I keep coming back to watch the slam dunk reply from pinker: 12:18 to 14:32 . And that's why I thought I would make a comment here so that I can find that portion quicker myself.
@@curtisjulian2652 Daxton, Rory and Curtis - you should contact Flixzone, maybe they'd offer you some sort of reward for these unsolicited recommendations. I'll not be using their services, however.
OMG, art. Revolutionary landscapes that are inhospitable but at a certain point became aesthetically pleasing? Um... I don't know, maybe as survival becomes less of a problem, we begin to see the unsurvivable as a challenge to be admired and surmounted? Duh. How is this not answerable by the combination of evolution and environment?
I agree. An incurable Romantic myself, I also know that whatever pleasure I take in forbidding and inhospitable landscapes is attributable to my comfortable inexperience of them. I like the look of them, but under no circumstances am I ever going there. Furthermore, I think that the kind of people who actually do go there, and climb mountains, or fly to the moon or whatever, lack imagination. I get enough of an adrenaline rush merely looking at pictures of places that no one but an exotic bacterium makes a home in.
James Roach It is unimaginable: the lack of imagination in he who wondered what was over the mountain, ventured there and painted it, dissected it, or sampled it, so that we, the imaginative, didn't have to bother.
+karen straughan Problem is, those things can partly be explained by evolutionary theory, but evolutionary theory will never fully explain satisfactorily what is all connected with certain ideas within theories of art and literature, let alone if these theories are valid. There is simply a point where you can well explain the crude basics of why we might have such a desire, but you will come at a point where evolutionary theory is simply not fit anymore to explain the complexity that goes along with it. Everyone who thinks this has probably never taken an art/literature/sociology class whatsoever. There are, as Steven Pinker said, biological bases for what can occure within culture but there are developments within the history of art and literature for example that can't be fully explained by biology at all. Biology is a basis for why things are possible at all, but culture is its own phenomenon that requires a distinct analysis. Surely you can explain why it is biologically possible for us to like certain landscapes, but you won't explain the shifts between certain predominant artistic devices, epochs and styles the shift from classicism to romanticism, the emergence of modernism etc.
I wonder if the woman on the panel, when she talks about the possible propensity for women to desire multiple partners, is talking about concealed ovulation? I've seen many people describe concealed ovulation as a strategy on the part of women's biology to essentially exploit "beta bucks and alpha fucks"--that is, to marry the high-earning accountant while having babies with the pool boy. While this situation is, IMO, facilitated by concealed ovulation, I don't think this is the reason concealed ovulation exists in human females. If we are to consider the U of Tennessee researcher who demonstrated by a mathematical model the first hominid "sexual revolution", which mirrors the consortship behaviors of subordinate male baboons and chimpanzees with their favored females, concealed ovulation may have occurred while we were still primarily a tournament species (like the chimp and baboon). THIS researcher posited that millions of years ago our hominid grandmothers began opting for "good fathers" rather than the "best genes". In baboon society, some females also make this choice. A subordinate male will typically make overtures by helping a female with her offspring, sharing food, being affectionate, lavishing attention and investment on her and her young. She rewards him with sex to keep his attention and investment, BUT, the obviousness of estrus prevents her from providing him with many reproductive opportunities. When she's in estrus, the dominant male engages in mate-guarding. Some baboon females have demonstrated a wide variety of strategies to circumvent this mate-guarding instinct on the part of the dominant male--distractions, attrition, diversions, etc. However, this female would need apply none of these strategies to exercise her choice if her ovulation was concealed. The idea that sex is a thing that should be done in private is something of a human universal, unlike pretty much any other species. If the first monogamous couples were, essentially, individuals cheating on the alpha male (and if the price for being caught was getting your block knocked off), would this not facilitate a universal or near universal understanding of sex as something that should not be done out in the open where anyone and everyone can see? Female sexual crypsis (concealed fertility) would only have assisted in the transition of our hominid ancestors from tournament to a unique brand of egalitarian monogamy. Unlike other monogamous social animals, there are no prohibitions on subordinate members of the group mating (as with wolves or marmosets, where only the dominant pair have mating rights, and all others' celibacy is aggressively policed). I'm actually of the opinion that many of the "signs" some researchers use to "prove" that we're inherently polygamous are actually the very things that propelled us from a tournament model toward what our most successful societies have employed for a long time (egalitarian monogamy). Concealed ovulation may not be a result of female cuckolding behaviors (though it does facilitate them), but the result of the initial success of egalitarian monogamy and the female prioritization of "fatherly investment" in offspring. If polyandry were a norm, men's testicles would be HUGE. I'm sorry, but they would. When you look at promiscuous animals where male intra-sexual competition is non-violent (as compared with tournament models like Mountain Gorillas), you find ginormous testicles and high sperm counts. Human males are nothing special in this regard. Given concealed ovulation, the fact that human groups do not expel males at maturity (so there is always the danger of female infidelity by opportunity), if females had a propensity to the kind of polyandry (concurrent, as opposed to serial), men's testicles would be as big as their heads. But they're not. Because humans are not inherently polyandrous--we came from a polygynous tournament species, and our sexualities evolved to facilitate egalitarian monogamy. Incidentally, some 43% of college aged men in the US have had a coercive sexual experience inflicted on them. Half of those experiences were coercive or forced completed sexual intercourse. 95% of the reports indicate a female perpetrator. When feminists talk about college women and the "rape epidemic" they use "scary stats" like 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 college women have been victims of sexual assault. The number for men sexually assaulted by women is nearly 1 in 2, and the number of completed rapes by women on men is 1 in 5. The very fact that few people even know about this, let alone care, only reinforces Steven Pinker's point--that women are more likely to care about quality in a sexual partner, and men about quantity. While I won't tell any man that he should not be traumatized by his experience of rape at the hands of a woman, the fact that men seem more capable of "shrugging off" being raped by Alice the Goon than women are to do the same when their ass is groped by Ron Jeremy's uglier cousin tells me that women are MUCH more choosy than men when it comes to sexual partners.
karen straughan As men appear, when highlighted, to shrug it off, as you say, women appeared to do so before. What you seem to accept, in suggesting that men aren't so bothered by the rape upon their person because they tend, more than women, to like it however they can get it, is that a handsome rapist (Ted Bundy, for example) was a far less harmful mass rapist and murderer than a squinty, sweaty and inelegant one (Ed Gein? I don't know). When there's some capital in appealing to an authority (demagogue or law enforcer), men may well end up much more like women in the desire to report rapes and receive a form of feedback that feels desirable. No one used to care much about women being raped, so they themselves either didn't care, or didn't care to say. They may have asked, as men may be asking themselves now, "What would be the point?" It's impossible to make the assumption that men aren't as deeply traumatised by rape as are women, though it is just as comfortable and unchallenged for feminists and comradely Leftist cuckoos to make precisely that assumption today as it was for Victorian society to dismiss contemporaneous rape of women as being of little emotional or moral consequence. Chauvinism evolved in this way, but not as much as some among us like to think. Men suffered just as much under the Victorian sensibility as women, yet it is simply the height of uncouthness to say so. Men were shot if they didn't go and die in wholesale warfare for what they were assured was the protection and freedom of their wives and children (and it was women who assured them most convincingly of their duty). Women were raped and told it was a legal and bearable component of marriage. Everyone can suffer from these constructs and divisions in one way or another. Men suffered to see the women suffer (whether they sensed it or not), and vice versa, and so on and so forth ad infinitum in a diffusion of ways. If it were true that men only suffer from rape technically and, potentially, physically, but not psychologically, then that can be equally true for women. What's good or bad for the goose is good or bad for the gander. Perhaps I should have referred to the biological categories of 'male' and 'female', as the terms 'man' and 'woman' are more garbled concepts nowadays than they ever were, but I can't be bothered going back and finding them.
Supper Time "No one used to care much about women being raped, so they themselves either didn't care, or didn't care to say. They may have asked, as men may be asking themselves now, "What would be the point?"" Rape [of women] used to be a capital crime. People cared so little about women getting raped that they used to execute men who raped women. Gotcha. Your Ted Bundy analogy is just... weird. The vast majority of rapists (outside of wartime) don't kill their victims. In fact, RAINN advises women to verbally and physically resist rapists because it is the best strategy for preventing an attempted rape from becoming a completed one, and because there is, in the vast majority of cases, a ceiling of violence above which a male perpetrator will not go. "If it were true that men only suffer from rape technically and, potentially, physically, but not psychologically, then that can be equally true for women. What's good or bad for the goose is good or bad for the gander." Yes, yes, and evolution stopped at the neck. And cultural attitudes have nothing to do with individual biological realities and the attitudes they engender, either. I also never said that men don't suffer psychologically from rape. But the reality is that their self-reported psychological trauma is, on average, much lower than what women victims report. In my opinion, the negative practical and material consequences today for men who are raped by women are MUCH higher than for women who are raped by men. There are almost no negative practical and material consequences for women--most women are on long term birth control, and they have access to abortion if they fall pregnant from a rape. Having been raped will not destroy a woman's ability to find a male partner, it will not cause an employer to toss her resume in the trash. Given the way the media portrays the rape of women, any huge stigma they feel is internal, not external. But boys raped by adult women at age 14 can be made to pay child support to their rapists out of their paper routes. A court ruling like that can completely derail a young man's life, his ability to access education, his ability to find a female partner, etc.
In the end, there's only getting of reality, not getting of people. The fact that, at some point in history, somewhere, rape may have been a capital crime, takes no account of the widespread acceptance of rape (in the absolute sense of sex forced on a person against his will). You may not have knowledge of specific law, but it was not illegal for a man to force sex on his wife (which was rape, despite not being recognised in statute). I won't say, "Gotcha," except in the form of saying, 'I won't say, "Gotcha," except in the form of saying, 'I won't say, "Gotcha," except in the form of saying, 'I won't That sentence became trapped in a loop, but you know what I mean. Your fault.
