14. How often and in what circumstances can the mechanisms responsible for adaptive plasticity result in developmental or post-developmental canalization?
15. How often and in what circumstances can the mechanisms responsible for adaptive plasticity result in generative entrenchment?
16. How often and in what circumstances can the mechanisms responsible for adaptive plasticity result in stable developmental sequences?
17. How often and in what circumstances is a species-typical trait due to mechanisms for adaptive plasticity?
18. How often and in what circumstances are stable developmental sequences produced by evolved canalizing mechanisms (as opposed to, say, developmental constraints)?
There is no attempt to answer these or any of the other questions raised in this chapter in any account of nativist knowledge. Therefore, instincts add nothing to our attempts to understand how humans come by their unspoken or ineffable knowledge. We must move beyond instincts to an empirical epistemology, based on culture and the growth of dark matter of the mind. Once we do abandon nativists “bed-time stories,” as Blumberg (2006, 205) calls them, we are able to move beyond yet another obstacle to the understanding of our species: the idea of “human nature.”
Before concluding this essay on dark matter, therefore, I want to say in the next chapter why it is time to move on, beyond the idea of human nature, leaving such an idea to religions and superstitions, where it belongs.
In this chapter we considered and rejected numerous claims for instincts, from phonology and semantics to morality. To be sure, the proposed instincts we addressed require much more experimentation and research to conclusively demonstrate that the noninstinctual alternatives are superior across the board, but the very fact that we are able to account for the core proposals even moderately well should raise concerns that the instincts are unneeded, based on parsimony alone.
There is of course a huge body of work in favor of instincts. But only a couple of research programs seem to escape the kinds of criticisms that have been raised in this chapter. Those are the work by Charles Yang (2015), Lisa Pearl (2013), and their associates. Unsurprisingly, these researchers, while clearly favoring inborn abilities, do not quite arrive at claims for innate conceptual knowledge. Each in effect makes the reasonable case that the child learning its grammar and the like needs a solution space—it needs to be able search for answers or solutions to the problems of analysis it faces (e.g., settling on a grammar for the language it is learning) in a feasible space that will enable it to find the answers in reasonable time (in particular, in the time we actually observe among young language learners).
Having said that, however, there are nonnativist proposals on the solution space problem, among other issues raised by nativists. For example, the competition model of Brian MacWhinney (2004) and the new empiricism of Goldsmith (2015) provide promising avenues of research.
Thus, although intriguing proposals have been and continue to be made for inborn conceptual knowledge—“instincts,” according to some popular usage—none of these overcome the joint problems of parsimony, origins, and empirical adequacy.
10
Beyond Human Nature
The very advantage that [great artists and others distinguished by creative gifts] enjoy consists precisely in the permeability of the partition separating the conscious and the unconscious.
CARL JUNG, Psychology of the Unconscious
Whether there is such a thing as human nature is an important question. As this chapter makes clear, looked at from the biological perspective or the behavioral perspective, there clearly is a human nature. But this is not the sense of human nature that many people have in mind. Another view of human nature is that there is innate knowledge that all humans are born with that provides our species with a psychic unity. In this chapter, we consider and reject this latter notion of human nature, while maintaining the former.
What Would a Human Nature Be?
Line up a salmon, an eagle, an ape, a random human, and a robot. Could you pick out the human? Probably. So does this means humans have a nature? At one level, obviously we are a species and obviously we are as distinctive as any species, so of course there is a human nature—whatever makes us a species is our nature. If there is any human nature, it is found in our capacities—our excellent memories, our higher intelligence, our ability to create symbols and cultures, our statistical learning prowess. But our higher cognitive powers, deriving to a large extent from the cortex, are more general and show no neurophysical or evolutionary evidence—nor even much behavioral evidence—for innate, hardwired specialization. There are many, many attempts to come to grips with the notion of human nature in the literature (Degler 1992; Stevenson 2000; Downes and Machery 2013; Enfield and Levinson 2006).
In Islam, human nature is referred to as fitrah. It is the belief that all humans are born in a natural state of submission to Allah, though they may fall away. “I created My servants in the right religion but the devils made them go astray” (Sahih Muslim). But Islamic writings also seem to assume that people will go astray, that it is not hard for people to go astray, and so on. Like some versions of Christianity, because Islam believes that Allah is all-knowing and all-seeing (i.e., omniscient), then predestination for damnation or heaven is the lot of all humans.
The Islamic view of human nature thus seems quite different from the Christian view. The Islamic view is that people are born as they should be, while the (evangelical, fundamentalist) Christian view is that they are born flawed and need to be fixed. Some people will find salvation for their souls and direction for their lives as they turn to Jesus, the theology goes. But at core, before Jesus, all humans are rebels against God and evil.
