Over at my Substack I posted a much longer review of The Genetic Lottery (you can find my shorter review at UnHerd).

That prompted a reader to point me to a piece in The Nation, Sociobiology and You, dated to October 31st, 2002, and penned by Steve Berlin Johnson, reviewing The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. It begins:

If Steven Pinker’s latest 500-page treatise on the brain, The Blank Slate, serves any wider purpose in the popular discussion of science issues, it will, one hopes, be the final demolition of that battle-worn slur, “biological determinism,” still lugged out by the occasional critic when someone starts talking about genes, evolution and human behavior in the same paragraph. Ever since E.O. Wilson first published the 1975 book Sociobiology–which argued that human behavior, like that of all creatures on the planet, was partially shaped by natural selection–certain factions of the left, sometimes led by creditable scientists like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, have lashed out at any attempt to connect human emotions and aptitudes to Darwinian explanations.

He continues:

Of course, the one place in which the neo-Darwinians have in fact emphasized differences over commonalities is the fraught world of the sexes. Because so much of natural selection is predicated on reproductive success or failure, and because men and women have such differing biological stakes in the act of reproduction, it is inevitable that natural selection would craft slightly different toolboxes for each sex. This is no problem for the many schools of feminism that embrace the “different but equal” assessment of the sexes, but it is a major irritant for those on the left who imagine all gender differences to be the product of cultural biases. I suspect, though, that the sexual blank slate isn’t long for this world, for several reasons.

For one, the science is increasingly making its advocates into Flat Earthers…

It is not entirely surprising Johnson wrote something like this. He’s the kind of “counter-intuitive” and “heterodox” science writer who would praise The Blank Slate. But, it says something that The Nation commissioned and accepted this piece in the early 2000’s. I think if I wanted to be mischievous I could get this piece removed from the internet now with the ideological currents that are dominant in our society by creating an anonymous Twitter account. Perhaps I could even demand a public apology from the editor who accepted Johnson’s final draft and Johnson himself.

Johnson may have recanted his earlier views. I don’t know, and I don’t care. We know what the truth is, and we know that academics and journalists routinely lie to you about it. Sometimes, it doesn’t get better.