Category: ACADEMIA

I’m currently rereading the book of Judges and I have been fascinated by the cycles of peace and violence that played out as Israelites started settling the Promised Land.

The parallels between Ancient Israelites living in the early Iron Age (circa 1200 – 1000 BCE) and people living in current times are plain as day to Christians. Like the Israelites, we all have the tendency to remember God when things are hard, but at the slightest hint of consistent calm, we forget Him and indulge ourselves in every pleasure we can imagine – until we run into trouble again. The lesson is clear: Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

But what effect was God’s spiritual instructions having at a physical, sociomaterial level that translated into seasons of peace for the Israelites living during the period of Judges?

We can hypothesize.

Long before the Saul-David-Solomon timeline, ancient Israel was a collection of tribes that were more or less individually autonomous. People identified more closely with their tribes or clans than with Israel as a state.

From a material perspective, God’s laws were a unifying force for the Israelites. Whenever His spiritual instructions were kept salient in their minds, through sacrifices, rituals, and reciting the Torah, the Israelites saw themselves as a covenated people who were the objects of God’s affection, while others were strangers to Him. This identity would have been vital in coordinating the activities of a dozen or so tribes towards taking over the Promised Land.

As the Israelite tribes settled in the Promised Land, they would have been competing with the local Canaanites for scarce resources, such as farmable lands, accessible water sources and maybe trade networks. And for their part as older settlers, the local Canaanites had one advantage. They did not have any covenant with God but, over generations, they would have accumulated knowledge about the local region, such as its seasonal patterns or mineral deposits. There’s also a good chance that the Canaanites would have encoded this knowledge into their religious practices (e.g., Baal worship).

In times of peace, the temptation is always there to get comfortable and, perhaps, not take steps to reinforce cultural memories. If the Israelites did this, God’s spiritual instructions would have stopped being salient in the minds of each succeeding generation of Israelites. This would have dissolved the perceptions they had of themselves as God’s covenanted people, while also weakening the unity between the tribes that could have facilitated coordinated political and military action. And when Israelites started intermarrying the local Canaanites and assimilating their cultural practices, there would have been a palpable shift in allegiance away from the God of the unified Israelite tribes and towards the local idols.

One refrain in the book of Judges I find fascinating is the idea that “every man did what seemed right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6. 21:5). This means that when the external shocks inevitably came (e.g., war, famine, drought, etc.), it was hard for the Israelites to coordinate themselves ideologically, religiously, politically and militarily to withstand these pressures. Some local power would have taken advantage of the situation and subjected the Israelite tribes to heavy taxation and forced labor – until God raises someone to coordinate the Israelites to resist the oppression, negotiates peace and then the cycle repeats itself….

Harris, M. (1979). Cultural materialism: The struggle for a science of culture. California: AltaMira Press.

Preface

1. Cultural materialism drops the Hegelian motion of dialectic contradictions and adds reproductions and ecological variables to the material conditions under study (p. ix)
2. Marx was the first to formally propose that the material means of subsistence forms the foundation upon which society is formed (p. ix)
3. Marxism-Leninism, unlike Marx’s scientific materialism, overemphasized the dialectic over the objective and empirical (p. x)

Chapter 1

1. Francis Bacon emphasized the process of induction for gathering and organizing facts. However, facts are unreliable without a theory guiding its organization and discrimination of relevant and irrelevant information. At the same time, theory without facts is meaningless (p. 7)
2. True science balances induction, empiricism and positivism, on one hand with deduction and rationalism on the other (p. 8)
3. “Observation must be for or against a view if it is to be of any service” – Charles Darwin (p. 12)
4. Operationalism is required in the social sciences due to the field’s tendency to define its concepts and constructs fuzzily (p. 15)
5. Karl Popper posited that good science falsifies hypothesis rather than just verifying hypothesis. In other words, good science hypotheses expose themselves to the possibility of being proven wrong (p. 16-17)
6. Imre Lakatos posits that research programs should be evaluated based on their effectiveness at solving the field’s puzzles (p. 23)

