Michelle: Everything you've been told about 'nurture versus nature' is probably wrong. The debate isn't a 50/50 split. In fact, one side has been so terrifying to us, we've spent a century pretending it doesn't exist. Today, we open that forbidden door. Mark: Whoa, that’s a bold start. A forbidden door? It sounds like we’re about to get into some trouble. I always thought nature versus nurture was like a friendly tug-of-war, with the truth somewhere in the middle. You’re saying it’s more like a cover-up? Michelle: That’s exactly what our author today argues. That forbidden door was kicked wide open by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker in his landmark book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Mark: Pinker, right, the Harvard professor. This book was a huge deal when it came out—a Pulitzer Prize finalist, but also incredibly controversial. It basically threw a grenade into the middle of the social sciences. Michelle: It absolutely did. And Pinker argues the explosion was necessary because for the better part of a century, our intellectual world has been held captive by what he calls an 'unholy trinity' of flawed ideas about what it means to be human. Mark: An 'unholy trinity.' I love that. Okay, I'm hooked. Let's start the exorcism. What are these three ideas?

Michelle: The first, and the biggest, is the one in the title: The Blank Slate. This is the idea that the human mind has no innate traits. We're born as empty vessels, and experience writes on us. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to the philosopher John Locke. Mark: Okay, that one feels familiar. It’s the classic 'you can be anything you want to be' ethos. It’s optimistic, right? It means no one is limited by their birth. Michelle: Exactly. It’s politically and morally appealing, which is why it’s been so powerful. The second is The Noble Savage, from the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is the belief that humans are born good and peaceful, and it’s society that corrupts us. Mark: Right, the idea that if we could just get back to some pure, natural state, all our problems like greed and violence would disappear. I see that one a lot in movies about ancient tribes or untouched paradises. Michelle: And the third, which is maybe the most abstract, is The Ghost in the Machine. This comes from René Descartes. It’s the idea that we all have a soul, a 'ghost,' that is separate from our physical body and brain. This ghost is where our free will and consciousness live, totally independent of biology. Mark: Hold on, 'The Ghost in the Machine' sounds like a movie title. What does that actually mean in practice? Is it just a religious idea? Michelle: It's more than that. It’s the deep-seated feeling that 'you' are separate from your brain. That your mind isn't just a product of neurons firing, but something ethereal that inhabits your body. Pinker argues these three ideas together form the 'Official Theory' that has dominated psychology, sociology, and the humanities for decades. But he says science has shown, quite definitively, that they're wrong. Mark: Okay, so how do you even begin to prove something like the Blank Slate is wrong? It feels so fundamental. Michelle: Well, sometimes the best evidence comes from a very unexpected place. In this case, it comes from some very misbehaving animals. In the mid-20th century, two of B.F. Skinner's students, Keller and Marian Breland, started a business training animals for commercials and entertainment. They were true believers in behaviorism—the ultimate Blank Slate theory. They thought you could train any animal to do anything with the right system of rewards. Mark: So they were the original animal influencers, basically. Michelle: You could say that! And they had some success. But then they ran into some very strange problems. They had a gig where they needed to train a pig to pick up a large wooden coin and deposit it into a piggy bank. Simple enough, right? Reward the pig every time it gets the coin closer to the bank. Mark: Yeah, seems straightforward. Give it a treat, it drops the coin. Done. Michelle: That’s what they thought. At first, it worked. The pig would nudge the coin, get a reward, and learn the sequence. But as the training went on, the pig started to… misbehave. Instead of dropping the coin into the bank, it would drop the coin on the ground and start pushing it with its snout, rooting at it, burying it in the dirt. It would toss the coin in the air, then root at it again. It completely abandoned the task it was being rewarded for. Mark: Wait, why would it do that? It was literally walking away from its paycheck, its food reward. That makes no sense from a behaviorist perspective. Michelle: Exactly! The pig’s innate, hardwired 'pigness' was taking over. Pigs are foragers; they root for food in the soil. That instinct was so powerful that it overrode the training. The Brelands called this phenomenon 'instinctive drift.' They tried again with a raccoon. The task was to get the raccoon to drop coins into a box. But the raccoon wouldn't let go of the coins. It would hold them, rub them together, and dip them in and out of the box. Mark: Oh, I know this one! Raccoons 'wash' their food in water. It was treating the coins like a meal it needed to clean! Michelle: Precisely! The raccoon wasn't a blank slate; it was a raccoon, equipped with a whole suite of raccoon instincts. The Brelands, to their credit, eventually published a famous paper called "The Misbehavior of Organisms," which was a huge blow to pure Blank Slate theory. They concluded that you can't understand an animal's behavior without understanding its evolutionary history and its built-in instincts. Mark: Wow. So the animals' programming, their 'nature,' just took over! They weren't blank slates at all; they were… raccoons being raccoons. And Pinker’s point is that humans are the same? We’re not blank slates either; we’re humans being humans, with our own set of instincts. Michelle: That's the core of it. We come into the world with a rich, complex set of cognitive and emotional tools shaped by evolution. And that simple, almost obvious idea, is what makes the Official Theory crumble.

