new start

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Brad Walsh"
> Even the most extreme viewpoint today, which the Orionauts come
pretty close
> to, is that most of the selection would be done by choice. Spike
just wants
> to limit the available pool by imposing some ever-so rational
entrance
> requirements, then letting nature take its course. Even the
thought of
> throwing out the busted ones (those not writing symphonies by age
3) got
> buried somewhere down in the fine print.

Please, don't put words in my mouth and ideas in my head that simoly
aren't there. Had you actually bothered to READ what you with such
obvious implications of intentional deception call "the fine print,"
you would have learned that children who have not reached legal
majority are not subjet to Citizenship criteria. Only when colonists'
chldren reach legal majority -- by age and/or ability, however
succeeding generations decide to define it -- are they subject to the
IQ cutoff...just like any other applicant for Citizenship.

> >The blank slate is surely dominant in the
> >ideologies of many intellectual movements (feminism for example)
but
> >is it a true reprentation of reality?

Not bloody likely :P

On this topic, may I highly recommend to your attention Steven
Pinker's marvelous book, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature." Below is just a taste, for those sincerely interested.

spike

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Q&A: Steven Pinker of 'Blank Slate'
By Steve Sailer
UPI National Correspondent
>From the Life & Mind Desk
Published 10/30/2002 10:21 AM
View printer-friendly version

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's bestseller "The Blank
Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" is one of the more
intellectually ambitious books to hit the best-seller lists in recent
years. United Press International caught up with him just before a
lecture at the California Institute of Technology, and then followed
up with e-mail questions:

UPI: A widespread criticism among hostile reviewers has been: "You
say that genes affect how people behave. Doesn't everybody know this
already? Why write a book about it?"

Pinker: In their hearts, most people know it, especially people with
more than one child. But many people deny it when they switch into
intellectualizing mode. For example, many parenting studies measure a
correlation between parenting practices and children's outcomes and
conclude that parenting made the difference -- jabbering at your kids
advances their language skills, spanking them makes them more violent
and so forth. They ignore the fact that parents provide their
children with genes, not just an environment, so talkative parents
may pass on genes for talkativeness to their children. Another
example: every few years, many academics and activists sign pious
petitions declaring that "violence is learned behavior." A third
example: statistics showing that women are underrepresented in
professions like mechanical engineering are interpreted as evidence
of hidden barriers; no one asks whether women are less likely to
choose people-free professions like mechanical engineering. All three
of these blank-slate fallacies, by the way, are commonly made by
scientists.

Q: A common fear seems to be: "But if genetic determinism is actually
true, doesn't that mean the Nazis were right?"

A: Genetic determinism is not true. Except for a few neurological
disorders, no behavioral trait is determined with 100 percent
probability by the genome, or anything else (we know this because
identical twins are only similar, not indistinguishable, in their
personality and intellect). Of course, even a statistical influence
of the genes does not mean that the Nazis were right. Factually, they
were wrong in believing that races and ethnic groups are
qualitatively distinct in their biology, that they occupy different
rungs on an evolutionary ladder, that they differ in morally worthy
traits like courage and honesty, and that "superior" groups were
endangered by interbreeding with "inferior" ones. Morally, they were
wrong in causing the deaths of some 35 million innocent people and
horrific suffering to countless others.

Your question, of course, alludes to a conventional wisdom among left-
leaning academics that genes imply genocide. But the 20th century
suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one,
Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that
human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis
on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake
humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the
belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior
groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.

Q: Aren't we all better off if people believe that we are not
constrained by our biology and so can achieve any future we choose?

A: People are surely better off with the truth. Oddly enough,
everyone agrees with this when it comes to the arts. Sophisticated
people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which
everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science,
these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of
human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational
sermonizing.

Q: What is the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision?

A: They are the different visions of human nature that underlie left-
wing and right-wing ideologies. The distinction comes from the
economist Thomas Sowell in his wonderful book "A Conflict of
Visions." According to the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently
limited in virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, and social arrangements
must acknowledge those limits. According to the Utopian vision, these
limits are "products" of our social arrangements, and we should
strive to overcome them in a better society of the future. Out of
this distinction come many right-left contrasts that would otherwise
have no common denominator. Rightists tend to like tradition (because
human nature does not change), small government (because no leader is
wise enough to plan society), a strong police and military (because
people will always be tempted by crime and conquest), and free
markets (because they convert individual selfishness into collective
wealth). Leftists believe that these positions are defeatist and
cynical, because if we change parenting, education, the media, and
social expectations, people could become wiser, nicer, and more
peaceable and generous.

Q: What is the Naturalistic Fallacy vs. the Moralistic Fallacy?

A: The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature
is good. It was the basis for Social Darwinism, the belief that
helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which
depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce
the Naturalistic Fallacy because they want to describe the natural
world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to
behave -- as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide,
cannibalism, it must be OK).

