Posted on June 20, 2010 - by David

Steven Pinker: Stuck in a Biological Loop

In an op-ed piece published last week in the New York Times, Steven Pinker weighs in on the question of whether technology is dumbing down society. Pinker likens this concern to instances of “moral panic” over new forms of media throughout history, and believes that “far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.” He writes:

For a reality check today, take the state of science, which demands high levels of brainwork and is measured by clear benchmarks of discovery. These days scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying.

Of course, the “state of science” today has a lot to do with the state of science yesterday, and for a few hundred years now (for cultural/historical reasons), science as an institution has been steadily increasing in prestige, accelerating its activity, and calling more and more of modern society’s brightest minds to carry on its glory. It seems there is virtually nothing that could stop the momentum that science has built up; certainly not the (still recently acquired) text or tweet habits of those who have already dedicated their lives to the cause. But who’s to say these habits aren’t detrimental to scientific inquiry? The benefits of technology for scientific study of all kinds are so obviously great, how could we possibly know what small subtraction from its “dizzying” progress the various distraction-inducing developments might be making?

Nicholas Carr, author of the new book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, responded to Pinker on his blog Rough Type. There is nothing hysterical about Carr’s position; he merely believes that the ways we read, write, and communicate will affect our cognition. Where Pinker celebrates the accumulation of scientific advances, Carr sees the erosion of our ability to concentrate and think critically.

After reading Pinker’s 2007 book, The Stuff of Thought, I’m not at all surprised that he shrugs off these fears about the effects of technology on thought.  As I noted in an earlier post about evolutionary psychology, Pinker seems to see anything acquired as having a negligible impact on the way our minds work. He tells us, “one reason that the language we speak can’t be too central in our mental functioning is that we had to learn it in the first place.” ( 149) Pinker maintains that there is a strict difference between language as such and the “language of thought”; in his framework, the set of innate concepts and categories (largely derived from Kant) which provide the boundary conditions for the way we process information. “Language,” he cautions, “is above all a medium in which we express our thoughts and feelings, and it mustn’t be confused with the thoughts and feelings themselves.” (24) If language is just a medium for communication, then the way we choose to package the message is really of little importance to the functioning of the mind.

The Stuff of Thought is Pinker’s attempt to reverse-engineer language to get at the real “language of thought.” This is a fully enculturated adult, who reads, writes, and speaks, explaining that the cognitive processes of the human animal really don’t have that much to do with language. He tells us that “studies of the minds of prelinguistic infants have shown them to be sensitive to cause and effect, human agency, spatial relations, and other ideas that form the core of conceptual structure.” (149) But sensitivity to these categories is obviously not the apex of intellectual achievement. What would happen to these babies if they weren’t touched by language, if they could somehow be shut off from all symbolic communication? Of course, this would be a completely unethical experiment, but if a child was somehow  kept alive while being deprived of all culture (using Liah Greenfeld’s definition of culture – symbolic transmission of human ways of life), would whatever set of innate concepts it possessed cause the spontaneous development of the mental processes of a normal, enculturated adult Homo Sapiens?

I’m sure I could be accused of misconstruing Pinker’s argument. Maybe he’s not saying language in general isn’t important to mental functioning, but that the particular language one learns doesn’t do that much to shape thought because all Homo Sapiens think using the same set of innate concepts. In his argument against Linguistic Determinism, Pinker concludes that it is not that a society’s language determines the way it sees the world, but that the way it sees the world is reflected in its language. Now I’m not saying that this idea is wrong, but it is very clearly incomplete. If the ideas/biases/tendencies of our societies are reflected in our languages, than we become conditioned to experience reality in certain ways as soon as we begin to acquire language. As we learn a language, we don’t just amass a vocabulary and figure out the correct way to use verbs, we inherit ideas and beliefs which go to the core of our identities as individuals and as whole cultures. But I wouldn’t expect Pinker to be impressed with this observation, since he has already characterized the idea that “language affects thought because we get much of our knowledge through reading and conversation” as “banal” and “utterly trite.”

In Pinker’s model, innate concepts are just that: innate. They are fundamental characteristics of the brains of individual organisms. But language is not, as Pinker’s book suggests, just another part of culture, it is the foundational element of the culture, which is a symbolic (non-material), historical process. How does he account for the leap from biologically programmed concepts to a symbolic form of communication based on these concepts? On the one hand, he tells us that “word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought” (150), but also that “each of these [abstract conceptual frameworks] is an empty form that must be filled in by actual instances provided by the senses or the imagination.” (160) What is it that fills in these empty forms if not information transmitted through the symbolic system of language?

In the final chapter of the book, Pinker includes the following “caveats,” which I find particularly revealing. (I’ve bolded certain words for emphasis):

The phenomena may not be literally universal, since the words and constructions in a given language depend not just on the psychology of its speakers but on its history of fads, conquests, and neighbors. Nor are the phenomena necessarily direct reflections of the genetic patterning of our brains; some may emerge from brains and bodies interacting in human ecologies over the course of human history. (428)

Pinker allows history to account for a small portion of language, but even in this he emphasizes the material aspect. If “genetic patterning” can explain the behavior of those “brains and bodies interacting,” then all the accidents of human history have an essentially biological cause. This means that all variation within and between cultures is essentially caused by individual genetic variation. If this view is not clear from Pinker’s analysis of language, consider what he writes in this 2009 New York Times article, titled ‘My Genome, My Self’:

During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?