Chapter 2

1. Marx and Engels laid the foundation for demystifying social life by focusing on the material conditions that made them happen in the first place (p. 30)
2. Emic operations evaluate the perspective of the native informant/participant of a social participant of a social practice, while etic operations evaluate the perspectives of an external observer who is not part of a culture engaged in some social behavior (p. 32)
3. Harris provided an example of emic and etic explanations of the phenomenon of high mortality rates of male cattle in a community in southern India. When locals were asked why male cattle died more, they said the male cattle ate less than the female ones. This is an emic explanation. However, the etic explanation was that since the community didn’t need male cattle for transportation or to work farms, they knowingly /unknowingly culled them (p. 33)
4. Sometimes, it could be challenging to provide etic descriptions of mental life as the external observer does not know what is going on inside the minds of the natives when they are engaged in a particular social behavior (p. 40)
5. Harris acknowledges that scientists and other “observers” bring their own biases into providing etic descriptions, but to claim “all knowledge is emic” is to claim that there is no real way to know/study the world and that everything is relative (p. 45)

Chapter 3

1. Cultural materialism starts with an etic human population located in an etic time and space (p. 47)
2. Cultural materialism posits that every society must solve the problem of production (i.e. subsistence), the problem of reproduction and the coordination of relationships within and between societal groups (p. 51)
3. Harris’s taxonomy is as follows: (a) Mode of production which deals with producing food and energy, given the constraints of technology and the environment; (b) Mode of reproduction which deals with moderating the population size; (c) Domestic economy which deals with coordination of production and reproduction within a societal group; (d) Political economy which deals with the coordination of production and reproduction between societal groups; (e) Behavioral superstructure which deals with symbols, values, religion, etc. (p. 52-54)
4. Harris taxonomy can be further simplified into: (a) Infrastructure: (Modes of production and modes of reproduction); (b) Structure: (Domestic and political economy); (c) Superstructure (p. 52)
5. Language plays a vital role in coordinating activities at all levels of Harris taxonomy (p. 54)
6. “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” – Karl Marx (p. 55)
7. Harris espouses infrastructural determinism where modes of production and reproduction probabilistically determine domestic and political economies, which, in turn, probabilistically determines superstructure (p. 55)
8. Cultural materialism theories see infrastructure as the root cause of everything else (p. 55)
9. Harris prioritizes infrastructure because of the fact that humans have to balance energy consumption with production and reproduction. This is an iron clad law of nature that provides solid ground for any form of theory building (p. 56)
10. Patterns of reproduction and production are grounded in nature and can only be changed by the expenditure of energy (p. 58)
11. Harris is not downplaying innovation rather he argues that they cannot take hold unless the material condition for their adoption is also present (p. 59)
12. “We want what we will but we do not will what we do not want” – Arthur Schopenhauer (p. 60)
13. Although groups survive at the expense of the individuals, the direction of cultural change cannot be predicted by summing up the greatest good for the greatest number (p. 61)
14. Harris lists out 4 human behavioral constants: (a) People prefer more calories than less; (b) People prefer expending less energy than more; (c) People find sex pleasurable; (d) People prefer more love and affection to less (p. 63)
15. Harris’s critique of Marx was that the later focused on emic properties of the structure, e.g., capital, profits, etc., instead of prioritizing etic explanations (p. 55)
16. Cultural evolution has three main characteristics: (a) Increasing energy budgets; (b) Increasing productivity; (c) Increasing population growth (p. 67)
17. Unlike classical Marxism, cultural materialism sees the production of children as part of infrastructure (p. 66)
18. Harris argues that increases in efficiency brought about by innovations in technology hasn’t let to saving labor, but to increasing energy budgets which has been used to increase the population (p. 67)
19. Harris argues that changes in infrastructural levels are more likely to spread throughout other levels than vice versa (p. 71-72)
20. Harris clarifies that he’s not saying changes at the structural or superstructural levels cannot change things at other levels (p. 72)
21. Harris argues innovations at the level of structure or superstructure are unlikely to change the system if it is not compatible with the existing infrastructure (p. 73)

