where you drop your wallet in a crowd and have it returned, complete with credit cards and cash. A world in which unlocked Porsches are parked in the inner city. And children can be left unattended in the park. This is not the reality that confronts and confines us.

Children

“THE NATURE-NURTURE DEBATE is over.” So begins a recent article with a title—”Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean”—as audacious as its opening sentence.1 The nature-nurture debate is, of course, far from over when it comes to identifying the endowment shared by all human beings and understanding how it allows us to learn, which is the main topic of the preceding chapters. But when it comes to the question of what makes people within the mainstream of a society different from one another—whether they are smarter or duller, nicer or nastier, bolder or shyer—the nature-nurture debate, as it has been played out for millennia, really is over, or ought to be.

In announcing that the nature-nurture debate is over, the psychologist Eric Turkheimer was not just using the traditional mule-trainer’s technique of getting his subjects’ attention, namely whacking them over the head with a two-by-four. He was summarizing a body of empirical results that are unusually robust by the standards of psychology. They have been replicated in many studies, several countries, and over four decades. As the samples grew (often to many thousands)...

The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to grips with them, and most intellectuals do not understand them, even when they have been explained in the cover stories of newsmagazines. It is not because the laws are abstruse: each can be stated in a sentence, without mathematical paraphernalia. Rather, it is because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate is so ...

Here are the three laws: • The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable. • The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes. • The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human beha...

THE FIRST LAW: All human behavioral traits are heritable.

I once watched an interview in which Marlon Brando was asked about the childhood influences that made him an actor. He replied that identical twins separated at birth may both use the same hair tonic, smoke the same brand of cigarettes, vacation on the same beach, and so on. The interviewer, Connie Chung, pretended to snore as if she were sitting through a boring lecture, not realizing that he was answering her question—or, more accurately, explaining why he couldn’t answer it. As long as the heritability of talents and tastes is not zero, none of us has any way of knowing whether a trait has been influenced by our genes, our childhood experiences, both, or neither.

THE SECOND LAW: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.

THE THIRD LAW: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.