As for the the Lancet cover, I initially read that as meaning that racism is NOT confined to white majority societies, but has been found in every race all over the globe throughout history.
This is because all races are equally human, subject to human failings.
In this issue, however, I found that all the articles about racism dealt only with racism directed against non-white peoples in white majority countries. There was not a single article dealing with racism against minority groups in African or Asian countries - this despite the fact that racism is not confined to white majority countries, but may be found wherever there are humans.
This may be simple selection bias. The Lancet is a UK, English language publication and so articles dealing with medical issues originating in other, non English speaking nations maye be excluded by selection bias.
The irony here is that this is in itself a form of racist exclusion...
Othering, such as slavery and sale of humans, is historically universal in all Homo sapiens sapiens, even America's beloved First Nations. Tribes living in lands of plenty were less so inclined, and tribes living in highly competitive areas with more limited resources practised it more.
The word "slave" actually comes from the word "Slav", for Slavic peoples. Slavic tribes were often raided and then enslaved by the more technologically advanced societies on the other side of the Black Sea. Also, as you mention, lost in history is the fact that native North American tribes routinely enslaved one another. Cherokee tribes bought and held black slaves from early white settlers.
Do the secret MDs realize that it is precisely because they, and others, do not speak out that the narrative marches on?
That they are killing any miniscule amount of trust that is left in their profession and our "health" system? Sorry, but no patience or empathy left for them.
I do wish more docs (more people in general!) would speak out. But I'm sympathetic to why they don't . People are scared. I do agree with the trope that "Courage is contagious". It's why I speak out again and again. I hope that others (whether they agree with me or not) will be emboldened to speak their minds.
I'm not so much concerned about the fear of speaking out, as the initial error of total disregard for Pandemic Preparedness Plans. Is "fear" really responsible for scientists to forget the very fundamentals? I dunno. I find it hard to digest.
But not a single one has explained WHY they trashed Pandemic Preparedness Plans, written by experts, by their colleagues, over decades, based on evidence, specifically for such situations.
WHY ? I know they claim fear... but I'd like to hear ONE of them say they were UNINFORMED, that they had no idea that Pandemic Preparedness Plans existed.
I want to hear them say they were ijiots, that they SHOULD have read the damned Pandemic Preparedness Plans. These plans all stated NO to lockdowns and mandates.
I feel like statistics training should be a mandatory course for all citizens, otherwise our voting is complete nonsense.
Those scientists were practising Preference Falsification, there was a real fear driving their behaviour. I do not understand how scientists can be feeling such fear today.
Forgive me, I forgot the specific one that seems the most kurfuffle between feminists and MRAs. "Family". Nearly every Conservative and self-identified "heterodox thinker" claims it is "biology" driving "family" and that we are "all meant to reproduce"... cuz "biology".
But the fact is that nuclear family is NOT the DNA way for Homo sapiens. Nuclear families have only been happening for a few thousand years. Before that, humans ate as groups, groomed as groups, slept as groups, groomed as groups. Knowledge of paternity only became a thing once we were thoroughly sedentarised. As for the "we all are driven to reproduce" that is NOT true of all species, or all apes. (sure, it depends how you define 'drive', but in the actual outcomes). Not 100% of apes mate, a small percentage of wolves mate, not all ungulates mate. There is sexual selection at play, and mating is simply not everyone's destiny, as is so frequently claimed in some circles.
So "family", the most fundamental unit of the modern existence, is a social construct, as evidenced by evolution. Some days I swear humans want to be different species, like crows, or like bees. ;)
I want to make a clarification regarding blank slatism. Blank slatism is wrongly used as a slur in many conversations
When the world debunked Lamarckism, that was not a 100% abandoning of "acquired" traits. And it is necessary to scarequote that. When we select for traits an animal domestication, we are in *appearance* doing that. When we SELECT niceness in a dog and breed it for that character trait, it has the appearance of Lamarckism. The trait of niceness becomes more and more solidified with each generation (accompanied by a slew of undesired traits).
