Having reviewed The Blank Slate earlier this week, I’d thought I’d share a few choice quotes.

On the influence of genetics:

“Familiar categories of behaviour – marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on – certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.”

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

“‘Nature is a hanging judge,’ goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”

On the modern emphasis on culture:

“Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”

“The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”