(2002-12-27) Steven Johnson On The Blank Slate

Steven Johnson reviewing Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. The most compelling attempt to date to build a thorough inventory of humanity's basic toolbox comes from the anthropologist Donald E Brown. Inspired by Noam Chomsky's idea of a "universal grammar" - the deep syntax shared by all human languages - Brown set out to document the basic social patterns, beliefs and categories shared by all known human societies, without exception (Human Universals). Pinker devotes an entire appendix to Brown's list, which has a strangely moving, abbreviated style: "cooking; cooperation; cooperative labor; copulation normally conducted in privacy; corporate (perpetual) statuses; coyness display; crying; cultural variability; culture; culture/nature distinction; customary greetings; daily routines; dance; death rituals..." ... Darwinian anthropologists have argued that the most alienating environment possible for a mother - the one furthest removed from the ancestral Hunter Gatherer lifestyle our brains evolved in - is the stay-at-home suburban mom, disconnected from Extended Family, Cooperative Work and the social bonds of tribal life. As Matt Ridley argues, during a discussion of labor divisions in Hunter Gatherer communities: "None (of this material) says anything about the woman's place being in the home. After all, the argument goes that Men And Women both went out to work in the Pleistocene, one to hunt, the other to gather. Neither activity was remotely like trooping off to an office and answering telephones all day. Both sexes are equally unsuited to that."