[Marxism] Fwd: Information on Stephen Pinker

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> To Marxmail subscribers
>
> I have been studying Steven Pinker's 2002 text -- The Blank Slate : the
> modern denial
> of human nature -- but cannot locate a response from his keenest
> adversaries (the
> dialectical biologists and radical scientists such as Leewontin , Rose, et
> al).
>
> It seems to me that Pinker has attempted something that so many
> contemporaries of
> Marx tried: to develop a complete reductionist theory for everything human.
>
> Pinker  doesn't pull any punches and essentially it is a horrifying book
> as he tries to
> incorporate layer upon layer of human existence under the one
> sociobiological banner.
> Now with philosophers signing up with the biological imperative the
> new  "science" of
> evolutionary psychology is shaping up to be a much more significant
> ideological
> weapon than what Lewontion warned us about in his polemics against the DNA
> doctrine.
>
> Indeed as Lewontin has jokingly warned -- you can't trust the biologists
> to fight this one
> for us as they all tend to be deterministic!
>
> The problem is, as I see it, that UNLESS you think dialectically in the
> sense of
> dialectical materialism it is hard to generate a consistent polemic
> against this scientific
> mish mash. The underlying problem is  the narrowness of the genetic
> studies that
> underpin this new advocacy  which are then turned into absolutes. Of
> course unless,
> you can go over all the footnotes and review the material the bold
> propositions that
> Pinker makes  seem almost reasonable. Concede one then it's a domino effect.
>
> I spent 15 years working with people suffering from schizophrenia and no
> where did I
> come across the arrogant assurances he tries to make in regard to the
> inheritability of
> the condition. It seems you can do a lot with a handful of
> monozygotic  twin studies in
> way of generalising the universal human condition.
>
> So I'm looking for critical literature -- if only because Pinker's
> perspective dovetails with
> that being so popularly advanced by Jared Daimond --as both are proponents
> of a new
> offensive against such 'utopian' doctrines as Marxism. As E/O/Wilson was
> pleased to
> observe in regard Marxism: "Great theory. Wrong species."
>
> Dave Riley


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