Chapter 4

1. Nomothetic = General causes and effects; Idiographic = Particular individual instances (p. 78)
2. Harris argues that hunter-gatherers were mobile because they had no control where the fauna and flora were likely to grow. This infrastructure, in turn, led to those groups having a coordination and organization (i.e., structure) that was small, mobile and camplike (p. 80)
3. Harris also argues that more complex family structures are not found among the hunter-gatherers because of the infrastructure (i.e., limited resources and seasonal variations in fauna and flora) (p. 80)
4. Harris argues that hunter-gatherer societies who were in an environment where resources were plentiful were more likely to use lactation rather than abortion or infanticide as a means for population control (p. 83)
5. Harris agues the shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture was likely facilitated by global changes in the climate (p. 86)
6. Harris also argues that the transition from hunter-gathering to agricultural societies was also due to the incentive of producing more children who could assist with farming operations to increase yield while not necessarily depleting energy demands (p. 88)
7. Harris argued that pre-state societies differed in their structural and superstructural components based on the soil nutrient needs (infrastructure) in their local contexts (p. 89)
8. In Harris model, “big men” facilitate complexity at the level of social coordination. They do this by: (a) Intensifying production; (b) Redistributing harvest surpluses; (c) Coordinating to get more resources (through trade or war) (p. 92)
9. In Harris model, “big men” can also perpetrate inequality usually caused by a shift from egalitarian redistribution to asymmetrical redistribution (p. 92)
10. Infrastructure involving flora like grains and fauna like ruminant animals were also likely to have structures where asymmetric distribution was done by “big men”.  Incidentally, regions where this happened were also the societies that first shifted into statehood (p. 94)
11. Harris argued that the following circumstances led to the shift from chiefdoms to state: (a) A large energy base to cater for the needs of a permanent police/military subgroup; (b) A peasant base unable to easily leave the group in search for less densely populated regions (p. 101)
12. Elites spent considerable costs in constructing artifacts that supported superstructures (e.g., temples, altars, etc.) That convinced peasants that the elite were benevolent. Obedience from mystification was cheaper than obedience via police force (p. 102)
13. Harris argued that feudal kings of Europe were overall weaker than emperors in hydraulic societies (i.e., societies living near a river source) because the feudal kings had no control on who rain fell on, while the hydraulic emperors could set up controls to prevent waters from the rivers from flowing to the hinterlands. In other words, geography isn’t destiny, but it constrains the kind of social coordinated structures that evolve in an area (p. 105)
14. Harris argued that the political structures that evolved based on decentralized non-hydraulic societies allowed the rise of a merchant class that led to modern day capitalism (p. 105)
15. Dowries were common in pre-industrial Europe and Asia, while bride price was common in pre-industrial Africa. Harris argues that a dowry society is a symptom of reproductive pressure, i.e., it is to discourage (unconsciously) overpopulation while bride price is a symptom of a society that was sparsely populated and had a lot of land that could be cultivated (p. 107)
16. Harris also argues that religions prosper because the ruling elite who adopted them benefitted materially from it – either through making the poor care less about material benefits, (“heaven is the goal”) or through making it cheaper to maintain law and order (“all life is sacred”) (p. 110)
17. Harris argues that the taboo surrounding eating human flesh developed from the availability of domestic animals for food; and the value of prisoners of war as a source of manpower (p. 110)
18. Harris argues that capitalism in Europe developed in response to the depletion of feudal modes of production (p. 111)