So we CAN see how human intervention, human beliefs CAN affect genetics... through breeding, over many many generations.
Society CAN affect genetics. We must think of how that is scientifically true, WITHOUT it being Lamarckism.
Another way society CAN affect genetics is medicine. In a natural world without modern medical intervention, the weakest individuals would either fail to reach reproductive age, either fail to reproduce for other reasons, or be stupid/unlucky and die of all sorts of things.
Society breeds pets and livestock for specific traits, usually, this societal intervention onto genetics renders these animals LESS fit. Release them into the wild, and they almost instantly die.
Society (medicine) has also had an effect on human genetics AND human behaviours. Since infants that should have died don't die, they get to breed. Since ijiotic and mentally unfit adults are maintained by medicine and excessive empathy, their mental state gets to breed. Since most congenital illnesses (poor biological fitness) no longer lead to death, they go on to breed. Human society has been selecting for unfitness. And now, as wokeism progresses through all layers of society, we are more and more selecting for un-fitness. If City folk in Western nations were released into the wild, likely 90% of us would die instantly. Our brains are shrinking, our dentition is worsening, many unfitness traits are progressing, because empathy is anti-fitness.
A further impact of society onto biology are religions. Humans need vitamin D. Cultures that cover up more, like religious veiling, have more vitamin D deficiency. Cultures that don't allow women to travel/drive see women's brains develop with less spatial processing capacity, visible in brain scans. Society has consequences on biology, both genetically and generationally.
The term "blank slatism" claims zero societal effects, it is a term used not in scientific discussions but by armchair scientism-ists to speak against societal effects. Honestly, scientists should not use the term as it is completely disingenuous.
Otherwise love the article. My studies were in evolutionary biology, focused on herpetology, and my profs constantly correctly hammered home that "adaptations" did not drive evolution, that evolution is a consequence of random mutations, which then have to prove themselves in nature to demonstrate or not fitness, and I totally agree with that in nature, with caveats for example of predators who LEARN new hunting techniques which increase their breeding fitness, and birds who learn their mating songs which affects their fitness to reproduce.
Thanks for the clarification, Tracy. Getting into the details of how Medelian genetics works was beyond the scope of this article. Of course social factors can influence genetics over generations, but Lysenko and his ilk actually believed that if, for example, you took a bean seed and exposed it to extreme cold before planting, the resulting offspring would have "learned" to be cold tolerant. As for modern medicine and empathy saving the weak, I think there is much to be said for the old maxim that the worth of a society can be judged by how well it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. While I agree that we should try to eliminate things like financial and social disincentives for high-functioning people to have families, and I agree that empathy can go too far (that's a whole other Substack!) we have to be careful not to try to play God and to remember that one of the bases (and strengths) of Western civilization is the concept that ALL humans contain a spark of the divine. The Nazi medical establishment was able to justify the horrors of what it did by first convincing itself that its responsibility was to "the people," i.e., to the collective, rather than to individual human patients and that therefore they were doing their duty by carrying out their program of eugenics. It started with eliminating the "feeble-minded" and those with serious psychiatric illness--to eliminate them from the gene pool and free up resources for the healthy-- and proceeded down a long and slippery slope to the Holocaust.
Philosophically speaking, forcing billions to live is not very different than forcing billions to die. I rather think a middle less interventionist way would be biologically ideal. ;)
You say the term "blank slatism" claims zero societal effects. That is a straw-man argument, and something I've never heard anyone say. The arguments against "blank-slatism" are against the idea that there are zero GENETIC effects. ie: blank-slatism is the idea that anyone can grow up to be Einstein or Sidney Crosby if we put them in the right environment with the right resources and proper incentives.
Nature or nurture is the eternal question. And the eternal answer is "a bit of both". For certain things (skin colour) nurture counts for nothing. For other things (height) it counts for a fair amount (starve a kid, they end up short even if they have genes to be tall). For some things (occupation as an adult), your culture and social milieu counts for a great deal.
