Biological determinism is thriving today: I see it in the assertion of researchers such as the anthropologist Richard Wrangham of Harvard University that the roots of human warfare reach back all the way to our common ancestry with chimpanzees. In the claim of scientists such as Rose McDermott of Brown University that certain people are especially susceptible to violent aggression because they carry a " warrior gene.
In the insistence of the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and neuroscientist Sam Harris that free will is an illusion because our "choices" are actually all predetermined by neural processes taking place below the level of our awareness.
In the contention of James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, that the problems of sub-Saharan Africa reflect blacks' innate inferiority. In the excoriation of many modern researchers of courageous anti-determinists such as Gould and Margaret Mead.
Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally. If you doubt me on this point, read Mismeasure , which, even discounting the chapter on Morton, abounds in evidence of how science can become an instrument of malignant ideologies. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American. Follow John Horgan on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.
Create your free account or Sign in to continue. The accompanying caption reads;. A morphing demonstration of human evolution shows the transformation from a small lemur, up the evolutionary ladder into a human: seen here as legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
The author of the actual article, Shankar Vedantam, makes an effort to put Gould in proper context at the end of the piece;. Come to think of it, the late Stephen Jay Gould might have been upset with the above illustration.
Contrary to the popular imagination, evolution is not a linear process that culminates in the triumphal ascent of humans at the top of the genetic heap.
The process is analogous to a bush, where twigs and leaves push out in every direction. I know little of the process by which little widgets are created to be tacked onto articles, but the animation by Patterson Clark does little more than confuse the content of the article. It forces Vedantam to take extra time to explain how Gould would not be at all pleased with the animation featuring a straight line of grossly incorrect transmutations ending with his picture.
What otherwise could have been a fair piece of science journalism becomes a tangled mess, yet another example of how the mass media is failing to accurately and effectively communicate science. The problem does not lie solely with the current state of science journalism, though.
Many people recognize the names Einstein, Newton, and Darwin, but outside of repackaged textbook cardboard how many people can really say they know anything about what such scientists thought? New, impoverished histories are created that end up being regurgitated to successive generations.
It is perhaps fitting that I should be moved to express such sentiments on the day after the anniversary of T. Expedience and our desire for cherished stories to really be true often override the truth, and the struggle against whiggish history is constant. All rights reserved. Bruce R. Fenton: The Forgotten Exodus, A New Theory on Human Evolution: What happens when paleoanthropologists discover that their only candidate for a human ancestor in Africa is shown to be invalid by both genetic investigations and comparative fossil studies?
We might imagine that the collapse of a scientific paradigm Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson, a Related Articles. We Built These Bodies: Changing the human body, one invention at a time. Related categories Skip carousel.
Oeijord No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher. Stephen Jay Gould The term sociobiology Sociobiology: The New Synthesis Wilson created a field The Sociobiology Study Group But the horse kicked back Neo-Lysenkoism Gould had no alternative research program to offer The reemergence of human sociobiology under a new name Gould continued to attack Gould on genetic determinism Gould on panadaptationism Gould on unfalsifiable hypotheses Gould on ultimate explanations Gould on the vision of evolutionary psychology Gould—the psychic Gould on the human mind The Mismeasure of Man , Presentist Gould is a fraud Cyril Burt was right and honest, Gould was wrong and dishonest Data selection Gould was hopelessly out of date Contradictory claims Pathological nay-saying?
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors A victory for anti-racism and anti-sexism Instincts are autonomous, specialized learners, situationally triggered Human instincts are open programs But what is learning? Oskar and Jack explain our situational instincts Adoption proves that instincts are situational Psychology is a branch of biology Sensory receptors and motor neurons Specialized, content-dependent neuropathways The argument from the poverty of the input Adaptations, by-products, and noise Just the tip of the iceberg A basic principle A content-rich system There is no split We have more instincts than other species Mechanisms that cause the learning Interaction or situationality?
A meaningless question The new heritability coefficient The heritability coefficient rises Talent Consciousness is not holistic Smaller and smaller agents The behavior of babies Instinctual scientists Kids respond differently Not genetically identical Parallel lives MZ twins in the same pair do not necessarily have the same genetic diseases Enormous importance Identical behavior Identical choices Eat the same amount of food They kept themselves exceptionally clean and tidy Identical twins tell from TV documentaries : Identical wills Disproves biological determinism A gene for behavior X To discover a gene Behavior is controlled by instincts, not by genes We can control actions Situational and independent Certain instincts seem to hang together Creative stupidity and able misfits Perception and memory are instinctual Language and thinking are independent Why genetic independence?
The critical periods Unused neurons may die off To learn throughout life Correlation contradicts environmentalism How about peers? The restorative power Phenotypic plasticity is genetic Inbreeding depression Create their own cultures You ask the impossible The flawed Flynn Effekt Caused by gene damage The genetic catastrophe A false victory for environmentalism Evolution would be impossible Genetically different behavior The same parts The instincts of the great apes Animal brains including human brains Non-human intelligence Extraordinary people Innate memory Innate caculator Innate creativity Innate capacity for language and mathematics Innate musicality Innate drawing Numerous innate special modular intelligences The genetics of genius Fight mind, is difficult An instinct is active or inactive The explanatory power The concept of instinct is totally clear Unscientific avoidance Abnormal instincts Tabula rasa Franz Joseph Gall Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers Wallace and Darwin The period between roughly and The contemporary controversy The continuity of man and animals Francis Galton John Hughlings Jackson William James, Sigmund Freud The term evolutionary psychology Why behaviorism broke down Crazy claims Margaret Mead Lysenkoism and Neo-Lysenkoism The Modern Synthesis Mendel, Watson, Crick Human ethology and human sociobiology John Maynard Smith Hamilton George C.
Williams Richard Dawkins Paul McLean Edward O. Wilson The best book Competing syntheses The Michigan group Desmond John Morris The development of evolutionary psychology EP Leda Cosmides and John Tooby Gould strongly attacked EP Genes, Mind and Culture Pinker, Wright, and Buss Hamer, Plomin Timothy Perper Brain atlas maps the human mind The prerequisites Environmental determinism has relaxed Those who never understand They were attacking everything They refuted the mot successful research stratagem Discourteous language Total war Not even a reasoned discussion was possible A book-burning proposal It had to be imported They did not provide any alternative ideas He was attacking a straw man Dangerous conclusions Illogical science Inferring ought from is They objected to natural selection Contradicted Ill chosen examples Steven Pinker on spandrels A good empirical fit Fascinating discoveries Gould occupied a rather curious position Untalented accusations The hypothesis of punctuated equilibria Ernst Mayr created the theory Misunderstanding the selfish gene They communicated nothing Karl Marx and Margaret Mead The tragic history of environmentalism Nature via Nurture, or… Once again: An instinct has two parts Once again: More learning causes… Once again: We can quantify.
Refusing to buy into the rhetoric The instinct of Us and Them Quoted Wilson out of context They misused a film They misused a symposium Gould misused Plato A normal situation They had not read the literature A false identification Illogical moral guilt The troublesome Lewontin Planters and weeders Wishful and odd thinking LSE was rather embarrassed In the UK Social sociobiologists The Man and Beast conferences A collection of lies Attack on adaptationism Politically motivated attack Gould was an adaptationist until !
Gradual change or discontinuous change? The unit of selection Constraints The levels of selection Reading of society into human nature Behavioral flexibility Learning and genetic determinism
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