Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Standard Equipment 45ture. Biology endows humans with the five senses, a few drives likehunger and fear, and a general capacity to learn. But biological evolution,according to the SSSM, has been superseded by cultural evolution. Cultureis an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itselfby setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarilyfrom society to society. Even the reformers of the SSSM have acceptedits framing of the issues. Biology is "just as important as" culture, say thereformers; biology imposes "constraints" on behavior, and all behavior isa mixture of the two.The SSSM not only has become an intellectual orthodoxy but hasacquired a moral authority. When sociobiologists first began to challengeit, they met with a ferocity that is unusual even by the standards of academicinvective. The biologist E. O. Wilson was doused with a pitcher ofice water at a scientific convention, and students yelled for his dismissalover bullhorns and put up posters urging people to bring noisemakers tohis lectures. Angry manifestos and book-length denunciations were publishedby organizations with names like Science for the People and TheCampaign Against Racism, IQ, and the Class Society. In Not in OurGenes, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin dropped innuendosabout Donald Symons' sex life and doctored a defensible passageof Richard Dawkins' into an insane one. (Dawkins said of the genes,"They created us, body and mind"; the authors have quoted it repeatedlyas "They control us, body and mind.") When Scientific American ran anarticle on behavior genetics (studies of twins, families, and adoptees),they entitled it "Eugenics Revisited," an allusion to the discredited movementto improve the human genetic stock. When the magazine coveredevolutionary psychology, they called the article "The New Social Darwinists,"an allusion to the nineteenth-century movement that justifiedsocial inequality as part of the wisdom of nature. Even one of sociobiology'sdistinguished practitioners, the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy,said, "I question whether sociobiology should be taught at the highschool level, or even the undergraduate level. . . . The whole message ofsociobiology is oriented toward the success of the individual. It's Machiavellian,and unless a student has a moral framework already in place, wecould be producing social monsters by teaching this. It really fits in verynicely with the yuppie 'me first' ethos."Entire scholarly societies joined in the fun, passing votes on empiricalissues that one might have thought would be hashed out in the lab andthe field. Margaret Mead's portrayal of an idyllic, egalitarian Samoa was