When people like me criticize "blank slatism" we are criticizing the idea that anyone can become anything if we just push them hard enough. I believe humans have a nature in general, and that we are all born with a.unique "nature" on top of that. Society moulds us, but doesn't create us from scratch.
Hi Chris. It's rather the flip side of the same coin. And it's always TWO separate discussions, material and behaviour. I waste quite a bit of time arguing with MRA types online. They usually argue that ALL behaviour is "biological", in order to "counter" the strawman claim that feminism argues that all behaviour is social. I've been in feminism a few decades, and NEVER heard real feminists claim zero behaviour is genetic. (Feminist arguments are never about material questions, only about the behavioural questions)
Now of course, any person can claim they're anything they want to claim. So if some MRA says: look at this "female blank slater", well, sure, anyone can think anything, doesn't mean it's part of the main way of thinking in the field.
My education is biology, with a focus on evolution in my MSc and physiology for my BSc but my work is palaeobiology. So I come at this from a genetic pre-civilisational perspective. Trying to touch on the genetic fundamentals and weed out the societal influences.
As a baseline, I find it useful to *approximate* at this baseline:
-At the material level (anatomy, physiology, performance, etc) it's around 9:1 DNA:Environment
-At the human behaviours level, it's closer to the reverse 1:9 DNA:Environment ratio.
(we could say 8:2, 7:3, but really, each and every behaviour one analyses is on a spectrum. The important thing to remember is that other than breastfeeding, there are no valid biology articles demonstrating that such and such behaviours are genetic. They try and try to demonstrate that homosexuality is genetic. They fail over and over and over again. And the field that drives this nonsense is the pseudoscientific field of Evo Psych which doesn't live in university biology departments but in psychology or psychiatry departments, which are not renowned for practising the scientific method. ;)
(MRAs like GS and JP, yes, they re the definition of MRAs, argue that human behaviour is mostly, if not entirely, genetic. THAT is the point actual feminists debate MRAs on, behaviour)
Mostly, people who haven't actually studied biology confuse the expressions: "biological vs societal" and "Nature vs Nurture", which complicates lay debates.
We could make a chart looking at how the behaviour ratio changes from hunting mammals, all the way down to worms and insects. In order to claim such or such a behaviour is DNA based, one would have to demonstrate that in a study. We can barely achieve that level with studies on cancer! We're estimating that that 30% of breast cancers are DNA, that leaves 70% of breast cancers being behaviour. That's pretty damned massive. Society has insane levels of influence on biology. Yet, activists keep pushing and pushing and pushing to make everything DNA. (hardcore racists use the same false arguments).
As "MRA" is a feminist slur used against a subset of sexist attitudes in men (and rarely women).
While "blank slatism" is a MRA slur against feminists. ;)
Anyway, I love the article, I just think "blank slate ism" doesn't belong in science articles, because it's principally used as a slur, same way a biology article would discuss MRAs.
I strongly disagree with the numbers you are throwing around. It's well worth reading "Human Diversity" by Charles Murray. He actually goes through the data (it's EXTREMELY technical but if you have a bio background you can handle the book) about how much of behaviour, IQ, height, etc is genetic. It's fascinating. The data show that much of our temperament and behaviour (including politics) that we have always believed is mostly nurture, is actually largely nature. (even identical twin adoption studies back this up).
This idea (that behaviours were mainly due to nurture) was what was taught in biology forever, and it's how blank-slatism became so big. It turns out this was wrong, but as with most scientific "facts" it takes a long time to change people's understanding. (Besides the book I mentioned, Jonathan Haidt talks about this issue of inborn temperament as well throughout much of his work).
The behaviour numbers? or The material numbers? or both? Quantify the disagreement? I start with 9:1 and add in 8:2 and 7:3... for each category. It would be faulty analysis to clump behaviour and material into one.
