" 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 ism, have nothing in common with the notion that there is a universal, instinctive human nature. Indeed, they are fundamentally opposed because one believes in universals and the other in racial or class particulars.
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 metaclass="underline" 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-
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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 found a general learning-by-association device was false: Neural networks depend crucially on being told what answer to reach or what pattern to find, or on being designed for a particular task, or on being given straightforward examples to learn from: The "connectionists, " who placed such high hopes in neural networks, had stumbled straight into the traps that had caught the behaviorists a generation earlier: Untrained connection-4st networks proved incapable even of learning the past tense in English."
The alternative to connectionism, and to behaviorism before it, was the "cognitive" approach, which set out to discover the mind's internal mechanisms. This first flowered with Noam Chomsky 's assertions in Syntactic Structures, a book published in 1957, that general-purpose association-learning devices simply could not solve the problem of inferring the rules of grammar from speech:" It needed a mechanism equipped with knowledge about what to look for: Linguists gradually came to accept Chomsky 's argument: Those studying human vision, meanwhile, found it fruit-ful to pursue the "computational " approach advocated by David Marr, a young British scientist at MIT: Marr and Tomaso Poggio systematically laid bare the mathematical tricks that the brain was using to recognize solid objects in the image formed in the eye. For example, the retina of the eye is wired in such a way as to be especially sensitive to edges between contrasting dark and light parts of an image; optical illusions prove that people use such edges to delineate the boundaries of objects: These and other mechanisms in the brain are "innate " and highly specific to their task, but they are probably perfected by exposure to examples: No general-purpose induction here:"
Almost every scientist who studies language or perception now admits that the brain is equipped with mechanisms, which it did not "learn" from the culture but developed with exposure to the world; these mechanisms specialize in interpreting the signals
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that are perceived: Tooby and Cosmides argue that "higher " mental mechanisms are the same. There are specialized mechanisms in the mind that are "designed " by evolution to recognize faces, read emotions, be generous to one 's children, fear snakes, be attracted, to certain members of the opposite sex, infer mood, infer semantic meaning, acquire grammar, interpret social situations, perceive a suitable design of tool for a certain job, calculate social obliga-tions, and so on: Each of these " modules " is equipped with some knowledge of the world necessary for doing such tasks, just as the human kidney is designed to filter the blood.
We have modules for learning to interpret facial expressions—parts of our brain learn that and nothing else. At ten weeks we assume that objects are solid, and therefore two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time—an assumption that no amount of exposure to cartoon films will later undo. Babies express surprise when shown tricks that imply two objects can occupy the same place. At eighteen months babies assume there is no such thing as action at a distance—that object A cannot be moved by object B unless they touch. At the same age we show more interest in sorting tools according to their function than according to their color. And experiments show that, like cats, we assume any object capable of self-generated motion is an animal, which is something we only partially unlearn in our machine-infested world: 16
That last is an example of how many of the instincts in our heads develop on . the assumption that the world is that of the Pleistocene period, before cars: Infant New Yorkers find it far easier to acquire a fear of snakes than of cars, despite the far greater danger posed by the latter. Their brains are simply predisposed to fear snakes: