Political equality consists of recognizing, as the Constitution says, that people have certain inalienable rights, namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Recognizing those rights is not the same thing as believing that people are indistinguishable in every respect. |
So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents. |
That isn't really a question that can be answered. |
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. |
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. |
The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius - master of most constructions, obeying rules far more often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether. |
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. |
There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior - namely, the inhibition systems of the brain - just because we're coming to understand more about the temptation systems. |
they aren't identical lumps of clay. |
To make changes you have to make some enemies, but you also have to be careful not too make too many enemies. He made far too many enemies. |
Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and other basic human pleasures. And they are considered radical extremists! |
We may be seeing a coming together of the humanities and the science of human nature. |
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? |
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? |