> As examined at length by Steven Pinker's Blank Slate, they regard the controversy as outdated because nature won. Definitely.
How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits are 100% heritable"?
How is this supported by your link, whose second bullet point is "No traits are 100% heritable"?
The reason why this is so controversial is that some people (not necessarily biologists) wanted nature to support the moral systems that are based on equality among people. So they didn't want the nature to have a significant effect.
But the effect of the nature is significant. In this sense, this argument was lost.
It's kind of natural that we want to tie our moral system to some objective, well, nature; for the sake of argument. I don't think it's generally tenable, but I do it myself in certain sense, too. People who argue with god often do it, too, by claiming there is some objective moral system that this god wants.
Another example, from the opposite (liberal) camp, is claiming that being gay is unchangeable for biological reasons. We want nature to support our (I am a liberal too, in fact) moral wish that gays shouldn't be discriminated. And if it was true that being gay is unchangeable, you cannot so easily dismiss the behavior as immoral.
So yeah, in that sense the nature won - it didn't let to lend itself to any ideology, however likable it might have been.
"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."
For many years this blank slate view predominated, on every topic of human nature. Leading to some tragic results occasionally, such as the case of David Reimer in which attempts to socialize him as a girl after a botched circumcision against his will likely contributed to his suicide.
Eventually the evidence became overwhelming that this view was faulty. But more than that, the wishy washy "everything is nature and nurture all mixing together" fallback position was although not explicitly wrong profoundly disingenuous. Who you are is almost entirely contained within your genes, with a minority contribution from enviroment and parents and schooling. Nature won the debate, as profoundly as it was ever possible to win it, and it annoys me seeing equivocation in the discussion of the matter.
Well, that doesn't sound right either. It's not easy to put what is correct in a nutshell, I think. Your annoyance with everyone who doesn't agree with your understanding seems unreasonable. For one thing, if what the people who annoy you write is almost entirely determined by their genes, why be angry about that?
I'm no expert; I should rewatch Robert Sapolsky's excellent 25-part lecture series on the biology of human behavior[0], which covers this question in depth from a number of perspectives. It's by a long way the best lecture series I've seen.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949...
It would be more precise to say that maximum potential is largely genetic. Watson was wrong in that sense, but right in the opposite sense: an extremely bad environment - malnutrition, disease, pollution, very poor or no education, and so on - can definitely prevent someone from reaching their genetic potential. Unfortunately, an extremely good environment does not seem to reliably eliminate a genetic ceiling (for want of a better term) to a similar extent.
In simple words, being born in a lab environment makes one adapted to that lab environment.
So I would have still become a computer programmer with multiple graduate degrees had I been born to a tribe in the Amazon jungle? The power of the genetic code is truly amazing.
I think your position is at least as unreasonable as the "blank slate" position.