Supper Time There are some things you might not know about history and the law around marriage. Both men and women were entitled to a sex life within marriage. In the Middle Ages in Europe, one of the few grounds for divorce a woman could bring was if her husband couldn't, or wouldn't, have sex with her. Such an accused man would actually have to demonstrate before a panel of elder women that he could get and maintain an erection if he didn't want to be divorced. "Drop trou and testify!" But you wouldn't know anything about those laws, and how they worked in both directions. This attitude is also reflected in Sharia-based family law in Iran, where a man's impotence or withholding of sex is grounds for divorce--and in such a case, that man will be forced to pay out the entire remainder of the Mehrieh (bride gift--usually several years' average wages), plus monthly alimony, to his ex wife, on pain of prison. Quite the incentive to give your wife sex when she wants it, no? In 2010, a man in France was forced to pay the equivalent of $10,000USD to his ex wife for not providing her with enough sex during their marriage. This judgment was based on the legal understanding that marriage is a sexual relationship and that both parties have an expectation of sex when they enter into it. But I've never heard of a man suing his ex wife for not putting out enough, let alone winning. Please get some reality.
Yes! This came up to try and I was a big fan of Jonathan Miller. I thought to just get the tenor of the conversation and ended up glued to it all the way. What intelligent, articulate people who were also polite and considerate of each other.
With Pinker's articulateness I sometimes wonder whether it's spontaneous or prepared, or a mix of both. E.g. his very first statement here "...the fact that people would rather have sex than, say, bump foreheads or rub an elbow against a knee, surely is related to the fact that sex leads to reproduction whereas those other activities don't". Does he come up with those things on the fly, or were the questions rehearsed, or is it that he's made this exact statement 27 times before? I mean, normally you would at least expect him to make some more pauses between the words in order to give himself time to actually think up all those flowery (but still quite fitting and accurate) metaphors, allegories and rhetorical devices. If this is all spontaneous -- well, kudos.
I think he's just freakishly intelligent. One of the most intelligent speakers I've ever heard. He can just roll off these incredibly eloquent statements on Twitter at high speed also.
he came to do an unscripted talk at my college, and he summarised all of the work he has ever done in his career within 45 minutes in an off-the-cuff extended speech. it was like being caught in a tornado of pure information, he is something special. for me, he's beyond my envy, i can only admire him and feel awe.
I've never been in a situation with even close to as much prestige as this talk or others Pinker has given but I've been on conference panels and similar kinds of venues and what I always do is try to anticipate the questions and points I most want to make and have a few rehearsed answers ready to go. Also, you do these things enough and you tend to get similar questions and have more or less predigested answers stored and ready to go.
Well, my comment was nothing to do with his answers to questions, which were indeed fairly generic and easy to respond to. It was his summary of every topic he has ever published a book about that astounded me, he usually just talks about his latest book in depth so he said he found it a nice change to just riff off a list of topics he'd written on the back of a napkin.
Geniuses Pinker and Miller aren't spotted together much which is a shame - they're both excellent. And Dr. Miller is STILL ALIVE. He's like 200 years old now! Steven still rocks too. D.A., J.D., NYC
Agreed.The other two male panelists ooze arrogance (Jones) and pomposity (Miller), probably as a desperate reaction to being outclassed intellectually.
"What women _say_ they like or _say_ they do, and what they _actually_ do, are two different things" Oh we know that, sister. Believe me, we know that.
+Gobiniu "Hamer's results were robustly replicated in 2012 in a large, comprehensive multi-center genetic linkage study of male sexual orientation conducted by several independent groups of researchers" So he was completely right, decades before (I think, judging from his hairstyle).
I couldn't sleep last night, and ended up listening to hours of the audiobook, _The Better Angels of our Nature_. His words are pure gold. On this panel, he and Miller are the only hard-hitters. Jones, in particular, was virtually always wrong.
+Mechanics 0f Thought EXACTLY! The guy is freakin brilliant, and in fact, Dean Hamer's hypothesis was found to be completely true. "Hamer's results were robustly replicated in 2012 in a large, comprehensive multi-center genetic linkage study of male sexual orientation conducted by several independent groups of researchers" Most of the time hypothesis like that are shot down over time, but Pinker was able to understand it enough to bet on it and double down when challenged. What a mind on that guy.
+Mechanics 0f Thought I agree. He actually showed up armed with a solid body of research to cite on the subject. Everyone else was kind of shooting from the hip.
Neil McIntosh nowhere near the eloquent communicator though. And thats in many ways a more important type of intelligence. Even highly intelligent people can be stifled by lack of communication skills Take renfroe proxmire, a brillian musician who can hardly burp a sentence out, so he has trouble expressing his ideas verbally. Doesnt matter much with music, but hell.never be a good teacher.
*3:45** "…men may desire younger women …research shows that couples are made up of individuals that are about three years apart."* -"Younger" doesnt nessesserily mean younger than the age of the male partner. It could simply mean that men prefer youth. If a 20 year old male couples with a 23 year old female although there exists a 3 year age difference the female is still youthful / younger in terms of average life span. *3:53**"…women may want men of higher status or a lot of money but pretty much we end up with who loves us…"* -I couldn't disagree more! That statement alone almost disqualifies her from the discussion. "Love" is not quantifiable. Also the idea of marriage on the basis of "love" is a quite a recent concept and is not a universal idea even today. Marriage traditionally was an exchange of male labor/resources in exchange for access to female reproduction and or family-related wealth.
***** *"She was dispelling the common misconception that men ultimately desire 'younger' women"* -3:40 Prof. Small starts by saying "…what humans do and what they say are two different things." She isn't "dispelling" a conception that men desire younger women. She is saying that although they may desire younger women, a younger women isn't necessarily who they reproduce with. *"And by 'younger', the misconception is much younger, like earliest fertile age."* -Again that men desire "younger" women isn't being refuted. To say it is a "misconception" on the basis of Prof. Smalls analysis in this clip is inaccurate. *"She didn't clarify that she meant the average couple of a few years apart must be of an older male and a younger female, but it could likely be the other way around."* -I agree which is why the example i gave in my original post was of a younger male (age 20) and an older female (age 23). *"You conveniently left out the bit where she said "we end up with who loves us OR who WANTS us..." So "love" is clearly a factor today"* -I am not certain how love "clearly" being a factor in reproduction is derived from this statement. This doesn't refute my original comment in any way. You just transcribed her statement without explaining the xyz of it. That she says "who wants us" still doesn't change my point in any way. It doesn't magically change the fact that love still cannot be quantified. Even considering the the idea of wanting someone alone in this context is ambiguous and subjective.
***** *"I think part of what she meant by emphasizing the three-year average difference in couple's age, was to make the point that men are not purely desiring much younger women who are just fertile."* -This does not change my argument. Her claim is that words and actions are often inconsistent - that this pertains to the stated male desire for younger females not being consistent with actual behavior. To support this claim she references research that couples are made up of individuals that are about three years apart. My argument is that the research she referenced as recited concluding a three year age difference is not inconsistent with the idea that men desire younger women. Btw: The case that a male desires a "much" younger female isn't presented in this discussion. That is your own convenient qualifier. *"Nothing in what she says suggests that men do not or cannot couple with older women. So your initial interpretation was wrong."* -My example of a younger male and older female was an alternative interpretation of the research referenced by Small not an interpretation of what Small stated. To conclude my interpretation to be "wrong" one would need to present the actual referenced research and state were i was wrong. *"She could have been more clear of what she meant. However, I'm willing to bet…"* -From here on because the rest of your argument is speculative and subjective, has no grounding in evidence or fact, does not bear personal significance to the discussion and therefore not worth acknowledging.
There is strong evidence, PInker summarizes it in one of his books, that men MOST desire women in their late teens or early twenties who have a body type consistent with never having been pregnant. I.e., a body type most likely to yield lots of future offspring and unlikely to be carrying another man's child. Of course as the song goes for most of us: you can't always get what you want.
+HitomiAyumu _“I dont think you understand what quatify means.”_ -An attempt to criticize someones misunderstanding of a word while misspelling said word in question = fail. Try harder!
Breda Jake Ha! I thought you meant Steven Pinker when you mentioned a barber. Which would have been heresy. But yes, would it kill Jones to button up his shirt?
Just finished the whole thing. Jones really didn't come off well. Everyone else was genial and polite. Jones smirked and huffed and puffed his way through his reactions to each speaker. Looked foolish. Everyone else was reasonable. Pinker was in a class by himself.
Steven Pinker has my vote as the coolest scientist of our day, not to mention the easiest to listen too. Love how he puts Jones in his place over and again with immeasurable tact while displaying total respect.
I absolutely agree that there is a biological basis for appreciating beauty. All complex-brained organisms, to an extent, can appreciate a sanguine sunrise or sunset!
I even like his sculptures, I have a photograph of some of them framed on my wall. I also have his quite original book of photographs 'Nowhere in Particular'.
Surprised to see that many people thought that Pinker was impressive in this 'debate'. I thought he, and Meredith Small, were hopeless. I suspect that Steve Jones and Jonathan Miller regret agreeing to take part. As for Melvyn Bragg, why the BBC persist with him I have no idea. The quickest way to improve the debate would be to quietly usher him from the room.
The part about dyslexia and how human society today effect our brain, which evolve in a very different environment, is amazing. The condition human live today is vastly different than 200k years ago when we become anatomically modern humans so there bound to be a lot of mismatch in the way our brain ( and our body) work and the way human society work to day. This is one of many mind-blowing moment since I start to follow steven pinker work. He one of my favourite author in the morden era.
Yes! A stimulating and polite intellectual discourse among intelligent people, this is why I love youtube. It's a shame this type of broadcast doesn't air on television as often as it deserves to be.
I agree-Pinker’s performance is embarrassing whereas the real biologist, the real anthropologist, and even Jonathan Fucking Miller actually know what they are talking about.
I refuse to believe that someone can actually watch this and come away thinking that Steven Pinker was uninsightful here. It must be just a "sick burn" or something, on ideological grounds.
If you actually know a bit about evolutionary theory, which I happen to (studied it back in the day), Pinker’s stubborn simplifications are almost laughable. And not on ideological grounds-on actual scientific grounds, as the other three participants amply demonstrate even in this forum. When you happen to have studied a little history of evolution, genetics, and biology, as I have, it’s even funnier: he’s sort of a 21stC Herbert Spencer. Not really an evolutionist in his own right, but happy to cherry pick for his own, dare I say ideological?, reasons. Pinker’s long since caught Harvard Star Disease the major symptom of which is thinking you can just opine on anything-history, whatever-because you have a chair in some other field. His take on progress is both laughably Spencerian and so airport-lounge-paperback-vapid that I literally don’t know a historian of any kind (and I know a few) who hasn’t just rolled their eyes at it. Here’s a good review of his latest travesty by a real historian of the Enlightenment: www.thenation.com/article/waiting-for-steven-pinkers-enlightenment/
A "real historian" who pours scorn, at one point, on "rigid, Richard Dawkins-style atheism". So, a guy with an invisible friend. By the end of his rant, he makes a few good points about Pinker being too pro-capitalist, but Bell mostly just bristles at the criticism of intellectuals, and engages in the usual nitpicking of saying that things aren't better now because look at marker X which is going down -- ignoring the greater trend. He notices that Pinker gets to the point: the upward trends in the world since the Enlightenment, rather than droning on about the specific dead white men who wrote at the time, which is no doubt what Bell's lectures are like. Yes, yes, Bell. You are probably really smart and can quote Rousseau backwards while juggling. You've signalled that you lecture on the Enlightenment as a historian whereas Pinker is a mere psychologist. Here's your pat on the head. But meanwhile, Pinker is actually teaching the world something significant and relevant to now. You have to be pretty damn ivory-tower élitist for an intellectual like Pinker to seem anti-intellectual, populist and Breitbartian to you. Bell has managed it. And what a silly strawman to argue that he isn't an 18th-C "philosophe" on the grounds of his being unsceptical and unwitty. You have convinced me that you are indeed genuinely foolish enough to think that Pinker didn't contribute well to this discussion.
I’m a lifelong atheist-Dad was, so I went that way as a child before I could make up my own mind. Mom wasn’t-and they never fought over that for a second. Something the New Atheists-converts, almost all, and thus often more Catholic than the Pope-ought to consider. But they usually don’t because it’s not about the issues at hand: New Atheism is about narcissistic self-congratulation about how We aren’t Stupid enough to believe in Invisible Friends. You know, like a bunch of Comic Book Guys from the Simpsons telling everyone on earth how sad it is that they’re so pathetically stupid and weak. (What matters is what people do, not what they think motivates them, their beliefs. Who cares beyond a nice discussion of metaphysics? MLK, Jr believed in God. I don’t. Great; he was phenomenal. Hitchens was an atheist. So am I. Who cares? Hitch supported an out-and-out war crime in Iraq. By their fruits ye shall judge them.) You know, like the worst of religion-or any other ideology-making a big deal out of whether you’re In or Out on Dogma x, y, or z. Inevitably, we all have an ideology/worldview/framework-it’s unavoidable. The difference is to what extent such things are heuristic tools for getting a first-approximation picture of the world or some aspect of it and to what extent they are simply retaining walls in someone’s self image. And thus unquestionable. You know, like the worst of religion. New Atheism is the mirror image of the fundamentalist religion it supposedly decries, which is only to be expected, but hilarious given the endless self-congratulation they engage in, to say nothing of the fact that a key atheist, Nietzsche, famously warned that if you look into the abyss long enough, it looks into you, which you could take to mean that if you’re not careful you end up mirroring what you supposedly decry and hate. I have nothing against “popularizers” at all. It’s how one does it; God is in the details. Pinker’s deeply superficial. For all I know, and I happily grant it, he’s a great experimental psychologist. Wonderful. But he’s silly when he bumbles into other fields, and either amusing or annoying or both when he displays the arrogance he does. It’s not “elitist”-if Pinker were ignorantly opining on how to diagnose problems with a car or on how best to grow tomatoes in a garden or whatever, I’d feel the same way. Pinker or anyone: knowledge of any kind that is in fact knowledge should be respected-from building birdhouses to philosophy. Now, anyone who says that there’s been zero progress during the last 500 years is just grinding an axe, just as anyone who can look at our current state-nuclear weapons, climate disaster, etc-and think everything’s just peachy is also grinding away. Obviously, it’s a very mixed bag: tremendous possibilities, significant achievements but huge, truly existential dangers, too. I don’t even mind polemics, especially if they’re satirical or witty, but they have to be somewhat tethered to reality. Pinker’s a hedgehog, to use the Isaiah Berlin trope, not a fox. He’s got one hammer, really, and he pounds and pounds away with it. Hey, for all I know he and others who do that simply have a psychological need to remove complexity, let alone doubt. And of course the “monomaniacs” can make real progress pounding with their hammers. And, simple sells, especially when wrapped up in narcissistic culture warring. Fine, but neither I nor anyone need follow along-and if those people are going to set themselves up as Arbiters of Enlightenment-c’mon, you had better come correct then or suffer the consequences. In my view, when you’re dealing with just about anything, but certainly biology and evolution, you had better be far more of a dynamic-interaction systems-thinker, far more pluralistic and open about causality at various levels. The leading edge of evolutionary theory in our lifetimes has been evo-devo, not leghumping some 19thC Darwin-worshipping (and -simplifying, mind you, as well as -cherry-picking) adaptation-ueber-alles view of evolution long since discarded by serious thinkers. It’s so much richer a field than people have been popularly led to believe, especially with Stephen Jay Gould long gone. It’s little to do with “politics”-it’s internal to evolutionary theory. Complexity theory, all kinds of interesting stuff that stems from people like D’Arcy Thompson, Alan Turing, Sewall Wright and many, many others. The Dawkins and Pinkers of the world are hyper-reductionists; to steal a line from Woody Allen, they have some need to reduce all the beauty of the world to single fish (herring-from Love and Death). To the exclusion, mind you, of reality-the very thing they claim to see with untinted glasses, while everyone else is a fool or some kind or another. That’s my main point, not whether Gould’s father was a Marxist or anything else. I just don’t dig oversimplifications-that kind of popularization does no one any good.
Pinker the thinker's hair do looks ridiculous. It would be better fetched all off with clippers. Such an irritating mess. I think of canines every time I see it.
The problem with Pinker is he tries to sneak in evolutionary biology as possible explanations whenever he can and although he obviously acknowledges its limitations. he is over-diagnosing. It does have a big role in human health, and sexual selection but his attempt to have it explain our language, morality and cultural capacities have largely failed.
Thank goodness you posted this message. There are so many thoughtless and unintelligent people who just 'suppose' that science is not about discovery and learning and that it's just a big conspiracy to get people to follow the devil into Hell, but you seem to be someone who actually 'knows' this to be the case. Such knowledge is obviously priceless and must be used for good. Please tell how you have been spared from religious brainwashing and made able to see the truth so clearly.
I take it then that Steve Jones isn't much of an 'adaptationist'... The criticism he finishes around the thirteen minutes mark, about the Just So nature of evolutionary explanations, is very common; I think because a lot of people bridle at the sheer reach of natural selection's explanatory power. Academics in other disciplines don't like being told that their explanation of x is merely proximate and when it comes to the ultimate explanation they must defer to evolutionary biologists. Unfortunately, the universe doesn't owe any particular academic subject a kind of 'significance quota' - in the light of the theory of natural selection some subjects just turn out to be completely fucking worthless; like theology and psychoanalysis; and some subjects end up being greatly humbled; like literature, philosophy, anthropology, etc..
Thank you for posting this, I'm always interested in what Dr. Miller and Mr. Pinker had to say to say. We miss your mind Dr. Miller, you have made a profound difference in our lives. PS: To Poliphilvs's comment about the Renaissance man. Jonathan Miller disliked being called or referred to as one. Note to fact that he felt we should all be as well-versed in our lives as he.
Incidentally, anyone who has been through graduate school in mathematics can tell you that such claims of applicability are a running joke in the mathematical community. They're designed to attract funding, nothing more.
People can still learn a lot from this discussion that happened 14 years ago. A shame that it has so few views. Great display of knowledge and insight by Steven Pinker.
I'm just an interested layman in this area, here to consider various points of view and learn what I can. Why should I think myself qualified to pass a kind of judgement on this seemingly decent and well-respected academic that not even his professional colleagues would? Rather than superfluously defending Pinker's competence, I was simply challenging Polymath7 to show the rest of us why his judgement in this matter should supersede that of Pinker's professional peers. Is that so unreasonable?
Contrasting opinions dealt with in such a charming and reasonable manner (although they all agree that evolution is a fact). I really liked the outcomes and nature of this discussion. It also opened me to the wealth of information inside Steven Pinker's brain. I liked him before but it was great to see him in this free flowing debate.
The older guy forget if its Jones or Miller talking at minute 8 is doing what people who argue against evolutionary explanations do all the time: demolishing a strawman. "it can't be all evolution it has to be social as well" No shit Sherlock! No one such as Pinker would claim otherwise. The problem is that we can barely even understand the evolutionary pressures let alone the social ones. And that there are some good mathematical models (e.g. kin selection Trivers model for sibling rivalry and reciprocal altruism) we can use to quantify the evolutionary pressures where as the social causes, while of course being very significant, we currently have no way to model.
Fine; but none of that changes the fact that the public discourse cannot regard anything as positive or otherwise. Only we can. That's the way I meant it when I started that conversation, and I think you've known that all along.
i feel like the moderate did a disservice by passing one question from the gentle about "how far the evolutionary analysis could be taken to explain art .. or something" to Meredith. That question was clearly intended for Steven and I was very interested in his answer. Why interject a non participant in the line of thought purely for balance of panelists. they should be let on to finish the line of thought. any one else share this pet peeve of improper moderation?
***** Melvin Bragg interned at the BBC Department of Chairing Debates Badly (yes, it actually exists, probably), in which he was mentored to the highest standards of BBC-compliant ultra-Leftist and subjective bias by the fellow egotist Richard Dimbleby. BBC primogeniture protocols mean that Richard Dimbleby is left to tutor lesser BBC shills (midgets, BAMES, lesbians and women) who appear on Radio 4.
No, "tu quoque" doesn't apply, since you haven't given any examples of my supposed tendency toward ad hominem (apart from my attack on Polymath's character as a troll, which was my explicit intention). As for a thesis, I wasn't aware I needed one. You interrupted me (or "trolled" me, in your own formulation). I'm simply responding to your criticisms. If I had to advance a thesis, it would be that sane, mature, decent, reasonable people should stop passively tolerating over-the-top trolling. You?
27:06 Why should it absolutely have to have a selective advantage and only a selective advantage? Unless you've been educated to believe biological evolution - or the theory of - to be at the root of everything we do and are. If we don't understand the root cause of gene mutation, then we should put the brakes on. This attitude is a product of the mechanistic presumptuousness of modern education. It's certainty based on theory.
I study biology & psychology and thought I would take the evolutionary biologists side on most things, but out of them all I have to admit Steven Pinker is incredibly impressive.
E. O. Wilson was the one who really got us thinking that human behaviour was firmly biased by evolutionary forces. If cultural practices and ethical codes serve the goals of reproductive success, then we might suppose that evolution is influencing culture. How? Strong emotions are associated with instinctive drives. If a culture practice, and ethical principle supports the protection of children, we can expect that this practice or principle is highly regarded. We are prone to violence: we channel violence into fairly innocuous rituals like sports, or we channel it away from “us” towards “them”, in the training of military, police, etc. Evolutionary psychology allows for weird cultural practices to develop: sibling marriage among the Ptolemies. But we should find that these practices absorb a lot of cultural energy, are inherently instable, tend to disappear.
Some people are genuinely so. Most who promote themselves as such are not. That's been my experience. In any event, it's a simple matter to clear up: just present some evidence that your attitude of superiority is warranted by signs of actual superiority (of achievement, etc.).
I can't stand Jonathan Miller. He is a misfit, not because he is more intelligent and articulate than others, but because his replies are based on argument for the sake of argument. He is quite insincere and a bore, and while the others were making honest and genuine statements, this man seemed (as always) to be overcome with his own "uniqueness". He seems to be saying "Look at me, look at my clever use of language ...I am always going to say something different from all of you." As for Pinker, he is the most eloquent and fluent speaker of the English language after Christopher Hitchens. But I like Steve Jones too. He is the most important evolutionary biologist along with Richard Dawkins. And Professor Meredith Small was so down to earth and fresh. Loved the debate.
Think what you will. It's a data point to consider. I'm merely suggesting that calling one another idiots just isn't going to win either of us any points.
hmmmm, no mention of a Dawkins word "meme" cultural evolution - certainly the explanation of the many religions. So biological and cultural evolution "happen" Is that too simple?
Diseases may be caused by malnutrition not genetics. Most people forget this. People are born with a defects I they assume that it's genetic. In fact the mother grows a baby from a single cell with her nutrients. If she is malnourished this could (will) damage the baby. The family could have a genetic predisposition to eat a certain food which is no longer as nourishing as it once was due to soil mineral depletion. Naturopathic medicine cures many diseases by bringing nutrients into the body which are more scarce than thy once were. We have not had enough time to elevate to these environmental changes but, given supplementation we could remove many congenital disorders.
Steve Jones makes a good point but doesn't finish it, if for everything you can imagine an evolutionary explanation, then evolution is unfalsifiable. Pinker makes the retort that not all evolutionary explanations are equivalent (which is true), but that does not address the point.
what! Jones is a biologist! Pinker keeps schooling him. I don't understand the sloppiness on Jone's part. Jones keeps rolling his eyes and mugging. But Jones sputters away anyway
You are right that there would need to be such a control. However, to my knowledge, the notion that step-parents and biological parents are equivalent in their behavior towards their children has never been demonstrated. Then again, I'm not sure if step-parents are representative of the general population so that may have to be controlled for as well. But according to genetic similarity theory, one would expect such discrepancies among biological and non-biological parents to emerge.
Keep in mind that who reproduces is no linger tied to who has the most sex. Casual sex or sex with a temporary partner is usually done with contraception. Who reproduces is probably going to be determined by who has a steady income and wife/husband and a house and all that. Doctors and layers make good money and are in a place to decide to have kids and invest resources into them.
The moderator has really great 80's hair, Steve Jones looks angry, but I wonder if he has had a stroke or something (his face is sort of droopy on one side) - or is that the way he always looks?
Monogamy is something relatively recent. Even most patriarches in the Old Testament were polygamist. In many tribes people don´t get married but practise "free sex", exactly like bonobos.
Pinker takes book by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner, a writing guide, presenting views, very seriously. If one has had a look at the book, one can vividly structure and view how dearly and religiously Pinker applies every word enshrined in the book in his speaking and writing. Sense of Style by Pinker can be considered as an elaboration of the book by the abovementioned authors.
Forgive me for not understanding but could someone explain to me what does Steven Pinker mean by “a set of neural mechanisms” when defining culture 11:25?
He is making the point that human culture itself arises from the human mind, itself a product of the human brain. All of which are subject to evolutionary pressures.
I think, one of the key questions is, HOW CAN WE EVOLVE INTO A BENIGN CIVILIZATION? (If we don't, then we will murder ourselves and our habitat to extinction.) Related to this is the fundamental problem: HOW TO HELP THE MEEK INHERIT THIS EARTH? Simply stated, how do we prevent warring, dominating, loud mouthed, alpha-male genes from dominating, shaping our social and moral discourses? (i.e., How can we prevent the Wolfowitzs, Rumsfelds, Cheneys, Bushes, Blairs, Saddam Husseins, Putins, Trumps, Clintons, from driving our civilization into a despicable collection of primates?)
An interesting answer to your "How can we evolve into a benign civilization?" question might be 'fight wars' - at least in 20th century terms. If the war-like among us go to war and get killed, we ultimately become less war-like as a species from an evolutionary standpoint. I think there is a three phase effect here: prior to 1900, the most effective warmongers were evolutionary 'winners': they had lots of children. From 1900 to 2000 however, when war became industrial, those who went to war were just chewed up like so much corn in a threshing machine, and thus were LESS successful in having children than those who avoided war one way or another. Now we are entering a third phase, where war is conducted by drone and stealth, and the "loud-mouthed alpha males" can clamor for war without it engendering any actual risk to themselves.
(1of2) My point must of course be conceded at the outset, and belatedly has been. (You are obviously impotent to do the obverse.) But, to be complete (*sigh*) let us then move on to my alleged lack of decorum. You'll remember My concluding sentence was: "It is a minor hobby of mine trying to settle my *longstanding* [help,ho! italics again} vacillation whether Pinker is of *uneven* competence, or simply a psychopath" If you occasionally got your science from from the horse's mouth...
This is pure fluff -and do note that a mere unspecified accusations are literally at the very lowest level of rhetorical sophistication and place you at rock-bottom on Grahams scale of disagreement- but once you've fallen flat on your face attempting to marshal some travesty of a rejoinder to my central point -the ONLY thing of any moment here- afford me the additional amusement of a direct quote that will support your accusation of psychopathy. Am I to exceed the tact with which I'm assailed?
God, I wish this would come back to television broadcasts.
I keep coming back to watch the slam dunk reply from pinker: 12:18 to 14:32 . And that's why I thought I would make a comment here so that I can find that portion quicker myself.
@Daxton Jace Yea, have been watching on Flixzone} for years myself :D
@@curtisjulian2652 Daxton, Rory and Curtis - you should contact Flixzone, maybe they'd offer you some sort of reward for these unsolicited recommendations. I'll not be using their services, however.
I think Pinker is doing a great job demonstrating his argument
It's impossible to imagine an major American TV network even doing a watered down version of this for 5 minutes.
it is indeed very sad, because of all this ridiculous christian religious media lobby and politics.
G4L4〈T1〈P4RTY Thank "god" we got youtube, right? lol.
Bowen Zhao
well, it is of enormous help.
That's partly the reason that you have some many problems with bunk like creationism..
OMG, art. Revolutionary landscapes that are inhospitable but at a certain point became aesthetically pleasing? Um... I don't know, maybe as survival becomes less of a problem, we begin to see the unsurvivable as a challenge to be admired and surmounted? Duh. How is this not answerable by the combination of evolution and environment?
I agree. An incurable Romantic myself, I also know that whatever pleasure I take in forbidding and inhospitable landscapes is attributable to my comfortable inexperience of them. I like the look of them, but under no circumstances am I ever going there. Furthermore, I think that the kind of people who actually do go there, and climb mountains, or fly to the moon or whatever, lack imagination. I get enough of an adrenaline rush merely looking at pictures of places that no one but an exotic bacterium makes a home in.
James Roach It is unimaginable: the lack of imagination in he who wondered what was over the mountain, ventured there and painted it, dissected it, or sampled it, so that we, the imaginative, didn't have to bother.
+karen straughan Problem is, those things can partly be explained by evolutionary theory, but evolutionary theory will never fully explain satisfactorily what is all connected with certain ideas within theories of art and literature, let alone if these theories are valid. There is simply a point where you can well explain the crude basics of why we might have such a desire, but you will come at a point where evolutionary theory is simply not fit anymore to explain the complexity that goes along with it. Everyone who thinks this has probably never taken an art/literature/sociology class whatsoever. There are, as Steven Pinker said, biological bases for what can occure within culture but there are developments within the history of art and literature for example that can't be fully explained by biology at all. Biology is a basis for why things are possible at all, but culture is its own phenomenon that requires a distinct analysis. Surely you can explain why it is biologically possible for us to like certain landscapes, but you won't explain the shifts between certain predominant artistic devices, epochs and styles the shift from classicism to romanticism, the emergence of modernism etc.
+karen straughan All nature is beautiful to us. I don't think it's right to single out inhospitable landscapes as opposed to others.
+karen straughan Interesting point.
