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SLATE_GRAY

                                             August 31, 2012

About a piece by H. Allen Orr in the New York
Review of Books on the problems with Pinker's         https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/02/27/darwinian-storytelling/
style of "evolutionary psychology":


"Darwinian Storytelling"
February 27, 2003

   A review of Steven Pinker's
  "The Blank Slate:
   The Modern Denial of Human Nature"


  "Darwinism may well have endowed us with a
  crude morality, but this can't explain why              Here, Orr may seem a
  kings but not women once had rights, but now            bit optimistic about
  women but not kings do."                                the state of the
                                                          world, but it the
                                                          main point holds...

  "The notion that our moral circle expanded by
  reciprocity is in many cases ahistorical nonsense.
  Men had plenty of 'people-to-people' interaction with
  women while condemning them to second-class citizenship.
  And slaveholding Southerners had more 'cultural exchanges'
  and 'people- to-people activities' with African-Americans
  than did abolitionist Northerners. At what point in
  history did our 'networks of reciprocity' with women and
  slaves become sufficiently dense that the calculus of
  reciprocity demanded that we grant them the vote and
  freedom?"

  "The fact is that for every case in which morality
  plausibly expanded by reciprocity there's another in which
  it expanded by selfless moral reasoning, political or
  religious struggle, or even court rulings that forced a
  rule of conduct on those who initially opposed it. And it
  should be evident that a morality that bids us care for the
  severely handicapped cannot be explained by an expectation
  of reciprocity. So Pinker cannot, I think, minimize the
  debt he owes to Enlightenment ideology. The morality he
  uses to pacify evolutionary psychology is, to a good
  extent, a Blank Slate morality. Not bad for an 'anti-life,
  anti-human theoretical abstraction.'"


Orr references supporting material:

    See Chomsky's _Rules and Representations_
    (Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 99–100,

    Jerry A. Fodor, _In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive
    Science and the Philosophy of Mind_ (MIT Press, 1998)
                    
    Jerry A. Fodor, _The Mind Doesn't Work That Way_
    (MIT Press, 2000), Chapter 5.

    D.S. Wilson, "Tasty Slice-- But Where Is
    the Rest of the Pie?" Evolution and               ... especially his
    Human Behavior, Vol. 20 (1999), pp. 279–287,      critique of evolutionary
                                                      psychological work on
                                                      music as a sexual display"
    "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism,"
    The New York Review, June 26, 1997, p. 52;

    Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin,
    "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm:
    A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,"
    Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1979.


    N.S. Newcombe "Is Sociobiology Ready for
    Prime Time?"  The Chronicle of Higher      "N.S. Newcombe, an authority on
    Education, December 13, 2002.              human spatial skills, recently
                                               suggested that the difference
                                               between male and female spatial
                                               abilities may be a spandrel, not
                                               an adaptive difference as Pinker
                                               suggests."



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