Mark: Okay, if the Blank Slate is so obviously flawed, and we can see it even in pigs and raccoons, why on earth did everyone believe it for so long? Why is the idea of an innate human nature so… scary? Michelle: That is the million-dollar question, and Pinker dedicates a huge part of the book to answering it. He argues that the resistance isn't really scientific; it's moral and political. He boils it down to four great fears. The first is the Fear of Inequality. Mark: What do you mean by that? Michelle: The fear is that if we're not all born as identical blank slates, then any differences between people—in intelligence, in talent, in temperament—could be used to justify oppression and discrimination. The thinking goes: if all differences are a result of experience, then we can create a perfectly equal society by giving everyone the same experiences. But if differences are innate, then maybe some people are just 'better' than others, and that's a terrifying thought. Mark: I can see that. It feels like a slippery slope to justifying racism or sexism. 'Oh, this group is just naturally less suited for leadership.' That’s a horrible idea. Michelle: It is. And Pinker agrees it's a horrible idea, but he says the logic is flawed. We'll get to why later. The second fear is the Fear of Imperfectibility. If we have innate, selfish, or violent tendencies, then maybe social reform is a hopeless project. Maybe war, greed, and crime are just part of our nature, and we can never truly create a better world. The Blank Slate, on the other hand, offers the promise of a utopia. If we're infinitely malleable, we can be molded into perfect beings. Mark: That’s the Noble Savage idea again. That we’re naturally good, and we just need to fix society to get back to that state. Michelle: Exactly. The third is the Fear of Determinism. This is the fear that if our thoughts and feelings are products of our brain, which is a biological organ, then we don't have free will. Our choices are just the result of a complex chain of cause and effect, from our genes to our neurons. And if we don't have free will, how can we hold anyone responsible for their actions? Mark: Honestly, that one really hits home. If my choices are just my brain chemistry, what does that mean for my life? It's a scary thought. It feels like it robs you of your agency. Michelle: It’s a very deep and common fear. And it leads to the fourth and final one: the Fear of Nihilism. The fear that if our moral feelings are just evolutionary adaptations, and life itself is just a product of blind natural selection, then life has no higher meaning or purpose. Morality becomes a sham, and love, beauty, and justice are just illusions wired into our brains to help our ancestors survive and reproduce. Mark: Wow. Okay, when you lay them all out like that—Inequality, Imperfectibility, Determinism, and Nihilism—it’s a pretty terrifying list. It’s no wonder people would rather just believe in the Blank Slate. It’s so much more comforting. Michelle: It is. And Pinker makes a brilliant historical analogy to show just how high the stakes feel. He compares the modern denial of human nature to the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo. Mark: How does that connect? Galileo was about astronomy, right? The Earth moving around the sun. Michelle: On the surface, yes. But the Church's opposition wasn't really about astronomy. It was about morality. In the medieval worldview, the universe had a moral structure—the Great Chain of Being. God was at the top, then angels, then humans, then animals, all the way down to rocks and mud. And Earth, humanity's home, was at the physical center of the universe. This physical order was seen as a reflection of the moral order. Mark: Whoa. So if Galileo moved the Earth from the center, he wasn't just rearranging the planets. He was shattering the entire moral framework of the universe. He was demoting humanity. Michelle: Precisely. He was breaking the chain. The fear was that if the Earth is just another rock hurtling through a meaningless void, then the whole basis for morality, for our special place in creation, collapses. Pinker argues that the Blank Slate has become our modern Great Chain of Being. It's a doctrine that seems to guarantee our most cherished values—equality, progress, responsibility, and meaning. Mark: And the new sciences of the mind—evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics—are our modern Galileo. They're threatening to topple that comforting worldview by showing that we are, in fact, biological creatures, shaped by our evolutionary past. Michelle: That’s the parallel. The fear of human nature isn't really a scientific fear. It's a moral one. We're afraid that if we're not all born identical, good, and with a soul separate from our biology, then our ideals of equality and justice will collapse into dust.

