Interview with Fukuyama The latest issue of Policy, the journal of Australia's Centre for Independent Studies (my employer in my student days), carries an interview with Francis Fukuyama (he was in Australia recently on a lecture tour). I dare say that there are many positive assertions that Fukuyama makes that regular readers will agree with and many normative assertions he makes that they will not. However it does seem that the 'blank slate' theory is more or less dead as a dodo bird among serious mainstream thinkers (the interview is entitled 'Back to human nature'). Note for instance the start of the interview where he says:

One of the consequences of the whole genetic revolution is that you are going to be able to tell empirically what is natural, what is genetically determined, and what is environmentally determined in a much more precise way. Right now if you look at something like intelligence, the only way they come up with estimates of what degree of variance in intelligence is due to genes rather than environment is through behavioural genetics, which is the study of monozygotic twins. In the future, you are going to have actual molecular pathways between particular genes through certain proteins which will then affect certain higher order behaviours. They'll do this first in animals and gradually figure this out for human beings. At that point I think you'll still have these stupid arguments that say, well, human beings are cultural animals and how can you say there is a human nature. But what cognitive scientists are showing is that while there is a cultural and social component to behaviour, human beings also learn, understand and modify their behaviour in certain determined ways. There are limits on plasticity, and certain typically human ways of seeing things relate to other human beings.