Steven Pinker: belief

Transcript context

…All right. Thank you, Dr. Pinker, for a fascinating discussion. While we’re going through this, thinking about language, society, culture, in your answer, your response to Tyler’s question on the likelihood of a catastrophic event, someone being willing to go out and take such extreme measures, it seems like all this discussion is leading to us thinking that there’s a group effect or a cultural effect on the individual through evolution. I’m much more less aggressive than my ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago were. Do you agree with the theory of group selection? Think E. O. Wilson or Jonathan Haidt. Do you think that’s a correct response to what we were talking about? There are two ideas that I think you broached here. One of them is groups as the unit of analysis in evolution and natural selection. If you Google “false allure of group selection” or “Pinker group selection,” you’ll see that I have pretty strong opinions on that. I think that the idea of group selection is a big blunder. No, I don’t think that there is a Darwinian process of differential survival of replicators that applies to groups in the way that it applies to genes. I think it’s a bad analogy. You referred specifically to the case of violence. A frequently asked question that I get is, Are we literally evolving to become less violent in the biologist sense, that genes that encourage violence are becoming less common in the gene pool? I doubt it, but I can’t rule it out. A fellow economist, Gregory Clark, argued that in Europe between the Middle Ages and the present, in a process that I actually wrote about in terms of the quite spectacular declines in rates of violence, he speculated might have been helped along by a genetic change. I’m a little more skeptical, but I can’t rule it out. The reason that I’m skeptical is that you can see declines of violence that take place on time scales that couldn’t possibly be due to Darwinian natural selection. For example, the fact that Germany went from the world’s most militaristic culture to the world’s most pacifist culture in pretty much a generation, or that the American homicide rate fell in half in eight years. There you didn’t have a turnover in generations that occurred long enough for it to be a genetic change. We know that the overt violent behavior can change really, really quickly. That just means that we don’t need to invoke a genetic change for reductions of similar magnitude that we see in history. Next question.…

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