Psychology: In his most provocative book yet, the MIT linguist and ognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, noodles enthusiastically into evolutionary psychology (EP): the modern attempt to formulate a theory of human behaviour, as sculpted by Darwinian natural selection down aeons of evolutionary time.
Impatient of those who associate EP with Social Darwinism and Nazi eugenics, Pinker traces the riotous reception to one of EP's Ur-texts, Edward O. Wilson's book, Socio- biology (1975), which selectively synthesised the literature on social animals from insects to ourselves; and pondered on the evolution of communication, altruism, aggression, sex, parenting and even a "moral" instinct.
Pinker rightly skewers the late Stephen Jay Gould for implying that Wilson, in suggesting adaptive causes behind genocide, was somehow condoning it. Pinker argues that, in avoiding racism and sexism, sociologists and "scholars" have allowed political correctness to dictate a "Blank Slate" doctrine: i.e. that our behaviour is purely a product of our environment. This idea, he say, underpins the "Standard Social Science Model" - another phrase championed by EPs Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
A companion myth, he claims, is the Ghost in the Machine, Descartes's "indivisible mind", the conscious imp in the neural cockpit - which Pinker insists has been debunked by neuroscience. For Pinker, the human mind naturally emerges from the wet circuitry of the brain's 100 billion neurons, linked by 100 trillion connections; mysteriously coded for by 34,000-odd genes, all honed by natural selection.
Certainly, the human brain displays remarkably consistent wiring patterns and modular components - such as Einstein's sizeable pair of inferior parietal lobes for "spatial reasoning and mathematical intuition". But these structures, Pinker surmises, were honed and adapted to ancestral environments, because 10,000 years - the time elapsed since human hunter-gatherers settled down, and agriculture begat civilisation - is simply not long enough for evolution to have rewired us for today's man-made world.
Whilst generalising links between, say, genetics and behaviour, Pinker admits yawning gaps in our knowledge. Still, he cheerfully reports that, with a long version of the D4DR dopamine- receptor gene, one is "more likely to be a thrill-seeker, who jumps out of airplanes, clambers up frozen waterfalls or has sex with strangers".
Pinker notes that critics - and criminal lawyers - have argued that such determinism diminishes peoples' sense of responsibility. Meanwhile, fundamentalist Christians and many US Republicans resist thinking of themselves as "meat puppets". Biochemist Michael Behe's "intelligent design" theory (rather than evolution) is now supported by Leon Kass, George W. Bush's chair of the Council on Bioethics. Scary.
Another myth, says Pinker, is the peaceful Noble Savage - citing the Kung San people of the Kalahari whose murder rate is higher than in US inner cities. War among dwindling "pre-state" cultures is common, he says, citing findings that, in some, 60 per cent of males die in wars.
He also rows in behind the controversial book, A Natural History of Rape (2000), by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer. Pinker contests the PC consensus that rape is a crime of violence, not sexuality - which, while true for the victim, is hardly true for the perpetrator. He marshalls some US statistics: less than one in 500 rape victims is murdered, and only 4 per cent are seriously injured. Roughly 5 per cent of rapes, he says, result in conceptions - among them, 32,000 reported rape- related pregnancies a year in the US.
But if he claims that lab studies of male arousal patterns show turn-off at depictions of sexual violence (not universally true, from my readings), his evolutionary musings on rape are even woollier. If rapes resulted in conception, he reckons, this would propagate the genes of rapists, including a possible genetic propensity to rape. So either rape is a by-product of lust and opportunistic violence, or it is a Darwinian adaptation specifically selected for - as in certain male insects which have an appendage purely dedicated to restraining a female during mating. Indeed, "coerced copulation" is widespread across the entire animal kingdom.
Although Pinker mentions another controversial book, The Bell Curve (on how African-Americans, on average, score lower in IQ tests than whites), maybe it's as well he doesn't go into race - other than remarking that for all our cultural diversity, there is a universal human nature. He cites Noam Chomsky's universal grammar and anthropologist Donald Brown's universals of human behaviour.
Although broadly quite sensible, there's something here to offend all the family, with the odd statement that leaves one's jaw dangling in the wind. Pinker mocks the absurdity of a "soul" entering the fertilised ovum. He declares that GM foods are no more dangerous than "natural" foods; that "gender feminists" don't condemn tribal clitorectomy due to their belief in "cultural relativism"; even that violence can sometimes be justified - say, for torturing a "terrorist" to find out where he planted a bomb.
Some of the psychological categories behind "behavioural genetics" also sound dubious, even though the findings are interesting - that, for example, most adult personality traits are not produced by home environments or parenting styles.
Pinker admits that, unlike physics, the shimmering theories of EP have no deep, deductive principles which could generate testable predictions. One is left doubting his optimism that "the new science of human nature can help lead the way to a realistic, biologically informed humanism".
Despite his own distinction between objective truths and social truths, Pinker breezily intermixes realms of fact, speculation, morals and political philosophy; and finishes off with a risible damnation of (post-)modernist art which has "dispensed with beauty". Indeed, our forgotten origins continue to provide a wonderful void onto which to project some bizarre ideas.
Mic Moroney is a writer and critic
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. By
Steven Pinker. Penguin/Allen Lane, 509pp. £25