I wonder if the woman on the panel, when she talks about the possible propensity for women to desire multiple partners, is talking about concealed ovulation? I've seen many people describe concealed ovulation as a strategy on the part of women's biology to essentially exploit "beta bucks and alpha fucks"--that is, to marry the high-earning accountant while having babies with the pool boy. While this situation is, IMO, facilitated by concealed ovulation, I don't think this is the reason concealed ovulation exists in human females.
If we are to consider the U of Tennessee researcher who demonstrated by a mathematical model the first hominid "sexual revolution", which mirrors the consortship behaviors of subordinate male baboons and chimpanzees with their favored females, concealed ovulation may have occurred while we were still primarily a tournament species (like the chimp and baboon).
THIS researcher posited that millions of years ago our hominid grandmothers began opting for "good fathers" rather than the "best genes". In baboon society, some females also make this choice. A subordinate male will typically make overtures by helping a female with her offspring, sharing food, being affectionate, lavishing attention and investment on her and her young. She rewards him with sex to keep his attention and investment, BUT, the obviousness of estrus prevents her from providing him with many reproductive opportunities. When she's in estrus, the dominant male engages in mate-guarding. Some baboon females have demonstrated a wide variety of strategies to circumvent this mate-guarding instinct on the part of the dominant male--distractions, attrition, diversions, etc. However, this female would need apply none of these strategies to exercise her choice if her ovulation was concealed.
The idea that sex is a thing that should be done in private is something of a human universal, unlike pretty much any other species. If the first monogamous couples were, essentially, individuals cheating on the alpha male (and if the price for being caught was getting your block knocked off), would this not facilitate a universal or near universal understanding of sex as something that should not be done out in the open where anyone and everyone can see?
Female sexual crypsis (concealed fertility) would only have assisted in the transition of our hominid ancestors from tournament to a unique brand of egalitarian monogamy. Unlike other monogamous social animals, there are no prohibitions on subordinate members of the group mating (as with wolves or marmosets, where only the dominant pair have mating rights, and all others' celibacy is aggressively policed).
I'm actually of the opinion that many of the "signs" some researchers use to "prove" that we're inherently polygamous are actually the very things that propelled us from a tournament model toward what our most successful societies have employed for a long time (egalitarian monogamy). Concealed ovulation may not be a result of female cuckolding behaviors (though it does facilitate them), but the result of the initial success of egalitarian monogamy and the female prioritization of "fatherly investment" in offspring.
If polyandry were a norm, men's testicles would be HUGE. I'm sorry, but they would. When you look at promiscuous animals where male intra-sexual competition is non-violent (as compared with tournament models like Mountain Gorillas), you find ginormous testicles and high sperm counts. Human males are nothing special in this regard. Given concealed ovulation, the fact that human groups do not expel males at maturity (so there is always the danger of female infidelity by opportunity), if females had a propensity to the kind of polyandry (concurrent, as opposed to serial), men's testicles would be as big as their heads. But they're not. Because humans are not inherently polyandrous--we came from a polygynous tournament species, and our sexualities evolved to facilitate egalitarian monogamy.
Incidentally, some 43% of college aged men in the US have had a coercive sexual experience inflicted on them. Half of those experiences were coercive or forced completed sexual intercourse. 95% of the reports indicate a female perpetrator.
When feminists talk about college women and the "rape epidemic" they use "scary stats" like 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 college women have been victims of sexual assault. The number for men sexually assaulted by women is nearly 1 in 2, and the number of completed rapes by women on men is 1 in 5.
The very fact that few people even know about this, let alone care, only reinforces Steven Pinker's point--that women are more likely to care about quality in a sexual partner, and men about quantity. While I won't tell any man that he should not be traumatized by his experience of rape at the hands of a woman, the fact that men seem more capable of "shrugging off" being raped by Alice the Goon than women are to do the same when their ass is groped by Ron Jeremy's uglier cousin tells me that women are MUCH more choosy than men when it comes to sexual partners.
Hi there Karen
karen straughan As men appear, when highlighted, to shrug it off, as you say, women appeared to do so before.
What you seem to accept, in suggesting that men aren't so bothered by the rape upon their person because they tend, more than women, to like it however they can get it, is that a handsome rapist (Ted Bundy, for example) was a far less harmful mass rapist and murderer than a squinty, sweaty and inelegant one (Ed Gein? I don't know).
When there's some capital in appealing to an authority (demagogue or law enforcer), men may well end up much more like women in the desire to report rapes and receive a form of feedback that feels desirable.
No one used to care much about women being raped, so they themselves either didn't care, or didn't care to say. They may have asked, as men may be asking themselves now, "What would be the point?"
It's impossible to make the assumption that men aren't as deeply traumatised by rape as are women, though it is just as comfortable and unchallenged for feminists and comradely Leftist cuckoos to make precisely that assumption today as it was for Victorian society to dismiss contemporaneous rape of women as being of little emotional or moral consequence.
Chauvinism evolved in this way, but not as much as some among us like to think. Men suffered just as much under the Victorian sensibility as women, yet it is simply the height of uncouthness to say so. Men were shot if they didn't go and die in wholesale warfare for what they were assured was the protection and freedom of their wives and children (and it was women who assured them most convincingly of their duty). Women were raped and told it was a legal and bearable component of marriage. Everyone can suffer from these constructs and divisions in one way or another. Men suffered to see the women suffer (whether they sensed it or not), and vice versa, and so on and so forth ad infinitum in a diffusion of ways.
If it were true that men only suffer from rape technically and, potentially, physically, but not psychologically, then that can be equally true for women. What's good or bad for the goose is good or bad for the gander.
Perhaps I should have referred to the biological categories of 'male' and 'female', as the terms 'man' and 'woman' are more garbled concepts nowadays than they ever were, but I can't be bothered going back and finding them.
Supper Time "No one used to care much about women being raped, so they themselves either didn't care, or didn't care to say. They may have asked, as men may be asking themselves now, "What would be the point?""
Rape [of women] used to be a capital crime. People cared so little about women getting raped that they used to execute men who raped women. Gotcha.
Your Ted Bundy analogy is just... weird. The vast majority of rapists (outside of wartime) don't kill their victims. In fact, RAINN advises women to verbally and physically resist rapists because it is the best strategy for preventing an attempted rape from becoming a completed one, and because there is, in the vast majority of cases, a ceiling of violence above which a male perpetrator will not go.
"If it were true that men only suffer from rape technically and, potentially, physically, but not psychologically, then that can be equally true for women. What's good or bad for the goose is good or bad for the gander."
Yes, yes, and evolution stopped at the neck. And cultural attitudes have nothing to do with individual biological realities and the attitudes they engender, either.
I also never said that men don't suffer psychologically from rape. But the reality is that their self-reported psychological trauma is, on average, much lower than what women victims report.
In my opinion, the negative practical and material consequences today for men who are raped by women are MUCH higher than for women who are raped by men. There are almost no negative practical and material consequences for women--most women are on long term birth control, and they have access to abortion if they fall pregnant from a rape. Having been raped will not destroy a woman's ability to find a male partner, it will not cause an employer to toss her resume in the trash. Given the way the media portrays the rape of women, any huge stigma they feel is internal, not external.
But boys raped by adult women at age 14 can be made to pay child support to their rapists out of their paper routes. A court ruling like that can completely derail a young man's life, his ability to access education, his ability to find a female partner, etc.
In the end, there's only getting of reality, not getting of people.
The fact that, at some point in history, somewhere, rape may have been a capital crime, takes no account of the widespread acceptance of rape (in the absolute sense of sex forced on a person against his will). You may not have knowledge of specific law, but it was not illegal for a man to force sex on his wife (which was rape, despite not being recognised in statute).
I won't say, "Gotcha," except in the form of saying, 'I won't say, "Gotcha," except in the form of saying, 'I won't say, "Gotcha," except in the form of saying, 'I won't
That sentence became trapped in a loop, but you know what I mean. Your fault.
Supper Time There are some things you might not know about history and the law around marriage. Both men and women were entitled to a sex life within marriage. In the Middle Ages in Europe, one of the few grounds for divorce a woman could bring was if her husband couldn't, or wouldn't, have sex with her. Such an accused man would actually have to demonstrate before a panel of elder women that he could get and maintain an erection if he didn't want to be divorced.
"Drop trou and testify!" But you wouldn't know anything about those laws, and how they worked in both directions.
This attitude is also reflected in Sharia-based family law in Iran, where a man's impotence or withholding of sex is grounds for divorce--and in such a case, that man will be forced to pay out the entire remainder of the Mehrieh (bride gift--usually several years' average wages), plus monthly alimony, to his ex wife, on pain of prison. Quite the incentive to give your wife sex when she wants it, no?
In 2010, a man in France was forced to pay the equivalent of $10,000USD to his ex wife for not providing her with enough sex during their marriage. This judgment was based on the legal understanding that marriage is a sexual relationship and that both parties have an expectation of sex when they enter into it. But I've never heard of a man suing his ex wife for not putting out enough, let alone winning.
Please get some reality.
It is such a pleasure to listen to an intelligent conversation like this. Thank you BBC. I wish we had more of this in America.
Bredah Jake Actually, he's Canadian :)
Canada is in North America.
The USA isn't pedantically, America.
Yes! This came up to try and I was a big fan of Jonathan Miller. I thought to just get the tenor of the conversation and ended up glued to it all the way. What intelligent, articulate people who were also polite and considerate of each other.
Steven pinker is a rock star ......brilliant mind he has got......genius even
With Pinker's articulateness I sometimes wonder whether it's spontaneous or prepared, or a mix of both. E.g. his very first statement here "...the fact that people would rather have sex than, say, bump foreheads or rub an elbow against a knee, surely is related to the fact that sex leads to reproduction whereas those other activities don't". Does he come up with those things on the fly, or were the questions rehearsed, or is it that he's made this exact statement 27 times before? I mean, normally you would at least expect him to make some more pauses between the words in order to give himself time to actually think up all those flowery (but still quite fitting and accurate) metaphors, allegories and rhetorical devices. If this is all spontaneous -- well, kudos.
