My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.
From Steven Pinker
The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
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