Melvin Konner reviews The Blank Slate by Steve Pinker & Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin. He gives them a fair shake. But a few quibbles with his quibblings I do have….
Unlike race, gender is a valid and significant biological and psychological category, which, despite huge overlaps between male and female, does help us predict some aspects of behavior and mental life.
Well, wait another generation Melvin, just wait….
As we settled into agricultural and pastoral villages, gradually building them into what we are pleased to call civilization, the intensity and ubiquity of group conflict greatly increased. Conquest often entailed slaughter, usually of men. Women, especially young ones, were kept alive for partly reproductive reasons, and this pattern also may have had genetic consequences, although there has not been enough time since the rise of towns for much genetic change. If you doubt these patterns, you can read excellent new research in archeology and anthropology or, to save time, you can just reread the Bible.
Konner refers to activities that will obviously change the frequency of genes in any given population, killing men and hording women, but asserts blandly that not enough time has occurred to result in genetic changes. 10,000 years was long enough for lactose tolerance to spread through much of humanity. It was also long enough for myopia to become prevelant at different rates in different ethnic groups. Certainly, of the more than 6 billion people alive today, we trace most of our ancestry from only a small subset of the less than 1 million people alive 10,000 years ago.
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