More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
tacit
We know that the design of women is based on the design of men because in the second telling of the creation of women Eve was fashioned from the rib of Adam. Human decisions cannot be the inevitable effects of some cause, we may surmise, because God held Adam and Eve responsible for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, implying that they could have chosen otherwise. Women are dominated by men as punishment for Eve’s disobedience, and men and women inherit
Hobbes believed that people could escape this hellish existence only by surrendering their autonomy to a sovereign person or assembly. He called it a leviathan, the Hebrew word for a monstrous sea creature subdued by Yahweh at the dawn of creation.
Indeed, by forcing people to delineate private property for the state to recognize—property they might otherwise have shared—the leviathan creates the very greed and belligerence it is designed to control.
brute
sentient,
Even Walt Disney was inspired by the metaphor. “I think of a child’s mind as a blank book,” he wrote. “During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.” 14
If we turned society into a big Skinner box and controlled behavior deliberately rather than haphazardly, we could eliminate aggression, overpopulation, crowding, pollution, and inequality, and thereby attain utopia. 15 The noble savage became the noble pigeon.
A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. Cognitive science has undermined the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine in another way. People can be forgiven for scoffing at the suggestion that human behavior is “in the genes” or “a product of evolution” in the senses familiar from the animal world. Human acts are not selected from a repertoire of knee-jerk reactions like a fish attacking a red spot or a hen sitting on eggs. Instead, people may worship goddesses, auction kitsch on the Internet, play air guitar, fast to atone for
...more
The fact that any language can be used to convey any proposition, from theological parables to military directives, suggests that all languages are cut from the same cloth.
For example, in English the verb comes before the object (drink beer) and the preposition comes before the noun phrase (from the bottle). In Japanese the object comes before the verb (beer drink) and the noun phrase comes before the preposition, or, more accurately, the postposition (the bottle from). But it is a significant discovery that both languages have verbs, objects, and pre- or postpositions to start with, as opposed to having the countless other conceivable kinds of apparatus that could power a communication system.
(A few anthropologists say there are cultures with no emotions at all!) 20 For example, Catherine Lutz wrote that the Ifaluk (a Micronesian people) do not experience our “anger” but instead undergo an experience they call song. Song is a state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction such as breaking a taboo or acting in a cocky manner. It licenses one to shun, frown at, threaten, or gossip about the offender, though not to attack him physically.
Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.
But cognitive neuroscience is showing that the self, too, is just another network of brain systems.
Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge. (In fact, we are blind to detail outside the fixation point. We quickly move our eyes to whatever looks interesting, and that fools us into thinking that the detail was there all along.)
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus callosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent.
Sigmund Freud immodestly wrote that “humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science three great outrages upon its naïve self-love”: the discovery that our world is not the center of the celestial spheres but rather a speck in a vast universe, the discovery that we were not specially created but instead descended from animals, and the discovery that often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions. He was right about the cumulative impact, but it was cognitive neuroscience rather than psychoanalysis that conclusively
...more
A study of Albert Einstein’s brain revealed that he had large, unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which participate in spatial reasoning and intuitions about number.
Gay men are likely to have a smaller third interstitial nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus, a nucleus known to have a role in sex differences. 39 And convicted murderers and other violent, antisocial people are likely to have a smaller and less active prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs decision making and inhibits impulses.
schizophrenia is highly concordant within pairs of identical twins, who share all their DNA and most of their environment, but far less concordant within pairs of fraternal twins, who share only half their DNA (of the DNA that varies in the population) and most of their environment. The trick question could be asked—and would have the same answer—for virtually every cognitive and emotional disorder or difference ever observed. Autism, dyslexia, language delay, language impairment, learning disability, left-handedness, major depressions, bipolar illness, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sexual
...more
They are similar in verbal, mathematical, and general intelligence, in their degree of life satisfaction, and in personality traits such as introversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. They have similar attitudes toward controversial issues such as the death penalty, religion, and modern music. They resemble each other not just in paper-and-pencil tests but in consequential behavior such as gambling, divorcing, committing crimes, getting into accidents, and watching television. And they boast dozens of shared idiosyncrasies such as giggling
...more
One version of the gene IGF2R is associated with high general intelligence, accounting for as many as four IQ points and two percent of the variation in intelligence among normal individuals. 47
in Stardust Memories he explains to an envious childhood friend that there is a crucial environmental factor as well: “We live in a society that puts a big value on jokes. . . . If I had been an Apache Indian, those guys didn’t need comedians, so I’d be out of work.”
In either case genetics and neuroscience are showing that a heart of darkness cannot always be blamed on parents or society.
Nor is the eye a masterpiece of engineering literally fashioned by a cosmic designer who created humans in his own image. The human eye is uncannily similar to the eyes of other organisms and has quirky vestiges of extinct ancestors, such as a retina that appears to have been installed backwards.
ultimately people crave sex in order to reproduce (because the ultimate cause of sex is reproduction), but proximately they may do everything they can not to reproduce (because the proximate cause of sex is pleasure).
