I concur. I think it’s easy to get too one-dimensional, and biological determinism is quite limiting, and I would say… manifestly wrong. I want to be clear I certainly understand the view you outlined.

I think this topic is hopelessly complicated and incredibly important. Certainly different communities put different weight on the nature vs. nurture divide– and unfortunately few communities really keep up on research from both sides.

The first quote I pulled on the topic was from Simon Baron-Cohen (interestingly, the cousin of Sasha Baron-Cohen, of Borat fame… though I’m not sure that endears him to you, T. :) — he’s an autism researcher in the UK, and I think he feels the way he does partly due to the pushback he’s gotten from people who think autism is a social disease, i.e. ‘the mothers are doing something wrong’.

The second quote I pulled was from John Tooby, co-founder of evolutionary psychology (along with his wife Leda), who has spent a great deal of his time trying to identify ‘mental modules’, and contexts where they break down. He thinks human intelligence is essentially an amalgamation of many domain-specific ‘narrow intelligences’ aka highly specific algorithms. E.g., we’re really good at recognizing faces, but upside-down faces are really hard to recognize– therefore we have some specific hardware in our brain that’s narrowly-intelligent at recognizing right-side-up faces, instead of a general ‘intelligence’ module that can be used for faces. Similarly, we’re really good at figuring out if someone’s cheating us somehow (say, in a card game), but really really bad at figuring out the same sorts of situations when phrased only in logic and numbers.

I doubt that either of these researchers strike the perfect balance between giving nature its due, and giving nurture its due. But I understand why they say the things they do, and I do believe each of their work has moved our understanding of nature vs nurture toward a better place, on the whole.

Baron-Cohen references a talk by C. P. Snow on “Two Cultures”, which laments the growing divide between scientists and literary intellectuals, with each dismissing the contributions of the other. Brockman has used this talk as a springboard, arguing we need more contexts in which they can mingle. His yearly questions are an attempt to throw people from both cultures together and shake vigorously.

I could say more, but I’m afraid I might ramble a bit. I did want to thank you for your comment, though. And I can’t say I disagree that science is pretty bad at some things.

Mike
:-)

Edit: I added who said which quote– it was probably pretty confusing to read without any attributions.