I think he's just freakishly intelligent. One of the most intelligent speakers I've ever heard. He can just roll off these incredibly eloquent statements on Twitter at high speed also.
he came to do an unscripted talk at my college, and he summarised all of the work he has ever done in his career within 45 minutes in an off-the-cuff extended speech. it was like being caught in a tornado of pure information, he is something special. for me, he's beyond my envy, i can only admire him and feel awe.
I've never been in a situation with even close to as much prestige as this talk or others Pinker has given but I've been on conference panels and similar kinds of venues and what I always do is try to anticipate the questions and points I most want to make and have a few rehearsed answers ready to go. Also, you do these things enough and you tend to get similar questions and have more or less predigested answers stored and ready to go.
Well, my comment was nothing to do with his answers to questions, which were indeed fairly generic and easy to respond to. It was his summary of every topic he has ever published a book about that astounded me, he usually just talks about his latest book in depth so he said he found it a nice change to just riff off a list of topics he'd written on the back of a napkin.
I'd guess he has come up with most of his one-liners or concise summaries when teaching (and preparing for it) and honed them even more when writing.
Geniuses Pinker and Miller aren't spotted together much which is a shame - they're both excellent. And Dr. Miller is STILL ALIVE. He's like 200 years old now! Steven still rocks too. D.A., J.D., NYC
Pinker is fucking brilliant!
That’s no joke
Steven Pinker is 30 IQ points above everyone else. He’s also got a charm and lack of pomposity absent in some of the other panel members.
While a definite misevaluation of Jonathan Miller's intellect. I fear the remark may be true of the other two; at least by what was demonstrated here.
Agreed.The other two male panelists ooze arrogance (Jones) and pomposity (Miller), probably as a desperate reaction to being outclassed intellectually.
Pinker killed with stats.
Data is power
"What women _say_ they like or _say_ they do, and what they _actually_ do, are two different things"
Oh we know that, sister. Believe me, we know that.
Steve Pinker slapping Steve Jones around and around!!!
Man, is it a pleasure to listean to Pinker...
+Gobiniu
"Hamer's results were robustly replicated in 2012 in a large,
comprehensive multi-center genetic linkage study of male sexual
orientation conducted by several independent groups of researchers"
So he was completely right, decades before (I think, judging from his hairstyle).
I couldn't sleep last night, and ended up listening to hours of the audiobook, _The Better Angels of our Nature_. His words are pure gold.
On this panel, he and Miller are the only hard-hitters. Jones, in particular, was virtually always wrong.
Pinker simply rocked!
Pinker is on another level
Agreed. Much lower than the others.
@@MrJustinRobertson in what way exactly
Great panel, but I just can't help thinking that Pinker stands head and shoulders above the rest.
+Mechanics 0f Thought EXACTLY! The guy is freakin brilliant, and in fact, Dean Hamer's hypothesis was found to be completely true.
"Hamer's results were robustly replicated in 2012 in a large,
comprehensive multi-center genetic linkage study of male sexual
orientation conducted by several independent groups of researchers"
Most of the time hypothesis like that are shot down over time, but Pinker was able to understand it enough to bet on it and double down when challenged. What a mind on that guy.
+Mechanics 0f Thought I agree. He actually showed up armed with a solid body of research to cite on the subject. Everyone else was kind of shooting from the hip.
Jonathan Miller is just as intelligent and intellectual. He's also a polymath.
Neil McIntosh nowhere near the eloquent communicator though. And thats in many ways a more important type of intelligence. Even highly intelligent people can be stifled by lack of communication skills
Take renfroe proxmire, a brillian musician who can hardly burp a sentence out, so he has trouble expressing his ideas verbally. Doesnt matter much with music, but hell.never be a good teacher.
People go on and on about Stephen Fry being clever, now this guy Jonathan Miller, he really is clever!
From what year is this? Steven Pinker doesn't seem get old! o.0
1998. He was 44 then, the age that I am now. He has fared much better then I. :(
*3:45** "…men may desire younger women …research shows that couples are made up of individuals that are about three years apart."*
-"Younger" doesnt nessesserily mean younger than the age of the male partner. It could simply mean that men prefer youth. If a 20 year old male couples with a 23 year old female although there exists a 3 year age difference the female is still youthful / younger in terms of average life span.
*3:53**"…women may want men of higher status or a lot of money but pretty much we end up with who loves us…"*
-I couldn't disagree more! That statement alone almost disqualifies her from the discussion. "Love" is not quantifiable. Also the idea of marriage on the basis of "love" is a quite a recent concept and is not a universal idea even today. Marriage traditionally was an exchange of male labor/resources in exchange for access to female reproduction and or family-related wealth.
*****
*"She was dispelling the common misconception that men ultimately desire 'younger' women"*
-3:40 Prof. Small starts by saying "…what humans do and what they say are two different things." She isn't "dispelling" a conception that men desire younger women. She is saying that although they may desire younger women, a younger women isn't necessarily who they reproduce with.
*"And by 'younger', the misconception is much younger, like earliest fertile age."*
-Again that men desire "younger" women isn't being refuted. To say it is a "misconception" on the basis of Prof. Smalls analysis in this clip is inaccurate.
*"She didn't clarify that she meant the average couple of a few years apart must be of an older male and a younger female, but it could likely be the other way around."*
-I agree which is why the example i gave in my original post was of a younger male (age 20) and an older female (age 23).
*"You conveniently left out the bit where she said "we end up with who loves us OR who WANTS us..." So "love" is clearly a factor today"*
-I am not certain how love "clearly" being a factor in reproduction is derived from this statement. This doesn't refute my original comment in any way. You just transcribed her statement without explaining the xyz of it. That she says "who wants us" still doesn't change my point in any way. It doesn't magically change the fact that love still cannot be quantified. Even considering the the idea of wanting someone alone in this context is ambiguous and subjective.
*****
*"I think part of what she meant by emphasizing the three-year average difference in couple's age, was to make the point that men are not purely desiring much younger women who are just fertile."*
-This does not change my argument. Her claim is that words and actions are often inconsistent - that this pertains to the stated male desire for younger females not being consistent with actual behavior. To support this claim she references research that couples are made up of individuals that are about three years apart. My argument is that the research she referenced as recited concluding a three year age difference is not inconsistent with the idea that men desire younger women. Btw: The case that a male desires a "much" younger female isn't presented in this discussion. That is your own convenient qualifier.
*"Nothing in what she says suggests that men do not or cannot couple with older women. So your initial interpretation was wrong."*
-My example of a younger male and older female was an alternative interpretation of the research referenced by Small not an interpretation of what Small stated. To conclude my interpretation to be "wrong" one would need to present the actual referenced research and state were i was wrong.
*"She could have been more clear of what she meant. However, I'm willing to bet…"*
-From here on because the rest of your argument is speculative and subjective, has no grounding in evidence or fact, does not bear personal significance to the discussion and therefore not worth acknowledging.
There is strong evidence, PInker summarizes it in one of his books, that men MOST desire women in their late teens or early twenties who have a body type consistent with never having been pregnant. I.e., a body type most likely to yield lots of future offspring and unlikely to be carrying another man's child. Of course as the song goes for most of us: you can't always get what you want.
The Paradox I dont think you understand what quatify means. Even as a convenient metaphore, it doesnt fit this context.
+HitomiAyumu
_“I dont think you understand what quatify means.”_
-An attempt to criticize someones misunderstanding of a word while misspelling said word in question = fail. Try harder!
That Steve Jones guy seemed to have a bit of an attitude. Sneered a lot
Breda Jake Ha! I thought you meant Steven Pinker when you mentioned a barber. Which would have been heresy. But yes, would it kill Jones to button up his shirt?
His lips are too small too.
He has a naturally lopsided mouth. He can't help it.
stroke? it is constant. looks neurological
Pinker is a fucking Jedi, lol.
Imagine steve pinker and robert sapolsky having a chat at the same table, darn those are geniuses
They can express themselves so well without being boring.
Did Melvyn Bragg always look like Michael Palin in character...
Just finished the whole thing. Jones really didn't come off well. Everyone else was genial and polite. Jones smirked and huffed and puffed his way through his reactions to each speaker. Looked foolish. Everyone else was reasonable. Pinker was in a class by himself.
Steven Pinker has my vote as the coolest scientist of our day, not to mention the easiest to listen too. Love how he puts Jones in his place over and again with immeasurable tact while displaying total respect.
I absolutely agree that there is a biological basis for appreciating beauty. All complex-brained organisms, to an extent, can appreciate a sanguine sunrise or sunset!
Johnny Miller!!! Yay! My all time number 1 smart guy!
I even like his sculptures, I have a photograph of some of them framed on my wall.
I also have his quite original book of photographs 'Nowhere in Particular'.
YASSS Pinker SLAY
Surprised to see that many people thought that Pinker was impressive in this 'debate'. I thought he, and Meredith Small, were hopeless. I suspect that Steve Jones and Jonathan Miller regret agreeing to take part. As for Melvyn Bragg, why the BBC persist with him I have no idea. The quickest way to improve the debate would be to quietly usher him from the room.
Great talk. They all had something interesting to add, but Pinker is on another level. He could have carried the the conversation himself.
Check out Steve Jones' facial expressions when young handsome genius, Steve Pinker, dominates these older theories.
ha! I'd like to
be described that way! But yes, Pinker steals the show.
The part about dyslexia and how human society today effect our brain, which evolve in a very different environment, is amazing. The condition human live today is vastly different than 200k years ago when we become anatomically modern humans so there bound to be a lot of mismatch in the way our brain ( and our body) work and the way human society work to day. This is one of many mind-blowing moment since I start to follow steven pinker work. He one of my favourite author in the morden era.
This is so incredibly refreshing we need more of this
Pinker is a legend.
Pinker is the man
he absolutly is...brilliant mind and able to express it
Joe Schmoe Ignorance.
Ignorance is your failure to learn anything other than what BS poses for science these days and the failure to think abstractly.
Joe Schmoe You're ignorant,. End of story.
Atheism is reality..
Deal with it.
Atheism is a belief nothing more. Bug off shithead. I can roll in muck just like you ignorant atheist pig.