Mark: But this leads to a really dark place. If we accept that some people might be innately... different, what does that do to ideas like responsibility? Take a psychopath, for example. If they're born with a brain that's incapable of empathy, are they still responsible for their actions? It feels like the Fear of Determinism in action. Michelle: You've hit on one of the most difficult and important applications of these ideas. And Pinker argues that ignoring human nature here isn't just naive, it's actively dangerous. There's a chilling, real-life story he uses to make this point, involving the famous author Norman Mailer. Mark: The writer? What does he have to do with this? Michelle: In the late 1970s, Mailer was fascinated by the mind of a killer. He received a letter from a prisoner named Jack Henry Abbott, who was serving time for manslaughter. Abbott was incredibly articulate and intelligent. He wrote to Mailer, offering a radical critique of the prison system and a window into the mind of a violent man. Mark: So he was a kind of intellectual criminal. Michelle: Exactly. And Mailer was completely captivated. He saw Abbott as a brilliant writer, a product of a brutal system—a perfect Noble Savage, corrupted by society. Mailer and other New York literary elites championed him. They helped get his letters published as a bestselling book, 'In the Belly of the Beast,' and they lobbied for his parole. They believed he was a victim who just needed a chance. Mark: Oh no. I have a bad feeling about where this is going. Michelle: They succeeded. Abbott was paroled in 1981 and became the toast of the New York literary scene. He was celebrated at dinner parties, interviewed in major publications. The intellectuals saw him as proof that even the most violent man could be redeemed if you just changed his environment. Mark: And? Michelle: Six weeks after his release, Abbott got into an argument with a 22-year-old aspiring playwright who was working as a waiter in a cafe. Abbott stabbed him in the chest, killing him on the sidewalk. Mark: That's... horrifying. And absolutely insane. They fell for the myth completely. They saw what they wanted to see—the Noble Savage—and ignored the reality of the man in front of them. Michelle: They ignored the warnings from prison psychiatrists who recognized Abbott as a classic psychopath, someone with a profound, likely innate, lack of empathy. Pinker uses this story, and a similar one involving the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, to show the profound danger of the Blank Slate and Noble Savage myths. Denying the darker parts of human nature, like the existence of psychopathy, isn't compassionate. It's deadly. Mark: So what’s the alternative? If we accept that someone like Abbott has a 'defective' brain, does that mean we just lock him up and throw away the key? How does a biologically-informed view handle morality and responsibility? Michelle: Pinker argues it actually gives us a better framework. He says responsibility isn't about some magical 'free will' ghost. It's about a functioning brain system. Specifically, the parts of our prefrontal cortex that can anticipate the consequences of our actions and inhibit our impulses. We hold people responsible because the threat of punishment is a consequence that a normal brain can process and respond to. Mark: So, responsibility is about whether your brain is 'deterrable'? Michelle: In a sense, yes. For most people, the thought 'if I do this, I'll go to jail' is a powerful inhibitor. For a true psychopath, that part of the system may be broken. That doesn't mean they're 'not guilty' in a moral sense; it means the tool of deterrence doesn't work on them, and we need a different mechanism, like civil commitment, to protect society. It moves the conversation from a fuzzy philosophical debate about souls to a practical, neurological one about brain function. Mark: And what about our moral sense in general? If it's just an evolutionary adaptation, isn't that the Fear of Nihilism coming true? Michelle: Pinker flips this on its head. He says the problem with humans isn't that we have too little morality; it's that we have too much, and it's often misapplied. Our moral sense is a 'gadget,' he says, prone to quirks and illusions. Think about it: we have powerful gut feelings about things like consensual incest between siblings, even if no one is harmed. We can't explain why it's wrong, we just feel it is. That's our evolved instinct against inbreeding at work. Our moral sense is easily confused with feelings of disgust, purity, or loyalty to our tribe. Mark: So our morality isn't some pure, rational system. It's a messy, emotional, evolved toolkit. Michelle: A very messy toolkit. And recognizing that is incredibly important. It forces us to use our reason to examine our moral intuitions, to ask whether they're actually preventing harm or just satisfying some ancient, tribal impulse. It doesn't destroy morality; it forces us to be more rigorous and humane about it.

Michelle: When you pull it all together, Pinker's argument isn't that nature is everything, or that we're puppets of our genes. It's that we can't build a just and humane society on a foundation of lies about who we are. Acknowledging our built-in faculties—our moral sense, our capacity for cooperation, AND our tribalism and potential for violence—is the only realistic starting point for true progress. Mark: It really dismantles that comforting but ultimately fragile idea that we can perfect humanity just by fixing the outside world. The work is internal, and it starts with understanding the hardware we're working with. It leaves you with a powerful question: What comforting beliefs do I hold about humanity that might be getting in the way of seeing things clearly? Michelle: That's a perfect question for our listeners. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What's one 'blank slate' idea you've encountered in your own life—in parenting, in politics, in your own self-improvement journey? Join the conversation on our social channels. Mark: It’s a challenging book, but a necessary one. It forces you to confront some uncomfortable truths, but you come out the other side with a much clearer, more solid understanding of what it means to be human. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.