I find Haidt and Pinker both insufferable, extremely politicised and Humanist (capital H, which is a religion I dislike as much as most religions), because it serves their sales, "audience capture", I've been reading their stuff for 20 years. As for Murray, as a hyper Conservative which I occasionally read/listen to, I'm not too sure why biologists would take biology lessons from a very biased political pundit? As I've been having these debates for many years, I've seen MANY people making DNA claims for behaviours, but those claims are never backed up by biological studies. Oh sure, they cite references, but when you look at the references, the references do not say what they're purported to say.
I'm not against changing my mind, but it's not a pundit who's going to achieve that, it will be actual biological studies testing specifically for DNA as behaviour controls, rather than ideas thrown around about universalism, or "twin studies" (which are all over the place) and typical confounding (as JP and GS do) of Correlation vs Causation.
We are named Homo sapiens specifically because so much of life experience is determined by learning/absorbing culture from our peers. Would you propose a binomial name change? I often wonder whether we should be called Homo rapiens (please forgive the terrible Latinisation of the word rape) as it seems to be our nature to rape land and people, systematically.
We've seen this at work the past three years. The number of Homo sapiens willing to go against their peers' culture is extremely small. Only people detached from cultural group thinks go the masses.
I guess we'll agree to disagree. I'll wait for biological papers to demonstrate that behaviour is equally controlled as material questions. That would completely nullify all we know about brain plasticity.
I think what you've said about Pinker, Haidt, and Murray all falls into "ad hominem attacks" which are not useful to making rational arguments. Both Haidt, and even moreso Murray, are far from "pundits" and are actually scientists. I'd be happy to hear your criticisms of their actual work. You can't "agree to disagree" about something that you haven't actually looked into yet.
Thank you for such a great article! It's always been a treat to read your blogposts here!
Excellent article.
As for the the Lancet cover, I initially read that as meaning that racism is NOT confined to white majority societies, but has been found in every race all over the globe throughout history.
This is because all races are equally human, subject to human failings.
In this issue, however, I found that all the articles about racism dealt only with racism directed against non-white peoples in white majority countries. There was not a single article dealing with racism against minority groups in African or Asian countries - this despite the fact that racism is not confined to white majority countries, but may be found wherever there are humans.
This may be simple selection bias. The Lancet is a UK, English language publication and so articles dealing with medical issues originating in other, non English speaking nations maye be excluded by selection bias.
The irony here is that this is in itself a form of racist exclusion...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/issue/vol400no10368/PIIS0140-6736(22)X0051-2
Othering, such as slavery and sale of humans, is historically universal in all Homo sapiens sapiens, even America's beloved First Nations. Tribes living in lands of plenty were less so inclined, and tribes living in highly competitive areas with more limited resources practised it more.
The word "slave" actually comes from the word "Slav", for Slavic peoples. Slavic tribes were often raided and then enslaved by the more technologically advanced societies on the other side of the Black Sea. Also, as you mention, lost in history is the fact that native North American tribes routinely enslaved one another. Cherokee tribes bought and held black slaves from early white settlers.
Not just north! Central and South America too. It's simply universal. Power/dominance is the most basic of biological functions.
Great article, should be interesting to see what happens to Jordon Petrrson with the licensing body in Ontario.
I dislike most of Peterson's public pronouncements, but I WILL DEFEND his right to say them.
There will be a huge anti-Peterson crowd protesting his talk at the Canadian Tire Centre on Jan.30.
I live many thousands of kms away, but if I were within reach, I'd show up in support of FREE SPEECH. Hopefully many people show up for free speech.
Do the secret MDs realize that it is precisely because they, and others, do not speak out that the narrative marches on?
That they are killing any miniscule amount of trust that is left in their profession and our "health" system? Sorry, but no patience or empathy left for them.
I do wish more docs (more people in general!) would speak out. But I'm sympathetic to why they don't . People are scared. I do agree with the trope that "Courage is contagious". It's why I speak out again and again. I hope that others (whether they agree with me or not) will be emboldened to speak their minds.
I'm not so much concerned about the fear of speaking out, as the initial error of total disregard for Pandemic Preparedness Plans. Is "fear" really responsible for scientists to forget the very fundamentals? I dunno. I find it hard to digest.