As I stared blankly, the interviewer suggested that perhaps it was because I grew up in Quebec in the 1970s when language, our pre-eminent cognitive capacity, figured so prominently in debates about the future of the province. I quickly agreed — and silently vowed to come up with something better for the next time. Now I say that my formative years were a time of raging debates about the political implications of human nature, or that my parents subscribed to a Time-Life series of science books, and my eye was caught by the one called “The Mind,” or that one day a friend took me to hear a lecture by the great Canadian psychologist D. O. Hebb, and I was hooked. But it is all humbug. The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.

An obvious candidate for the real answer is that we are shaped by our genes in ways that none of us can directly know. Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

For Pinker, cultural explanations of his interests and identity are “all humbug”; only biology can provide a “real answer.”  Later he writes:

The most prominent finding of behavioral genetics has been summarized by the psychologist Eric Turkheimer: “The nature-nurture debate is over. . . . All human behavioral traits are heritable.” By this he meant that a substantial fraction of the variation among individuals within a culture can be linked to variation in their genes. Whether you measure intelligence or personality, religiosity or political orientation, television watching or cigarette smoking, the outcome is the same. Identical twins (who share all their genes) are more similar than fraternal twins (who share half their genes that vary among people). Biological siblings (who share half those genes too) are more similar than adopted siblings (who share no more genes than do strangers). And identical twins separated at birth and raised in different adoptive homes (who share their genes but not their environments) are uncannily similar.

Then:

Behavioral genetics has repeatedly found that the “shared environment” — everything that siblings growing up in the same home have in common, including their parents, their neighborhood, their home, their peer group and their school — has less of an influence on the way they turn out than their genes. In many studies, the shared environment has no measurable influence on the adult at all. Siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings reared apart, and adoptive siblings reared in the same family end up not similar at all. A large chunk of the variation among people in intelligence and personality is not predictable from any obvious feature of the world of their childhood.

These findings are based on a definition of  “environment” that basically boils down to geography and the institutions to which the individual is in closest proximity. But if by “environment” we mean the wider cultural context which provides the boundary conditions for an individual’s beliefs and desires, we then see how open the possibilities are, especially for the modern American and European societies from which, Pinker tells us, these results are typically taken. Despite a “shared environment,” it would be absolutely impossible for two siblings to have the same experience. Will both be present to witness the same moment of frustration when mom comes home from work complaining about the boss and wishing she had pursued a different career path? Will they have the same teachers, and read exactly the same books, in the same order? Will their classmates express the same opinions? Will the magazine on the coffee table that, in a moment of boredom, catches the eye of one of them, still be sitting there when the moment is right to catch the eye of the other? There’s no way to count all the possible variations in experience within this “shared environment,” but the point is that those slight variations can make all the difference.

As much as I think Pinker is aware that the typical definition of “environment” is problematic, he continues to use it in his case to prove the primacy of genes in determining our personalities. He writes:

A common finding is that the effects of being brought up in a given family are sometimes detectable in childhood, but that they tend to peter out by the time the child has grown up. That is, the reach of the genes appears to get stronger as we age, not weaker. Perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves. Young children are at the mercy of parents and have to adapt to a world that is not of their choosing. As they get older, however, they can gravitate to the microenvironments that best suit their natures.

But the wider cultural environment – its values and its possibilities – are also “not of their choosing.” Children are not released into the wild by their parents when they turn 18. The moment the TV is turned on, the first day of kindergarten, they become part of something much larger. The key sentence in the above paragraph is “perhaps our genes affect our environments, which in turn affect ourselves.” For Pinker, these “microenvironments” may be historical phenomena, but they are also biological necessities, created to satisfy a range of genetically determined drives. If the particularities of environment are shaped by the peculiarities of genes, which express themselves in response to the particularities of environment, then we are stuck in a biological loop.

I don’t claim to have covered every aspect of Pinker’s argument (either about language or genetics), but I’ve tried to follow a few of the main points to their logical conclusions.  Pinker’s view ends up looking like a form of historical materialism, with some of the same dangers. I think Louis Menand sums it up well in his review of The Blank Slate (2002):

The notion is that a particular arrangement must have been “selected for”—as though the struggles among individuals and groups and ideas were nature’s way of making sure that we end up with the best. Evolutionary psychology is therefore a philosophy for winners: it can be used to justify every outcome. This is why Pinker has persuaded himself that liberal democracy and current opinion about women’s sexual autonomy have biological foundations. It’s a “scientific” validation of the way we live now. But every aspect of life has a biological foundation in exactly the same sense, which is that unless it was biologically possible it wouldn’t exist. After that, it’s up for grabs.