Chapter 5

1. Behavior is not exclusively genetically determined (p. 120)
2. Cultural repertories evolve independently of natural selection. For instance, Edison’s inventions would have spread even if had remained childless (p. 122)
3. Under normal biological circumstances, all behavioral innovations that persist in offspring do so because they contribute to fitness and reproductive success (p. 122)
4. In humans, natural selection increased human cognitive capabilities and simultaneously downplayed the dependence on genetic transmission to preserve behavioral innovations (p .123)
5. The bulk of human behavioral repertoire can be acquired through cultural rather than genetic, transmission (p. 125)
6. Harris argues that the idea that males desire multiple sexual partners while females only desire one is a product of domination of males in the political economy. In societies where women have independent wealth and power, they also tend to have multiple sexual partners (p. 129)
7. The idea that young humans have a long socialization period has less to do with genes and more to do with the breath of social traditions to learn (p. 129)
8. At the emic level, some cultures deem males more valuable than females, but at the etic level, it’s really just population control (p. 133)
9. Semantic universality: The ability to communicate about infinite classes of events regardless of when or where they occur (p. 134)
10. Natural selection has favored a behavioral genotype where programming acquired through personal/social learning has dominated programming acquired via genetic change (p. 134)
11. Harris posits that ecological conditions at the infrastructural level increase or decrease biophysiological costs and benefits of certain innovative behaviors – not that certain behaviors are genetically preprogrammed to occur in certain conditions that increase fitness (p. 137)
12. Among the elite in medieval Europe, India and China, preferential female infanticide was practiced to consolidate wealth and avoid paying dowries. On the other hand, among the peasant class, there were less occurrences of female infanticide because the females could provide manpower for labor (p. 138)

Chapter 6

1. Cultural materialism and dialectical materialism disagree on what makes up infrastructure (p. 141)
2. “… hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first eat and drink before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc., and therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or driving a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa as has hitherto been the case” – Frederick Engels (p. 141-142)
3. Hegel was an idealist who believed that things were the express manifestations of ideas. He also believed that things that exist today are all destined to change into its opposite. In addition, Hegel posited that the contradictions between an idea and its opposite doesn’t lead to a back-and-forth between the duo, but to a progression towards some complete ideal (p. 142-143)
4. For Marx, it is the modes of production (not ideas) that are destined to change into its opposite as everything progresses towards a classless utopia (p. 143)
5. Marx posited that contradiction of capitalism is that capitalists have to exploit labor to make profit. To stay competitive, at some point, they invest the profits into machines which takes the place of laborers. This investment of profits reduces the amount of profits available for the capitalists. So, to maximize profits, the capitalists have to double down and exploit labor further.  If this continues, wealth becomes concentrated with the capitalist while the laborers become more and more resentful with the falling standards of living. The more the capitalist exploits labor, the more likely laborers ought to organize themselves to destroy the capitalist system. In Marx’s system, capitalism creates the opposite that destroys it (p. 143-144)
6. Harris argues that the weakness of a dialectical epistemology is that every event contains an indefinite number of components which all have an indefinite amount opposites/negations. This means that the most critical opposites cannot be identified and a dialectical relationship cannot be falsified (p. 145)
7. Evolution is the process of change. Harris argues that labelling any change as ‘dialectical’ doesn’t provide any additional information (p. 146)
8. Lenin attacked empiricism because he wanted to overstate the revolutionary component of Marxist thought (p. 150)
9. Capitalism is full of stresses, but Harris argues that its problems won’t be solved by classless and stateless societies (p. 150)
10. Harris concedes that contradiction, negation and opposites are useful descriptors when discussing changes that play out in the struggle between classes or between nations. But he doesn’t agree that the descriptors are useful in any system where there is change (p. 151)
11. Dialectical materialism, according to Harris, is committed to the expectation that a classless society will emerge from capitalism – regardless of how much evidence demonstrates that to not be the case (p. 157)
12. Marx and Engels were not able to fit the data from non-European and precapitalist history into their model (p. 162)