The Christian view of what is often known as the doctrine of the “total depravity of man” is partially constructed from verses like the following, Matthew 19:16–17: “And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.” This is a reflection of the idea that all humans are born as sinners, unable to win God’s favor on their own, because of the sin of their proto-parents, Adam and Eve.
The Christian and Islamic views of human nature are compatible in a broad conceptual sense with Cartesian dualism, since they believe that the soul is eternal and capable of moral perfection, while the body is temporal and largely a source of evil. These religious views are not dualism so much in an opposition between mind and body but between spiritual vs. physical existence.
The Hindu view of human nature, on the other hand, is that there are two layers to the self (Kupperman 2012, 1), the jiva and the atman. The jiva is the “superficial self,” the body, the personality, one’s social self, and so on. The atman is the deeper self, a spiritual and impersonal self. The Upanishads outline this view of the self as they also prescribe a life that leads to liberation and ultimate satisfaction. “The knowing (Self) is not born, it dies not; it sprang from nothing” (Second Valli, 18). Or “The wise knows the self as bodiless within the bodies, as unchanging among changing things, as great and omnipresent, does never grieve” (22). Or “But he who has not first turned away from his wickedness, who is not tranquil, and subdued, or whose mind is not at rest, he can never obtain the Self (even) by knowledge” (24).
In the Buddhist Dhammapada, chapter 1, we encounter a religious view that is radically different from that of the three religions just mentioned, as it is different from most other religions. The Buddhist view strikingly reminiscent of the idea of humans that has emerged from our discussion until this point: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.” Buddhism does away with the eternal self, atman, of Hinduism, replacing it with “no-self” or anatman. Our identities are based on the skandhas: physical, feelings, perceptions, mental constructions/interpretations, and consciousness. Material forms come in six ba
sic forms (the heard, the seen, the smelled, the tasted, the felt, and the thought). Sensations are seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, and thinking. Perceptions are versions of these. From these we construct mental formations, including attention, will, determination, confidence, concentration, wisdom, energy, desire, hate, ignorance, conceit, self-illusion, and so on (see Mitchell 2002). We will return to the Buddhist view directly. The religious views, except for Buddhism, are primarily built around the perceived moral nature of humans. Humans are born moral or immoral. Buddhism doesn’t participate in this true-or-false quiz, instead proposing the radical idea that humans make themselves. By the end of life, we are all self-evolved people, that is, the result of our cumulative experiences and memories. This is very similar to the Pirahã worldview.
However, religions certainly do not provide the only ideas about human nature. Many scientists offer their own views of human nature. We briefly examined the views of Freud, Jung, and others in chapter 1. More recent and sophisticated attempts to defend the idea of human nature exist, however. E. O. Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize with a book entitled On Human Nature (Wilson 1978). According to Wilson (3), any view from religion is suspect because “religions, like other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.”1 Wilson recognizes that humans are the output of millions of years of evolution. We are purposeless, aside from the purposes we give ourselves. But we are tightly constrained machines controlled by evolved psychological and emotional mechanisms that give us similar motives—violence, jealousy, self-preservation, desire for monogamy among females, desire to have sex with as many women as possible for men, and so on. Certainly the evolutionary concept of humans as biological machines has to be accepted at some level. For we are indeed the output of some one or another evolutionary process. On the other hand, although Wilson discusses what he believes to be hardwired characteristics of humans in each of his nine chapters, he offers no convincing account of the role of culture nor psychology in forming human nature. Of course, he is not alone in this. Steven Pinker and his fellow evolutionary psychologists also take a strong evolutionary approach, they believe, to human nature.
Before going into more detail, let me emphasize that the question we are trying to answer is whether there is such a thing as “human nature” and, if so, what kind of thing this is. Human nature has exercised scientists, philosophers, theologians, and others, likely as long as humans have reflected on the world. Yet ideas about it have only occasionally been based on anything we might today call science. E. O. Wilson must be credited with one of the first scientifically based claims that human nature is based on evolution emerged when he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson 1975). Like all of Wilson’s work, the proposals in this book were based on painstaking research over many years. Wilson argued that just as genes are responsible for much of observed behaviors across nonhuman animals, so we might naturally expect them to be responsible for much of human behavior. According to sociobiology, human nature exists and is largely a function of the human genome. The idea that humans’ and other animals’ behavior are influenced by their evolution is such a natural and obvious idea that one struggles to understand the vitriol it engendered. Nevertheless, Wilson famously had water poured on his head at one lecture, received hateful messages, and became an object of scorn for many—both in and outside the academy—because of this, to me innocuous, hypothesis.