Some are now making apologies.
But not a single one has explained WHY they trashed Pandemic Preparedness Plans, written by experts, by their colleagues, over decades, based on evidence, specifically for such situations.
WHY ? I know they claim fear... but I'd like to hear ONE of them say they were UNINFORMED, that they had no idea that Pandemic Preparedness Plans existed.
I want to hear them say they were ijiots, that they SHOULD have read the damned Pandemic Preparedness Plans. These plans all stated NO to lockdowns and mandates.
I feel like statistics training should be a mandatory course for all citizens, otherwise our voting is complete nonsense.
Those scientists were practising Preference Falsification, there was a real fear driving their behaviour. I do not understand how scientists can be feeling such fear today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
Impressive and compelling.
Very interesting text.
Forgive me, I forgot the specific one that seems the most kurfuffle between feminists and MRAs. "Family". Nearly every Conservative and self-identified "heterodox thinker" claims it is "biology" driving "family" and that we are "all meant to reproduce"... cuz "biology".
But the fact is that nuclear family is NOT the DNA way for Homo sapiens. Nuclear families have only been happening for a few thousand years. Before that, humans ate as groups, groomed as groups, slept as groups, groomed as groups. Knowledge of paternity only became a thing once we were thoroughly sedentarised. As for the "we all are driven to reproduce" that is NOT true of all species, or all apes. (sure, it depends how you define 'drive', but in the actual outcomes). Not 100% of apes mate, a small percentage of wolves mate, not all ungulates mate. There is sexual selection at play, and mating is simply not everyone's destiny, as is so frequently claimed in some circles.
So "family", the most fundamental unit of the modern existence, is a social construct, as evidenced by evolution. Some days I swear humans want to be different species, like crows, or like bees. ;)
Do you have kids?
Hell no! I had my tubal ligation by cauterisation at 28 after 14 years of begging my docs!
I want to make a clarification regarding blank slatism. Blank slatism is wrongly used as a slur in many conversations
When the world debunked Lamarckism, that was not a 100% abandoning of "acquired" traits. And it is necessary to scarequote that. When we select for traits an animal domestication, we are in *appearance* doing that. When we SELECT niceness in a dog and breed it for that character trait, it has the appearance of Lamarckism. The trait of niceness becomes more and more solidified with each generation (accompanied by a slew of undesired traits).
So we CAN see how human intervention, human beliefs CAN affect genetics... through breeding, over many many generations.
Society CAN affect genetics. We must think of how that is scientifically true, WITHOUT it being Lamarckism.
Another way society CAN affect genetics is medicine. In a natural world without modern medical intervention, the weakest individuals would either fail to reach reproductive age, either fail to reproduce for other reasons, or be stupid/unlucky and die of all sorts of things.
Society breeds pets and livestock for specific traits, usually, this societal intervention onto genetics renders these animals LESS fit. Release them into the wild, and they almost instantly die.
Society (medicine) has also had an effect on human genetics AND human behaviours. Since infants that should have died don't die, they get to breed. Since ijiotic and mentally unfit adults are maintained by medicine and excessive empathy, their mental state gets to breed. Since most congenital illnesses (poor biological fitness) no longer lead to death, they go on to breed. Human society has been selecting for unfitness. And now, as wokeism progresses through all layers of society, we are more and more selecting for un-fitness. If City folk in Western nations were released into the wild, likely 90% of us would die instantly. Our brains are shrinking, our dentition is worsening, many unfitness traits are progressing, because empathy is anti-fitness.
A further impact of society onto biology are religions. Humans need vitamin D. Cultures that cover up more, like religious veiling, have more vitamin D deficiency. Cultures that don't allow women to travel/drive see women's brains develop with less spatial processing capacity, visible in brain scans. Society has consequences on biology, both genetically and generationally.
The term "blank slatism" claims zero societal effects, it is a term used not in scientific discussions but by armchair scientism-ists to speak against societal effects. Honestly, scientists should not use the term as it is completely disingenuous.