Chapter 7

1. “Structure” in structuralism means the mental superstructure in cultural materialism’s taxonomy (p. 165)
2. Emile Durkheim proposed the idea that society has a “collective consciousness,” i.e., the ideas that are external to an individual but can influence the behavior and thoughts of individuals in that society (p. 166)
3. Structuralists believe that the mind has molds (which they call structures) and culture fills these molds with the ideas pertaining to that culture. Structuralism is the attempt to explain the “collective consciousness” as a mental dialectic (p. 167)
4. Structuralism, according to Harris, is not concerned with the empirical proof, but with understanding the collective consciousness (p. 169)
5. “History shows that to treat as heroes people who abominate empirical reality is to risk destruction” – Marvin Harris (p. 170)
6. In structuralism, there are hidden meanings underneath different thoughts. The hidden meanings are always reduced to two opposing ideas. These opposite ideas, according to according to structuralism, always exist in the collective unconscious. So, in this model, the structure underneath the institution of marriage is exchanged between the opposite ideas of “us” and “them” or “mine” and “yours” (p. 167, 171)                   
7. Structural anthropologists posit that people select food based on the message underlying the food (e.g., “roasted” food vs “boiled” food represents the message of “nature” vs “nurture”). Cultural materialists, on the other hand, posit that food preparation practices are probabilistically determined by the kind of infrastructure in place (e.g., Asian cultures developed rapid frying in response to fuel shortages in densely populated areas) (p. 188, 190)

Chapter 8

1. Unlike cultural materialists, structural Marxists do not see the need to separate the “relations of production” (Harris’s structure) from the “forces of production” (Harris’s infrastructure) (p. 220)
2. The Hegelian-Marxist-Leninist model couldn’t predict how the socialist revolutions took place in industrially backward nations (i.e., early 20^th century China & Russia) rather than in the more industrially developed nations at the time (e.g., US, Germany, or Japan) (p. 221)
3. Marx’s model has some ambiguity because it doesn’t distinguish between the mental-emic and the behavioral-etic components of social systems. Although Marx acknowledged the role of the religious superstructure, the other factors in his base which he attributed causality to also had “imaginary” properties. For instance, capital is a mystified form of labor; commodities hide the labor processes it took to create them. These elements of Marx’s model look more Hegelian idealism rather than materialist (p. 225)
4. In the cultural materialist’s formulation, the physical control of the masses labor through physical control of the state’s police-military apparatus (another form of labor) is what allows the emic-mental structure of capitalism (i.e., contracts, rent, money, interests, and profits) to exist in the first place (p. 226-227)
5. The mystification/fetishization of social stratification in a socio-cultural system is a consequence of controlling the physical instruments of coercion (i.e., the people who work as police and armies) (p. 228)
6. Harris contends that the type of social and economic systems that developed in the Andes versus in Brazil was not only due to the Catholic ideologies of the early Europeans who colonized them, but more due to the ecological factors (highlands in the Andes versus tropics in Brazil) and demographics (different population characteristics in the Andes and in Brazil which led to the importation of African slaves in the latter vs dependence on the local population in former) (p. 230)
7. In Aboriginal Australia, marriage rules (i.e., political economy in Harris model) is dependent on the environmental factors. The drier the land the more disperse the bands and the more necessary it is to establish multi-band networks through inter-band marriage (p. 231)
8. Another school of thought adjacent to structural Marxism is ‘substantivism’ which argues that economic concepts identified from observing capitalist societies cannot be applied to pre-state/primitive societies because of the differences in the social relationship in both societies. Substantivists argues that extending capitalist derived concepts to pre-state societies makes the analyst to force-fit every society into the image of the capitalist (p. 234)
9. An extension of substantivist thought is the idea that economic process and concepts do not exists outside the social system that instituted it. The corollary of this is the idea that economic ideas such as surplus cannot be empirically/objectively determined because it only exists in the collective consciousness of the people in a society (p. 235-236)
10. Some substantivists extend their ideas to say that concepts such as classes, and exploitation of one class by another has no existence outside the collective consciousness of the people of the society (p. 237)
11. “Primitive” societies such as those in pre-colonial Africa are “underproductive” not because they tended to adjust their labor intensity to just produce whatever will serve their subsistence needs. Instead, cultural materialism argues that continual intensification of any given society’s mode of production would eventually lead to diminishing returns. In a “primitive” society that depends on labor intensity, rather than technology to increase productivity, continual accumulation of labor (either through forcing locals or getting slaves from neighboring societies) does not dramatically increase productivity, but will likely increase the chances of political instability in retaliatory, attacks from neighboring enemies. As a consequence, “underproduction” shouldn’t be looked at only from the perspective of the environment’s carrying capacity but from the perspective of intensification of the available modes of production before diminishing returns kick in (p.240)
12. Harris argues that cows were present in India in the pre-Vedic times (4000-2000 BC) as evidenced by the presence of charred cattle bones found in houses from the era. From the Vedic era (2000 – 800BC), killing and eating cattle became ritualized. Within this era sects arose within the area that prioritized the ritual/sacrificial use of cattle (like Levites in the Bible) over its other uses. These were the Brahmins. Buddhism and Jainism soon arose in the area that challenged Brahmin practices through its condemnation of animal sacrifices. Harris attributes this conversion from religious groups that routinely sacrificed cattle to those that didn’t to the intensification of production and increased population which led to deforestation and its attendant changes in environmental conditions. In these conditions, Harris argues that cattle became more valuable for its ability to pull plows than for its meat – hence the rise of taboos arising in religions in the region to prevent cattle from being eaten (p. 249-253)
13. Pork was preferred to beef was in the U.S. up until the 19^th century when beef started to take ascendancy due to technological developments like the refrigerated railroad can that delivered beef across the nature (p. 255)
14. Harris argues that dogs and humans are only eaten in cultures where alternative sources of meat are scarce. Otherwise, societies preferred cattle, sheep, and poultry that gain weight (more meat) from merely eating grains (p. 255)

