Problems with Pinker

I found myself growing frustrated with Steven Pinker about six paragraphs into his article The Blank Slate, when he writes, “Today, no scientifically literate person can believe that the events narrated in the book of Genesis actually took place”. He goes on to argue that it’s idiotic to believe in any part of the “Judeo-Christian” theory, which he asserts is entirely built on fundamentalist interpretations of the bible (it’s not). So, page one establishes a couple of things: 1) “Christian” (or religious, for that matter) is nonsensical, and 2) anyone who believes in any scrape of it is a moron. Thanks, Pinker. While this alone put me off the rest of his article (I am Christian and consider myself on the not-moron side of things), I think that it perfectly exemplifies my broader criticism of Pinker, which is that he wishes to know nothing of the “other side” (meaning, based off what it seems in the article, anyone who does not believe that neuroscience is the epitome of truth). Pinker spends the first three pages of The Blank Slate explaining/asserting that every other theory of human behavior is nonsense, outdated, fundamentalist etc, and that neuroscience can explain 100% of human behavior. He never stops to consider that, perhaps, neuroscience AS WELL AS “something else” could explain the world. Maybe we are born with certain basic traits but our environments determine how they develop? It seems ridiculous to me that he would completely write off environment growing up as a determinant in how we grow as humans (just as I think it would be completely ridiculous to argue that biology has no impact whatsoever). His methodology reminded me of something I had read by a scholar named Dylan Evans, writing on the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and science. He writes:

It follows from this that the question raised by the accusations of unscientificity is that of the relationship between science and truth. It is thus not only important to examine what we understand by “science” but also important to clarify what we mean by “truth.” Does something qualify as truth only when it can be validated by the discourse of institutionalized science? Or does modern science, as Lacan argues, derive its power precisely from the fact that it wishes to know nothing of truth as cause? (Evans in 2009)


While the specific context of Evan’s writing differs from what’s at hand here, I think his argument can be applied very effectively to Pinker. Modern science has long posited itself as the bringer of “truth” (whatever that means) precisely because it separates itself from everything else–in not being “mixed up” with culture, desire, and politics, it provides an “objective” view of the world (excessive quotes indicate my own thoughts on this). Evans argues (and I agree) that fleeing from “everything else” is an attempt to create so-called truth is what creates the hegemonic, un-questionable regimes of knowledge Pinker criticizes in the first page. Any theory of human nature must have some kind of answer to the “but what about X” questions raised by other disciplines. From what I’ve read, it seems like Pinker’s answer to the arguments presented by Lewontin about human nature or Elliot (more specifically) about the origins of Apotemnophilia would be “It’s all genetic!” To me, this is ignorance, not science. The existence of neuroscience is not a reason why history and culture can be wiped away; genes do not mean individuals are not impacted by the discourses that surround them. I certainly don’t understand the origin of what we call Apotemnophilia, but “it’s a result of a problem in the parietal lobe, which can be traced to Q deficiency inherited from Z gene” doesn’t really cut it for me.