Otherwise love the article. My studies were in evolutionary biology, focused on herpetology, and my profs constantly correctly hammered home that "adaptations" did not drive evolution, that evolution is a consequence of random mutations, which then have to prove themselves in nature to demonstrate or not fitness, and I totally agree with that in nature, with caveats for example of predators who LEARN new hunting techniques which increase their breeding fitness, and birds who learn their mating songs which affects their fitness to reproduce.
Thank you.
Thanks for the clarification, Tracy. Getting into the details of how Medelian genetics works was beyond the scope of this article. Of course social factors can influence genetics over generations, but Lysenko and his ilk actually believed that if, for example, you took a bean seed and exposed it to extreme cold before planting, the resulting offspring would have "learned" to be cold tolerant. As for modern medicine and empathy saving the weak, I think there is much to be said for the old maxim that the worth of a society can be judged by how well it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. While I agree that we should try to eliminate things like financial and social disincentives for high-functioning people to have families, and I agree that empathy can go too far (that's a whole other Substack!) we have to be careful not to try to play God and to remember that one of the bases (and strengths) of Western civilization is the concept that ALL humans contain a spark of the divine. The Nazi medical establishment was able to justify the horrors of what it did by first convincing itself that its responsibility was to "the people," i.e., to the collective, rather than to individual human patients and that therefore they were doing their duty by carrying out their program of eugenics. It started with eliminating the "feeble-minded" and those with serious psychiatric illness--to eliminate them from the gene pool and free up resources for the healthy-- and proceeded down a long and slippery slope to the Holocaust.
Philosophically speaking, forcing billions to live is not very different than forcing billions to die. I rather think a middle less interventionist way would be biologically ideal. ;)
Chris here with one comment of my own.
You say the term "blank slatism" claims zero societal effects. That is a straw-man argument, and something I've never heard anyone say. The arguments against "blank-slatism" are against the idea that there are zero GENETIC effects. ie: blank-slatism is the idea that anyone can grow up to be Einstein or Sidney Crosby if we put them in the right environment with the right resources and proper incentives.
Nature or nurture is the eternal question. And the eternal answer is "a bit of both". For certain things (skin colour) nurture counts for nothing. For other things (height) it counts for a fair amount (starve a kid, they end up short even if they have genes to be tall). For some things (occupation as an adult), your culture and social milieu counts for a great deal.
When people like me criticize "blank slatism" we are criticizing the idea that anyone can become anything if we just push them hard enough. I believe humans have a nature in general, and that we are all born with a.unique "nature" on top of that. Society moulds us, but doesn't create us from scratch.
Hi Chris. It's rather the flip side of the same coin. And it's always TWO separate discussions, material and behaviour. I waste quite a bit of time arguing with MRA types online. They usually argue that ALL behaviour is "biological", in order to "counter" the strawman claim that feminism argues that all behaviour is social. I've been in feminism a few decades, and NEVER heard real feminists claim zero behaviour is genetic. (Feminist arguments are never about material questions, only about the behavioural questions)
Now of course, any person can claim they're anything they want to claim. So if some MRA says: look at this "female blank slater", well, sure, anyone can think anything, doesn't mean it's part of the main way of thinking in the field.
My education is biology, with a focus on evolution in my MSc and physiology for my BSc but my work is palaeobiology. So I come at this from a genetic pre-civilisational perspective. Trying to touch on the genetic fundamentals and weed out the societal influences.
As a baseline, I find it useful to *approximate* at this baseline:
-At the material level (anatomy, physiology, performance, etc) it's around 9:1 DNA:Environment
-At the human behaviours level, it's closer to the reverse 1:9 DNA:Environment ratio.
(we could say 8:2, 7:3, but really, each and every behaviour one analyses is on a spectrum. The important thing to remember is that other than breastfeeding, there are no valid biology articles demonstrating that such and such behaviours are genetic. They try and try to demonstrate that homosexuality is genetic. They fail over and over and over again. And the field that drives this nonsense is the pseudoscientific field of Evo Psych which doesn't live in university biology departments but in psychology or psychiatry departments, which are not renowned for practising the scientific method. ;)
(MRAs like GS and JP, yes, they re the definition of MRAs, argue that human behaviour is mostly, if not entirely, genetic. THAT is the point actual feminists debate MRAs on, behaviour)
Mostly, people who haven't actually studied biology confuse the expressions: "biological vs societal" and "Nature vs Nurture", which complicates lay debates.
We could make a chart looking at how the behaviour ratio changes from hunting mammals, all the way down to worms and insects. In order to claim such or such a behaviour is DNA based, one would have to demonstrate that in a study. We can barely achieve that level with studies on cancer! We're estimating that that 30% of breast cancers are DNA, that leaves 70% of breast cancers being behaviour. That's pretty damned massive. Society has insane levels of influence on biology. Yet, activists keep pushing and pushing and pushing to make everything DNA. (hardcore racists use the same false arguments).
As "MRA" is a feminist slur used against a subset of sexist attitudes in men (and rarely women).
While "blank slatism" is a MRA slur against feminists. ;)
Anyway, I love the article, I just think "blank slate ism" doesn't belong in science articles, because it's principally used as a slur, same way a biology article would discuss MRAs.
Biology cheers to you.
I strongly disagree with the numbers you are throwing around. It's well worth reading "Human Diversity" by Charles Murray. He actually goes through the data (it's EXTREMELY technical but if you have a bio background you can handle the book) about how much of behaviour, IQ, height, etc is genetic. It's fascinating. The data show that much of our temperament and behaviour (including politics) that we have always believed is mostly nurture, is actually largely nature. (even identical twin adoption studies back this up).
This idea (that behaviours were mainly due to nurture) was what was taught in biology forever, and it's how blank-slatism became so big. It turns out this was wrong, but as with most scientific "facts" it takes a long time to change people's understanding. (Besides the book I mentioned, Jonathan Haidt talks about this issue of inborn temperament as well throughout much of his work).
The behaviour numbers? or The material numbers? or both? Quantify the disagreement? I start with 9:1 and add in 8:2 and 7:3... for each category. It would be faulty analysis to clump behaviour and material into one.
I find Haidt and Pinker both insufferable, extremely politicised and Humanist (capital H, which is a religion I dislike as much as most religions), because it serves their sales, "audience capture", I've been reading their stuff for 20 years. As for Murray, as a hyper Conservative which I occasionally read/listen to, I'm not too sure why biologists would take biology lessons from a very biased political pundit? As I've been having these debates for many years, I've seen MANY people making DNA claims for behaviours, but those claims are never backed up by biological studies. Oh sure, they cite references, but when you look at the references, the references do not say what they're purported to say.
I'm not against changing my mind, but it's not a pundit who's going to achieve that, it will be actual biological studies testing specifically for DNA as behaviour controls, rather than ideas thrown around about universalism, or "twin studies" (which are all over the place) and typical confounding (as JP and GS do) of Correlation vs Causation.
We are named Homo sapiens specifically because so much of life experience is determined by learning/absorbing culture from our peers. Would you propose a binomial name change? I often wonder whether we should be called Homo rapiens (please forgive the terrible Latinisation of the word rape) as it seems to be our nature to rape land and people, systematically.
We've seen this at work the past three years. The number of Homo sapiens willing to go against their peers' culture is extremely small. Only people detached from cultural group thinks go the masses.
I guess we'll agree to disagree. I'll wait for biological papers to demonstrate that behaviour is equally controlled as material questions. That would completely nullify all we know about brain plasticity.
Cheers. Without prejudice.
I think what you've said about Pinker, Haidt, and Murray all falls into "ad hominem attacks" which are not useful to making rational arguments. Both Haidt, and even moreso Murray, are far from "pundits" and are actually scientists. I'd be happy to hear your criticisms of their actual work. You can't "agree to disagree" about something that you haven't actually looked into yet.
Timely, relevant article. Well done.