But people often have desires that subvert their proximate well-being, desires that they cannot articulate and that they (and their society) may try unsuccessfully to extirpate. They may covet their neighbor’s spouse, eat themselves into an early grave, explode over minor slights, fail to love their stepchildren, rev up their bodies in response to a stressor that they cannot fight or flee, exhaust themselves keeping up with the Joneses or climbing the corporate ladder, and prefer a sexy and dangerous partner to a plain but dependable one. These personally puzzling drives have a transparent
...more
This shared way of thinking, feeling, and living makes us look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. 63 Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operators, from romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every society ever documented.
troglodytes
As William James put it, just a bit too flamboyantly, “We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.” 67
the proportion of male deaths caused by war in a number of societies for which data are available: 71 The first eight bars, which range from almost 10 percent to almost 60 percent, come from indigenous peoples in South America and New Guinea. The nearly invisible bar at the bottom represents the United States and Europe in the twentieth century and includes the statistics from two world wars.
Moreover, Keeley and others have noted that native peoples are dead serious when they carry out warfare. Many of them make weapons as damaging as their technology permits, exterminate their enemies when they can get away with it, and enhance the experience by torturing captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting on enemy flesh.
Donald Brown includes conflict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence as human universals.
The robot is observing a person opening a glass jar. The person approaches the robot and places the jar on a table near the robot. The person rubs his hands together and then sets himself to removing the lid from the jar. He grasps the glass jar in one hand and the lid in the other and begins to unscrew the lid by turning it counter-clockwise. While he is opening the jar, he pauses to wipe his brow, and glances at the robot to see what it is doing. He then resumes opening the jar. The robot then attempts to imitate the action. [But] which parts of the action to be imitated are important (such
...more
We should understand culture, according to the cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber, as the epidemiology of mental representations: the spread of ideas and practices from person to person. 18 Many scientists now use the mathematical tools of epidemiology (how diseases spread) or of population biology (how genes and organisms spread) to model the evolution of culture.
CULTURE, THEN, IS a pool of technological and social innovations that people accumulate to help them live their lives, not a collection of arbitrary roles and symbols that happen to befall them.
The ancestors of the Hasidic Jews did not wear black coats and fur-lined hats in Levantine deserts, nor did the Plains Indians ride horses before the arrival of the Europeans. National cuisines, too, have shallow roots. Potatoes in Ireland, paprika in Hungary, tomatoes in Italy, hot chile peppers in India and China, and cassava in Africa come from New World plants, and were brought to their “traditional” homes in the centuries after the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. 21
Second, the 34,000 genes take up only about 3 percent of the human genome. The rest consists of DNA that does not code for protein and that used to be dismissed as “junk.” But as one biologist recently put it, “The term ‘junk DNA’ is a reflection of our ignorance.” 11 The size, placement, and content of the noncoding DNA can have dramatic effects on the way that nearby genes are activated to make proteins. Information in the billions of bases in the noncoding regions of the genome is part of the specification of a human being, above and beyond the information contained in the 34,000 genes.
Indeed, demonstrations of the plasticity of the brain are less radical than they first appear: the supposedly plastic regions of cortex are doing pretty much the same thing they would have been doing if they had never been altered. And the most recent discoveries on brain development have refuted the idea that the brain is largely plastic.
And the cortex itself is not the entire brain. Tucked beneath the cortex are other brain organs that drive important parts of human nature. They include the hippocampus, which consolidates memory and supports mental maps, the amygdala, which colors experience with certain emotions, and the hypothalamus, which originates sexual desire and other appetites.
But most proposals in evolutionary psychology are about drives like fear, sex, love, and aggression, which reside largely in subcortical circuitry. More generally, on anyone’s theory an innately shaped human ability would have to be implemented in a network of cortical and subcortical areas, not in a single patch of sensory cortex.
Like the body, the brain must use feedback circuits to shape itself into a working system. This is especially true in the sensory areas, which have to cope with growing sense organs. For that reason alone we would expect the activity of the brain to play a role in its own development, even if its end state, like those of the femur and the eyeball, is in some sense genetically specified. How this happens is still largely a mystery, but we know that patterns of neural stimulation can trigger the expression of a gene and that one gene can trigger many others.
in this case the genome really does use a different gene for each axon when wiring them into their respective places in the brain, a thousand genes in all. It economizes on genes in a remarkable way. The protein produced by each gene is used twice: once in the nose, as a receptor to detect an airborne chemical, and a second time in the brain, as a probe at the end of the corresponding axon to direct it to its proper spot in the olfactory bulb. 51
Neuroanatomists have long known that there are as many fibers bringing information down into the visual cortex from other brain areas as there are bringing information up from the eyes.
What exactly do “determinism” and “reductionism” mean? In the precise sense in which mathematicians use the word, a “deterministic” system is one whose states are caused by prior states with absolute certainty, rather than probabilistically.
psychopaths, who are definitely not “good and kind people,” make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. 14 But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as “evil and destructive,” it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it “evil.”
In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered . . ., and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. . . . Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise. 18 The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a stand in favor of genocide!
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect humans.
THE GHOST IN the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left.
