eugenicists, a series of thinkers first in sociology, then anthropology, and finally psychology shifted the burden of proof firmly away from nurture and onto nature. Until proved otherwise, man must be considered a creature of his culture, rather than culture a product of man 's nature.
Emil Durkheim, the founder of sociology, set out in 1895
his assertion that social science must assume people are blank slates on which culture writes. Since then, if anything, this idea has hardened into three cast-iron assumptions: First, anything that varies between cultures must be culturally rather than biologically acquired; second, anything that develops rather than appears fully formed at birth must also be learned; third, anything genetically determined must be inflexible. No wonder social science is irredeemably wedded to the notion that nothing in human behavior is 'innate, ' for things do vary greatly between cultures, do develop after birth, and are plainly flexible. Therefore, the mechanisms of the human mind cannot be innate. Everything must be cultural.
The reason men find young women more sexually attractive than old women must be that their culture teaches them subtly to favor youth, not because their ancestors left more descendants if they had an innate preference for youth:'
Anthropology 's turn was next. With the publication of Margaret Mead 's
Psychology 's conversion was more gradual. Freud believed in universal human mental attributes—such as the Oedipal complex: But his followers became obsessed with trying to explain everything according to individual early childhood influences, and Freudianism came to mean blaming one ' s early nurture for one 's nature: Soon psychologists came to believe that even the mind of an adult was a general-purpose learning device. This approach THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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reached its apogee in the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. He argued that brains are simply devices for associating any cause with any effect.
By the 1950s, looking back at what Nazism had done in the name of nature, few biologists felt inclined to challenge what their human-science colleagues asserted: Yet uncomfortable facts were already appearing. Anthropologists had failed to find the diversity Mead had promised. Freudians had explained very little and altered even less by their appeals to early influences. Behaviorism could not account for the innate preferences of different species of animal to learn different things: Rats are better at running mazes than pigeons. Sociology 's inability to explain or rectify the causes of delinquency was an embarrassment. In the 1970s a few brave
' sociobiologists ' began to ask why, if other animals had evolved natures, humans would be exempt. They were vilified by the social science establishment and told to go back to ant-watching: Yet the question they had asked has not gone away.'°
The principal reason for the hostility, to sociobiology was that it seemed to justify prejudice. Yet this was simply a confusion.
Genetic theories of racism, or classism or any kind of
Genetic differences have been assumed just because genes are involved. Why should that be the case? Is it not possible that the genes of two individuals are identical? The logos painted on the tails of two Boeing 747s depend on the airlines that own them, but the tails beneath are essentially the same: They were made in the same factory of the same metal: You do not assume because they are owned by different airlines that they were made in different factories. Why, then, must we assume because there are differences between the speech of the French and the English that they must have brains that are not influenced by genes at all? Their brains are the products of genes—not different genes, the same genes. There is a universal human language-acquisition device, just as there is a universal human kidney and a universal 747 tail structure.
Think, too, of the totalitarian implications of pure environ-
mentalism: Stephen Jay Gould once caricatured the views of genetic determinists in this way: ' If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are ineluctable: We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change them:' He meant genetically programmed, but the same logic applies with even more force to environmental programming. Some years later Gould wrote: 'Cultural determinism can be just as cruel in attributing severe congenital diseases—
autism, for example—to psychobabble about too much parental love, or too little:'
If, indeed, we are the product of our nurture (and who can deny that many childhood influences are ineluctable—witness accent?), then we have been programmed by our various upbring-ings to be what we are and we cannot change it—rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief. Environmental determinism of the sort most sociologists espouse is as cruel and horrific a creed as the biological determinism they attack. The truth is, fortunately, that we are an inextricable and flexible mixture of the two: To the extent that we are the product of the genes, they are all and always will be genes that develop and are calibrated by experience, as the eye learns to find edges or the mind learns its vocabulary. To the extent that we are products of the environment, it is an environment that our designed brains choose to learn from. We do not respond to the ' royal jelly ' that worker bees feed to certain grubs to turn them into queens: Nor does a bee learn that a mother 's smile is a cause for happiness.
THE MENTAL PROGRAM
When, in the 1980s, artificial intelligence researchers joined the ranks of those searching for the mechanism of mind, they, too, began with behaviorist assumptions: that the human brain, like a computer, was an association device. They quickly discovered that a computer was only as good as its programs. You would not dream of trying to use a computer as a word processor unless you had a word-processing program. In the same way, to make a computer THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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capable of object recognition or motion perception or medical diagnosis or chess, you had to program it with ' knowledge: ' Even the ' neural network ' enthusiasts of the late 1980s quickly admitted that their claim to have