The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It
lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions
are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats
eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so
on. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor
desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too
depressing or reactionary.

Q: It's widely assumed that only right-wingers believe in human
nature. Are there any leftists who argue that understanding our
evolved natures will better help the poor?

A: The most famous is my MIT colleague Noam Chomsky, who believes
that people have innate tendencies to cooperate, share, and produce
creative works, justifying a kind of socialist anarchism. This is a
rather romantic view of human nature that is innocent of modern
Darwinism -- you can't be an anarchist unless you're a romantic, and
you cannot be a romantic if you're a Darwinian. But other leftists
are fans of evolutionary psychology. Peter Singer believes we cannot
achieve Utopia, but we can do better than we're doing now to help the
poor. Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles argue that welfare can become
politically popular again if it does not violate the public's sense
of fairness. Robert Frank argues that extreme laissez-faire policies
don't make people better off because of our innate craving for status
makes us waste disposable income in zero-sum contests of conspicuous
consumption. And decades ago there were "Bell-Curve Liberals" --
British intellectuals who saw IQ tests as the ultimate egalitarian
talent-detectors, which would subvert a class system ruled by inbred
upper-class twits.

Q: You argue that the modernist high culture and post-modernist
criticism have, on the whole, failed to engage humanity's interest
because they ideologically rejected basic truths about human nature.
What are some of modern art's flaws?

A: My quarrel isn't with Modernism itself, but with the dogmatic
versions that came to dominate the elite arts and bred the even more
extreme doctrines of postmodernism. These movements were based on a
militant denial of human nature, especially the idea that people are
born with a capacity to experience aesthetic pleasure. Beauty in art,
narrative in fiction, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry,
ornament and green space in architecture, were considered bourgeois
and lightweight, or products of mass-marketing. Instead, modernist
and postmodernist art was intended to raise our consciousnesses,
illustrate a theory, or shock us out of our middle-class stupor.

Q: Why, in contrast, did popular culture become so much more, well,
popular?

A: Popular culture, to become popular, had to please people, and (at
least at its best) it perfected engrossing plots, catchy rhythms and
melodies and gorgeous fashions and faces.

Q: You are an atheist, although less strident about it than your
fellow evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. Do you ever worry that
by pitting Darwin vs. God, mano a mano, evolutionists are encouraging
Creationism, since an awful lot of Americans would pick God if forced
to choose?

A: My criticism of religion in "The Blank Slate" was defensive, meant
to counter the argument that morality can only come from a belief in
a soul that accepts God's purpose and is rewarded or punished in an
afterlife. I think the evidence suggests that this doctrine is false
both logically and factually. I don't make a point of criticizing
religion in general. Some hard-headed biologists and evolutionary
theorists believe that an abstract conception of a divine power is
consistent with conventional Darwinism.

Q: In 1922, G.K. Chesterton argued that only the Christian doctrine
of the equal value of all souls could reconcile the human desire for
equality with Darwin's strong emphasis on heritable differences as
the engine of evolution. Chesterton observed, "The Declaration of
Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God
created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created
equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for
democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." You
believe the doctrine that we have souls is pernicious, but didn't the
blank slate theory start to flourish when intellectuals stopped
believing in souls, yet still wanted to believe in equality, so they
started insisting that humans had to be biologically equal blank
slates?

A: Yes, that's historically correct, but it is still a bad political
philosophy. It makes the principle of political equality a hostage to
fortune, implying that foreseeable empirical discoveries could make
it obsolete. A stronger case for political equality comes out of two
more robust principles. First, that humans, however much they might
differ in certain traits, don't differ in having a desire for life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These desires do not depend on
having a soul but on being a member of a species that was homogenized
in certain ways by natural selection. Second, that the policy of
treating people according to their individual merits is more fair
than a policy of prejudging them according to the statistics of their
race, sex, religion or ethnic group.

Q: If free will is a myth, how can we justify punishing criminals who
couldn't control their actions? How can we teach our children that
crime is wrong, even if nobody sees you commit the crime?

A: I don't think free will is a myth, only that it consists of a
brain process rather than the uncaused action of an immaterial soul.
In cases where we can tell with certainty that an identifiable kind
of actor is undeterrable by criminal sanctions, in fact we "don't"
punish him -- that's why we don't punish children, animals, machines,
or the truly insane (though we may incapacitate them if they are
dangerous to themselves or others). In other cases, we hold people
responsible because the steadfast policy of holding a person
responsible can deter bad behavior in the future -- if not by the
person himself, then by other people who see the policy being applied
resolutely and are not tempted to game the system.

We cannot teach a psychopath that crime is wrong even if no one sees
you commit it. With everyone else, we can appeal to their empathy,
alerting them to the harm they do to other people; to their
intellect, pointing out that they cannot logically hold others to
standards that they flout themselves; and to their sense of
character, reminding them that a person of principle will, in the
long run and for good reason, be trusted and esteemed more than
someone who cuts corners whenever he thinks he can get away with it.