Human Nature and Evolution
I agree to some degree with Wilson’s claim that because humans are animals, evolution is important to our biological makeup, much as it is for any other animal. But as we have seen throughout this study, biological evolution is just one force operating on human thought and values. Cultural evolution is crucial. And Wilson misses this entirely. To a large degree, Darwin ([1874] 1998) made Wilson’s point more than a hundred years before Wilson, but also missed the contribution of society and culture to human nature. On the other hand, it is incontrovertible that a great deal of the human psyche is shared with other animals, especially our deeply influential emotional makeup (see Panksepp and Biven 2012, among many others).
Controversy always ensues when a bold proposal places some human behavior or predisposition closer to one side or the other of the nature-nurture continuum, as sociobiology and its offshoot, evolutionary psychology, do—especially when the proposal challenges popular notions of “free will,” “dignity,” and so on. A large number of people—for religious, social, or philosophical reasons—just do not want to believe that humans lack “total freedom” or that some of our most important choices in life are influenced by the environment in which our minds evolved more than one hundred thousand years ago. And yet simultaneously, another large group of people seem to find it appealing to think we can trace our behaviors back to our genes. They believe that this would somehow explain us better than the complex, nuanced, and often imprecise notions of cultural shaping of human personalities, as advocated by behaviorists, some anthropologists, philosophers, and others. Moreover, there may even be some who believe that if “my genes made me do it,” then we cannot really be blamed for our actions (just as there some who believe the same if “culture made me do it”).
Yet in spite of its inherent scientific appeal, I have several objections to Wilson’s sociobiology. First, as we have seen, the very idea of “instincts” is at best weakly supported as they are normally presented, as is the reasoning that is often used to establish these. In the hands of some major proponents of either sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, the reasoning that humans must have instincts takes the form of a crude syllogism: “All animals have instincts. Humans are animals. Therefore humans have instincts.” One could just as easily argue in a very different direction: “All animals lack instincts for higher cognitive functions. Humans are animals. Therefore humans lack instincts for higher cognitive functions.” Or, more weakly, “Humans seem to lack instincts. Humans are animals. Therefore perhaps all animals lack instincts.” Contrary to the opinion of some, none of these premises or arguments have overwhelming support. There is room for a great deal of empirical work on instincts (or their absence) across all species.
However, the idea of instincts per se is not my objection to many of the models that propose them, such as sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and their ilk. In fact, I believe that there is evidence that humans and other animals may be born with some instincts (candidates include grasping, breathing, making sounds—all non-epistemic). Rather, my objection is that the vast majority of research on human instincts is looking in the wrong place. It is looking for knowledge instead of more basic capacities, such as emotions. Research by Panksepp and Biven (2012), among many others, makes the case that our emotions are instinctual, comprising a small set of basic human drives or needs that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Evidence for the evolutionary antiquity of emotions come from cross-species comparisons, locations of emotions in the brains of Homo sapiens and many other species, unconditioned responses directly observable via electrode probes, and so on. Our emotional responses to the world around us are shared across a large swath of the animal kingdom and heavily influence our cortical, intellectual, social, and cultural development. As one example of the physiology-emotion connection, let’s consider the relationship between blood pressure and the emotion of rage.
For example, according to Panksepp and Biven:2
Much of the intermingling of emotional feelings and physiological arousal could be because the primary-process emotional systems are situated in the same brain regions that regulate the activities of our viscera, our hormonal secretions, and our capacities for attention and action . . . Blood pressure . . . exerts influences on affect, as any chemical agent that raises blood pressure will make an angered person or animal feel more enraged. (2012, 31ff)
If physiology affects our emotions, then there is no a priori reason to expect that it could not affect our cognition. However, the interact
ion of physiology, emotions, and cognition is quite complex. It is the proximity and connections of the control centers, as well as their hormonal relationships (hormones generated by one affecting/effecting the other) that allows us to talk a bit more confidently about emotions as hardwired. On the other hand, the cognitive interpretation, expression, and reasoning regarding emotions varies from culture to culture, in minor and major ways. Thus, to my mind, the reason that the “cognitive revolution” is an illusionary revolution is that it became enamored with the idea that the mind is a digital computer operating on “representations” that are either formed by the brain synchronically or diachronically by evolution. If we ask how this analogy could lead to a “cognitive revolution” and then to human nature, there appear to be significant gaps in the reasoning.
INSTINCTS AND THE “COGNITIVE REVOLUTION”
To see this, let’s review the standard theory of cognition birthed more than fifty years ago, the theory that has dominated discussion of human thinking for so many decades. We can better evaluate some of this theory by considering the summary of the cognitive theory offered by Steven Pinker (2003, 31ff). He lists five primary theses of the standard theory:
1. “The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback.”
2. “The mind cannot be a blank slate because blank slates don’t do anything.”
3. “An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind.”
4. “Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures.”
5. “The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts.”
To these, we might add the following:
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 44