Chapter 9

• No notes

Chapter 10

• No notes

Chapter 11

• No notes

Pinker, S. (2016). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York, NY: Viking.

Preface

The conviction that humanity can be socially engineered led to some of the greatest atrocities (p. xvi – xvii)

Part 1

Blank slate: The idea that the human mind has no structure and it can only be influenced by society or ourselves (p. 2)

Chapter 1

1. John Locke is ascribed the idea tabula rasa. He came up with the idea as a reaction to those who thought man was born with an innate idea of concepts. (p.5).
2. Locke’s counter-idea was empiricism with focus on building ideas from experience. By implication, this meant that nobody (royals and nobles) was a custodian of wisdom. Everybody learns from experience (p.5).
3. The noble savage arises from some blend of Hobbes and Rousseau who posited that humans are by nature savages and institutions and society have some form of civilizing effect on human nature (p.8).
4. “Ghost in the machine” arose from Rene Descartes’ refusal to accept mechanistic explanation of behavior which would undermine freewill. For Descartes, there have to be a mind controlling behavior (p.9).
5. Empiricism = Blank Slate; Romanticism = Noble Savage; Dualism = Ghost in the machine (p.10)

Chapter 2

1. Pinker’s critique of behaviorism was for the flavor that only focused on event behavior (i.e., the variety of John B. Watson) (p.19)
2. Pinker claims behaviorists seek to explain behavior without acknowledging genetics or evolutionary history (p.20).
3. Pinker claims strict behaviorism is dead in psychology (p.21)
4. Franz Boas posited that differences in behavior doesn’t come from their physical or genetic make up but from culture. He believed everyone has the same mental capabilities – even though cultures are different (p.22-23)
5. Pinker argues that in the Black Slate paradigm, society is reified and blamed for peoples’ bad actions (p.26).