Yes! A stimulating and polite intellectual discourse among intelligent people, this is why I love youtube. It's a shame this type of broadcast doesn't air on television as often as it deserves to be.
The large knowledge gap between Steven Pinker and the others make this almost painfull to watch.
I agree-Pinker’s performance is embarrassing whereas the real biologist, the real anthropologist, and even Jonathan Fucking Miller actually know what they are talking about.
I refuse to believe that someone can actually watch this and come away thinking that Steven Pinker was uninsightful here. It must be just a "sick burn" or something, on ideological grounds.
If you actually know a bit about evolutionary theory, which I happen to (studied it back in the day), Pinker’s stubborn simplifications are almost laughable. And not on ideological grounds-on actual scientific grounds, as the other three participants amply demonstrate even in this forum. When you happen to have studied a little history of evolution, genetics, and biology, as I have, it’s even funnier: he’s sort of a 21stC Herbert Spencer. Not really an evolutionist in his own right, but happy to cherry pick for his own, dare I say ideological?, reasons. Pinker’s long since caught Harvard Star Disease the major symptom of which is thinking you can just opine on anything-history, whatever-because you have a chair in some other field. His take on progress is both laughably Spencerian and so airport-lounge-paperback-vapid that I literally don’t know a historian of any kind (and I know a few) who hasn’t just rolled their eyes at it.
Here’s a good review of his latest travesty by a real historian of the Enlightenment: www.thenation.com/article/waiting-for-steven-pinkers-enlightenment/
A "real historian" who pours scorn, at one point, on "rigid, Richard Dawkins-style atheism". So, a guy with an invisible friend.
By the end of his rant, he makes a few good points about Pinker being too pro-capitalist, but Bell mostly just bristles at the criticism of intellectuals, and engages in the usual nitpicking of saying that things aren't better now because look at marker X which is going down -- ignoring the greater trend. He notices that Pinker gets to the point: the upward trends in the world since the Enlightenment, rather than droning on about the specific dead white men who wrote at the time, which is no doubt what Bell's lectures are like. Yes, yes, Bell. You are probably really smart and can quote Rousseau backwards while juggling. You've signalled that you lecture on the Enlightenment as a historian whereas Pinker is a mere psychologist. Here's your pat on the head. But meanwhile, Pinker is actually teaching the world something significant and relevant to now.
You have to be pretty damn ivory-tower élitist for an intellectual like Pinker to seem anti-intellectual, populist and Breitbartian to you. Bell has managed it. And what a silly strawman to argue that he isn't an 18th-C "philosophe" on the grounds of his being unsceptical and unwitty.
You have convinced me that you are indeed genuinely foolish enough to think that Pinker didn't contribute well to this discussion.
I’m a lifelong atheist-Dad was, so I went that way as a child before I could make up my own mind. Mom wasn’t-and they never fought over that for a second. Something the New Atheists-converts, almost all, and thus often more Catholic than the Pope-ought to consider.
But they usually don’t because it’s not about the issues at hand: New Atheism is about narcissistic self-congratulation about how We aren’t Stupid enough to believe in Invisible Friends. You know, like a bunch of Comic Book Guys from the Simpsons telling everyone on earth how sad it is that they’re so pathetically stupid and weak. (What matters is what people do, not what they think motivates them, their beliefs. Who cares beyond a nice discussion of metaphysics? MLK, Jr believed in God. I don’t. Great; he was phenomenal. Hitchens was an atheist. So am I. Who cares? Hitch supported an out-and-out war crime in Iraq. By their fruits ye shall judge them.)
You know, like the worst of religion-or any other ideology-making a big deal out of whether you’re In or Out on Dogma x, y, or z. Inevitably, we all have an ideology/worldview/framework-it’s unavoidable. The difference is to what extent such things are heuristic tools for getting a first-approximation picture of the world or some aspect of it and to what extent they are simply retaining walls in someone’s self image. And thus unquestionable. You know, like the worst of religion. New Atheism is the mirror image of the fundamentalist religion it supposedly decries, which is only to be expected, but hilarious given the endless self-congratulation they engage in, to say nothing of the fact that a key atheist, Nietzsche, famously warned that if you look into the abyss long enough, it looks into you, which you could take to mean that if you’re not careful you end up mirroring what you supposedly decry and hate.
I have nothing against “popularizers” at all. It’s how one does it; God is in the details. Pinker’s deeply superficial. For all I know, and I happily grant it, he’s a great experimental psychologist. Wonderful. But he’s silly when he bumbles into other fields, and either amusing or annoying or both when he displays the arrogance he does.
It’s not “elitist”-if Pinker were ignorantly opining on how to diagnose problems with a car or on how best to grow tomatoes in a garden or whatever, I’d feel the same way. Pinker or anyone: knowledge of any kind that is in fact knowledge should be respected-from building birdhouses to philosophy.
Now, anyone who says that there’s been zero progress during the last 500 years is just grinding an axe, just as anyone who can look at our current state-nuclear weapons, climate disaster, etc-and think everything’s just peachy is also grinding away. Obviously, it’s a very mixed bag: tremendous possibilities, significant achievements but huge, truly existential dangers, too. I don’t even mind polemics, especially if they’re satirical or witty, but they have to be somewhat tethered to reality.
Pinker’s a hedgehog, to use the Isaiah Berlin trope, not a fox. He’s got one hammer, really, and he pounds and pounds away with it. Hey, for all I know he and others who do that simply have a psychological need to remove complexity, let alone doubt. And of course the “monomaniacs” can make real progress pounding with their hammers. And, simple sells, especially when wrapped up in narcissistic culture warring. Fine, but neither I nor anyone need follow along-and if those people are going to set themselves up as Arbiters of Enlightenment-c’mon, you had better come correct then or suffer the consequences.
In my view, when you’re dealing with just about anything, but certainly biology and evolution, you had better be far more of a dynamic-interaction systems-thinker, far more pluralistic and open about causality at various levels. The leading edge of evolutionary theory in our lifetimes has been evo-devo, not leghumping some 19thC Darwin-worshipping (and -simplifying, mind you, as well as -cherry-picking) adaptation-ueber-alles view of evolution long since discarded by serious thinkers. It’s so much richer a field than people have been popularly led to believe, especially with Stephen Jay Gould long gone. It’s little to do with “politics”-it’s internal to evolutionary theory. Complexity theory, all kinds of interesting stuff that stems from people like D’Arcy Thompson, Alan Turing, Sewall Wright and many, many others. The Dawkins and Pinkers of the world are hyper-reductionists; to steal a line from Woody Allen, they have some need to reduce all the beauty of the world to single fish (herring-from Love and Death). To the exclusion, mind you, of reality-the very thing they claim to see with untinted glasses, while everyone else is a fool or some kind or another.
That’s my main point, not whether Gould’s father was a Marxist or anything else. I just don’t dig oversimplifications-that kind of popularization does no one any good.
Pinker the thinker's hair do looks ridiculous. It would be better fetched all off with clippers. Such an irritating mess. I think of canines every time I see it.
The problem with Pinker is he tries to sneak in evolutionary biology as possible explanations whenever he can and although he obviously acknowledges its limitations. he is over-diagnosing. It does have a big role in human health, and sexual selection but his attempt to have it explain our language, morality and cultural capacities have largely failed.
Thank goodness you posted this message. There are so many thoughtless and unintelligent people who just 'suppose' that science is not about discovery and learning and that it's just a big conspiracy to get people to follow the devil into Hell, but you seem to be someone who actually 'knows' this to be the case. Such knowledge is obviously priceless and must be used for good. Please tell how you have been spared from religious brainwashing and made able to see the truth so clearly.
I would like to add: He seems like he would be a gentle lover.
Why aren't there government funded, televised debates of this caliber, weekly?
I take it then that Steve Jones isn't much of an 'adaptationist'...
The criticism he finishes around the thirteen minutes mark, about the Just So nature of evolutionary explanations, is very common; I think because a lot of people bridle at the sheer reach of natural selection's explanatory power.
Academics in other disciplines don't like being told that their explanation of x is merely proximate and when it comes to the ultimate explanation they must defer to evolutionary biologists. Unfortunately, the universe doesn't owe any particular academic subject a kind of 'significance quota' - in the light of the theory of natural selection some subjects just turn out to be completely fucking worthless; like theology and psychoanalysis; and some subjects end up being greatly humbled; like literature, philosophy, anthropology, etc..
"A lot of people bridle at the sheer reach of natural selection's explanatory powers" For good reasons given so much cannot be explained by it.
14:02 the face of OWNED
I can't decide what aspect of Steven is the most gorgeous and captivating; his intellect, his voice or his hair.
Unreal eh. I watched this and lapped it up like my cat on my leftover cereal milk at breakfast. I could listen to Pinker all day.
Pinker holds his own within a stellar cast.
Evolutionary Psychology is unfortunately so fucking underrated, even though it is one of the most important and fundamental.
Dude, huge ups for posting this. Pinker's just too constrained in his thinking; the others are very interesting.
Thank you for posting this, I'm always interested in what Dr. Miller and Mr. Pinker had to say to say. We miss your mind Dr. Miller, you have made a profound difference in our lives. PS: To Poliphilvs's comment about the Renaissance man. Jonathan Miller disliked being called or referred to as one. Note to fact that he felt we should all be as well-versed in our lives as he.
Pinker was the only one who knew anything.
I just love Steven Pinker's mind.
How have I not heard of Steven Pinker before? What the fuck is my life?
how does anyone on this panel besides Pinker even have a job?
+iii How does PINKER have a job? He's such a bore.
One of the leading social scientists in North America. It is a pity that you aren't smart enough to see that and must be entertained instead.
They are all academics, including P:inker. What kind of stupid question is that?
Well, which of the above were you doing at the time? Or was it all of them?
I apologize for the period splice. I was joking before, but I actually am currently excessively multitasking.
Incidentally, anyone who has been through graduate school in mathematics can tell you that such claims of applicability are a running joke in the mathematical community. They're designed to attract funding, nothing more.