Chapter 3

1. Consilience is the unification of knowledge (p.30)
2. 5 contributions of the cognitive revolution to explaining the mind:
3. Information, computation and feedback grounds the physical world in the mind (p.31)
   • A blank slate doesn’t do anything; the mind does things; therefore, the mind cannot be a blank slate (p.34)
   • A wide range of behavior can emerge from the limited programs in the mind (p.36)
   • All humans run on the same mental software that enables us learn the peculiarities of our different situations or cultures (p.37)
   • The mind is the complex system with many interacting parts with different agendas/goals (p.39)
4. Citing evidence using brain tissue studies of Albert Einstein, gay men, convicted murders, Pinker argues that some differences in behavior is not totally due to learning from the environmental culture (p.44)
5. Identical twins (living together or apart) test similarly on almost every trait. Whereas, kids of the same age who are adopted and raised from infancy in the same household tend to ne dissimilar. This may suggest that differences in mind come from difference in guess (p.47)
6. Pinker provided studies demonstrating that both behavioral tendencies and actual behavior may be inheritable (p.50)
7. Pinker argues that humans’ minds was an adaptation favored by natural selection (p.53).
8. Proximal cause = The mechanism; Ultimate/final cause: the adaptive rationale (p.54)

Chapter 4

1. An analysis of innate mental capabilities isn’t an alternative to the explanatory power of learning and culture, but an attempt to explain the mechanisms underpinning those other processes. (p.60)
2. Theory of mind: A mind that can infer what another’s goals are (p.61)
3. “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other” – Eric Hoffer (p.63)
4. Culture is simply accumulated local wisdom (p.63)
5. The social reality in a group depends on the cognitive abilities of the individuals who make up the group (p.65)
6. Four levels of analyzing mental life: (a) Function (in the evolutionary sense); (b) Real-time mechanism; (c) Development at the individual level; (d) Development at the species level (p.70)

Chapter 5

1. Pinker doesn’t see learning making changes in the brain as a big deal (p.85-87)
2. Pinker also uses a wide range of evidence to demonstrate how parts of the brain can shape themselves without sensory input (p.97)
3. The number of genes in a genome has nothing to do with the level of complexity the organization expresses in behavior (p.100)

Part 2

Chapter 6

1. Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1971 paper: As the proportion of variance in social studies explained by non-genetic factors go down, the proportion explained by genetic factors (e.g, intelligence, talent) will go up. (p.107)
2. People interpreted the Hernstein study as implying that blacks were less intelligent than whites (p.107)
3. Determinism (math): A system whose prior states cause subsequent states with certainty; Determinism (social sciences): people have a tendency to act in a particular way in certain circumstances. Pinker doesn’t believe in determinism as used in social sciences (p.113)
4. A gene doesn’t always cause a particular behavior and it’s not only the cause of that behavior. Rather it increases the probability of a particular behavior occurring in comparison to other genes (p.114).

Chapter 7

1. “… the notion that there should be one set of truth’s available to everyone is modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work” – Irving Kristol (p.131)
2. “Ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is “the opium of the people”; they add a heartfelt, “thank God!”  – Ronald Bailey (p.131).

Part 3

1. Four anxieties about human nature: (a) If people are innately different, there would be justification for discrimination and opposition; (b) If people are innately immoral, there is no point improving humanity; (c) If it’s all just biology, free will is a myth and people can’t be held accountable; (d) If it’s all just biology, life can’t have meaning (p.139)