People can still learn a lot from this discussion that happened 14 years ago. A shame that it has so few views. Great display of knowledge and insight by Steven Pinker.
Absolutely brilliant talk. I wish there was more of this.
I'm just an interested layman in this area, here to consider various points of view and learn what I can. Why should I think myself qualified to pass a kind of judgement on this seemingly decent and well-respected academic that not even his professional colleagues would? Rather than superfluously defending Pinker's competence, I was simply challenging Polymath7 to show the rest of us why his judgement in this matter should supersede that of Pinker's professional peers. Is that so unreasonable?
Dat hairdo...
Contrasting opinions dealt with in such a charming and reasonable manner (although they all agree that evolution is a fact). I really liked the outcomes and nature of this discussion. It also opened me to the wealth of information inside Steven Pinker's brain. I liked him before but it was great to see him in this free flowing debate.
Pinker is a genius
Kevin Keegan is a lot smarter than I thought!
The older guy forget if its Jones or Miller talking at minute 8 is doing what people who argue against evolutionary explanations do all the time: demolishing a strawman. "it can't be all evolution it has to be social as well" No shit Sherlock! No one such as Pinker would claim otherwise. The problem is that we can barely even understand the evolutionary pressures let alone the social ones. And that there are some good mathematical models (e.g. kin selection Trivers model for sibling rivalry and reciprocal altruism) we can use to quantify the evolutionary pressures where as the social causes, while of course being very significant, we currently have no way to model.
Fine; but none of that changes the fact that the public discourse cannot regard anything as positive or otherwise. Only we can. That's the way I meant it when I started that conversation, and I think you've known that all along.
He is a beautiful man both inside and out.
Love the hair!
i feel like the moderate did a disservice by passing one question from the gentle about "how far the evolutionary analysis could be taken to explain art .. or something" to Meredith. That question was clearly intended for Steven and I was very interested in his answer. Why interject a non participant in the line of thought purely for balance of panelists. they should be let on to finish the line of thought. any one else share this pet peeve of improper moderation?
***** Melvin Bragg interned at the BBC Department of Chairing Debates Badly (yes, it actually exists, probably), in which he was mentored to the highest standards of BBC-compliant ultra-Leftist and subjective bias by the fellow egotist Richard Dimbleby.
BBC primogeniture protocols mean that Richard Dimbleby is left to tutor
lesser BBC shills (midgets, BAMES, lesbians and women) who appear on
Radio 4.
No, "tu quoque" doesn't apply, since you haven't given any examples of my supposed tendency toward ad hominem (apart from my attack on Polymath's character as a troll, which was my explicit intention). As for a thesis, I wasn't aware I needed one. You interrupted me (or "trolled" me, in your own formulation). I'm simply responding to your criticisms. If I had to advance a thesis, it would be that sane, mature, decent, reasonable people should stop passively tolerating over-the-top trolling. You?
It'd be quite nice if Jonathan Miller spoke a little more sense and a little less flowery rhetoric.
27:06 Why should it absolutely have to have a selective advantage and only a selective advantage? Unless you've been educated to believe biological evolution - or the theory of - to be at the root of everything we do and are. If we don't understand the root cause of gene mutation, then we should put the brakes on. This attitude is a product of the mechanistic presumptuousness of modern education. It's certainty based on theory.
I study biology & psychology and thought I would take the evolutionary biologists side on most things, but out of them all I have to admit Steven Pinker is incredibly impressive.
Pinker, the master.
E. O. Wilson was the one who really got us thinking that human behaviour was firmly biased by evolutionary forces. If cultural practices and ethical codes serve the goals of reproductive success, then we might suppose that evolution is influencing culture. How? Strong emotions are associated with instinctive drives. If a culture practice, and ethical principle supports the protection of children, we can expect that this practice or principle is highly regarded. We are prone to violence: we channel violence into fairly innocuous rituals like sports, or we channel it away from “us” towards “them”, in the training of military, police, etc.
Evolutionary psychology allows for weird cultural practices to develop: sibling marriage among the Ptolemies. But we should find that these practices absorb a lot of cultural energy, are inherently instable, tend to disappear.
Me and the boys at lunch break:
Some people are genuinely so. Most who promote themselves as such are not. That's been my experience. In any event, it's a simple matter to clear up: just present some evidence that your attitude of superiority is warranted by signs of actual superiority (of achievement, etc.).
Pinker just rocks! Fucking awesome!
I can't stand Jonathan Miller. He is a misfit, not because he is more intelligent and articulate than others, but because his replies are based on argument for the sake of argument. He is quite insincere and a bore, and while the others were making honest and genuine statements, this man seemed (as always) to be overcome with his own "uniqueness". He seems to be saying "Look at me, look at my clever use of language ...I am always going to say something different from all of you." As for Pinker, he is the most eloquent and fluent speaker of the English language after Christopher Hitchens. But I like Steve Jones too. He is the most important evolutionary biologist along with Richard Dawkins. And Professor Meredith Small was so down to earth and fresh. Loved the debate.
Think what you will. It's a data point to consider. I'm merely suggesting that calling one another idiots just isn't going to win either of us any points.
Now that was one classy debate. Good old Melvin.
woefully outdated - bordering on ignorance mixed with incredible hubris and arrogance - this is Pinker, your king of pop-psychology
hmmmm, no mention of a Dawkins word "meme" cultural evolution - certainly the explanation of the many religions. So biological and cultural evolution "happen" Is that too simple?
Damn. Isn't youtube great? All of these great archives from time immemorial. This looks like early -mid 80s.
Diseases may be caused by malnutrition not genetics. Most people forget this. People are born with a defects I they assume that it's genetic.
In fact the mother grows a baby from a single cell with her nutrients. If she is malnourished this could (will) damage the baby.
The family could have a genetic predisposition to eat a certain food which is no longer as nourishing as it once was due to soil mineral depletion.
Naturopathic medicine cures many diseases by bringing nutrients into the body which are more scarce than thy once were.
We have not had enough time to elevate to these environmental changes but, given supplementation we could remove many congenital disorders.
Steve Jones makes a good point but doesn't finish it, if for everything you can imagine an evolutionary explanation, then evolution is unfalsifiable. Pinker makes the retort that not all evolutionary explanations are equivalent (which is true), but that does not address the point.
what! Jones is a biologist! Pinker keeps schooling him. I don't understand the sloppiness on Jone's part. Jones keeps rolling his eyes and mugging. But Jones sputters away anyway
You are right that there would need to be such a control. However, to my knowledge, the notion that step-parents and biological parents are equivalent in their behavior towards their children has never been demonstrated. Then again, I'm not sure if step-parents are representative of the general population so that may have to be controlled for as well. But according to genetic similarity theory, one would expect such discrepancies among biological and non-biological parents to emerge.
Keep in mind that who reproduces is no linger tied to who has the most sex. Casual sex or sex with a temporary partner is usually done with contraception. Who reproduces is probably going to be determined by who has a steady income and wife/husband and a house and all that. Doctors and layers make good money and are in a place to decide to have kids and invest resources into them.
The moderator has really great 80's hair, Steve Jones looks angry, but I wonder if he has had a stroke or something (his face is sort of droopy on one side) - or is that the way he always looks?
Monogamy is something relatively recent. Even most patriarches in the Old Testament were polygamist. In many tribes people don´t get married but practise "free sex", exactly like bonobos.
Pinker takes book by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner, a writing guide, presenting views, very seriously. If one has had a look at the book, one can vividly structure and view how dearly and religiously Pinker applies every word enshrined in the book in his speaking and writing. Sense of Style by Pinker can be considered as an elaboration of the book by the abovementioned authors.
Forgive me for not understanding but could someone explain to me what does Steven Pinker mean by “a set of neural mechanisms” when defining culture 11:25?
He is making the point that human culture itself arises from the human mind, itself a product of the human brain. All of which are subject to evolutionary pressures.
Ahh, gotcha.
Pinker's thinking is so clear. Reminds me of the Singer interview by Dawkins.
I think, one of the key questions is, HOW CAN WE EVOLVE INTO A BENIGN CIVILIZATION?
(If we don't, then we will murder ourselves and our habitat to extinction.)
Related to this is the fundamental problem: HOW TO HELP THE MEEK INHERIT THIS EARTH?
Simply stated, how do we prevent warring, dominating, loud mouthed, alpha-male genes from dominating, shaping our social and moral discourses? (i.e., How can we prevent the Wolfowitzs, Rumsfelds, Cheneys, Bushes, Blairs, Saddam Husseins, Putins, Trumps, Clintons, from driving our civilization into a despicable collection of primates?)
An interesting answer to your "How can we evolve into a benign civilization?" question might be 'fight wars' - at least in 20th century terms. If the war-like among us go to war and get killed, we ultimately become less war-like as a species from an evolutionary standpoint.
I think there is a three phase effect here: prior to 1900, the most effective warmongers were evolutionary 'winners': they had lots of children. From 1900 to 2000 however, when war became industrial, those who went to war were just chewed up like so much corn in a threshing machine, and thus were LESS successful in having children than those who avoided war one way or another.
Now we are entering a third phase, where war is conducted by drone and stealth, and the "loud-mouthed alpha males" can clamor for war without it engendering any actual risk to themselves.
jenslyn87 LOL at Pinker'd - so true!
(1of2)
My point must of course be conceded at the outset, and belatedly has been.
(You are obviously impotent to do the obverse.)
But, to be complete (*sigh*) let us then move on to my alleged lack of decorum. You'll remember My concluding sentence was: "It is a minor hobby of mine trying to settle my *longstanding* [help,ho! italics again} vacillation whether Pinker is of *uneven* competence, or simply a psychopath"
If you occasionally got your science from from the horse's mouth...
This is pure fluff -and do note that a mere unspecified accusations are literally at the very lowest level of rhetorical sophistication and place you at rock-bottom on Grahams scale of disagreement- but once you've fallen flat on your face attempting to marshal some travesty of a rejoinder to my central point -the ONLY thing of any moment here- afford me the additional amusement of a direct quote that will support your accusation of psychopathy.
Am I to exceed the tact with which I'm assailed?