Chapter 8

1. The moral appeal of the Blank slate arises from the reasoning that if we’re all blank, we’re all equal (p.14)
2. If people are innately different, there evils may arise from that: (a) It becomes rational to discriminate against people that don’t look like you; (b) It becomes rational to blame them for their lot in life; (c) People might entertain eugenics to remove people with undesirable traits out of society (p.142)
3. “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that carry them far apart” – Confucius (p.142)
4. Genes affect personality and intelligence, although those differences apply to group averages and there’s overlap between group members (i.e., groups who have high averages in a trait will have some members scoring low on that trait) – (p.144)
5. Pinker argues that because the more information we have about a person’s qualifications, the less we default to decisions based on race or gender averages, the best cure for discrimination is more accurate tests of mental abilities. – (p.147)
6. Example of where discrimination has been justified in practice: benefits of racially diverse workplaces outweigh the costs of discriminating against white people (p.148)
7. Greater rewards go to people with greater inborn talents if people are willing to pay for the fruits of those talents (p.149)
8. The fact that inborn talents contribute to social status does not mean it is the only contribution (p.150)
9. Evolutionary success and goodness do not mean the same thing (p.150)
10. If people differ in talent, some will still find themselves in poverty – even in a society that manages to eliminate discrimination. Pinker argues that this will be an injustice that would be overlooked if we don’t admit in the first place that people have innate differences in ability (p.151)
11. “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin” – Charles Darwin (p.151)
12. A non-blank slate implies a tradeoff between freedom and material equality (p.152)
13. 20^th century eugenics was a cause of the left. The conservatives of the time hated it because they saw it as man trying to play God (p.153)
14. Hitler read Marx. Pinker argues the former got from the latter the ideology that history is a story of conflict between groups and certain groups are inferior to others (non-Aryans & Bourgeoise) and humanity will only be better if these inferior groups are stamped out. (p.157)
15. Marxist features attributable to the blank slate ideology: (a) People are the same, therefore anyone who is materially better off must have gotten there through greed or theft; (b) If the mind is a blank slate, a society that wants to cultivate a certain kind of mind also controls the people’s experiences; (c) If the people are shaped by their social environments, growing up in a materially better environment irredeemably corrupts their minds, values and tastes; (d) Self-interest is learnt and not a part of human nature. Self-interested actions simply imply greed or laziness and must be punished by the state; (e) Individuals are dispensible. It is the society as a whole that must be prioritized (p.157-158)

Chapter 9

1. The view that human nature is wicked could lead to the fear that social reform is a waste of time (p.159)
2. Naturalistic fallacy: If it’s in nature, it is good; Moralistic fallacy: If it is good, it must be found in nature/biology (p.162)
3. Pinker argues that if the mind is a blank slate, every inner desire will translate to an overwhelming urge that would lead wicked actions. However, if the mind is a system, there are components whose drives can be contacted by other components. (p.166)
4. Pinker argues that peaceful coexistence doesn’t come from stamping out their selfish desires, but by pitting long-sighted mental components against short-sighted ones (p.169)
5. Pinker argues that since we are not just products of the environment, there will always be costs to changing human behavior (p.169)

Chapter 10

1. “No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the ground that it was human nature” A. A. Milne (p.175)
2. There is dilemma: if behavior is determined (biologically, randomly or otherwise), then we can’t claim responsibility for our actions (p.178)
3. Some legal theorists posit that criminal law is just controlled implementation of humanity’s desire revenge (p.182)

Chapter 11

1. Pinker argues that: (a) The wrongness of discrimination is not only because everyone has the same traits; (b) The wrongness of violence is not because people are not naturally predisposed to it; (c) Being responsible for one’s actions should not be only because people’s motives aren’t always clean; (d) The meaningfulness of people’s motives shouldn’t be because biology cannot explain certain aspect of it (yet) (p.193)

Part 4

Chapter 12

1. Social constructionists believe that reality is socially constructed through language, stereotypes and media. They believe that people can’t view reality directly, but access it through lenses colored by the prevailing culture. Consequently, anyone claiming to know the truth is only trying to exert power through the backroad of offering an alternative lens to view reality. (p.198)
2. Naïve realism: we see things as they are (p.199)
3. Naive realism isn’t true due to the visual illusions (p.199)
4. If one claims the mind has the innate ability to form categorizations based on some reality, it can also be used to provide grounds for justifying stereotypes of race and gender that can be used to discriminate out-group members (p.201)
5. Pinker admits some stereotypes may be inaccurate, but criticizes moral relativists for wanting to do away with the idea that some categorizations humans make are actually grounded in objective reality (p.202)
6. Stereotypes are not typically inaccurate, but will definitely be inaccurate if a person has no direct, firsthand experience with the stereotyped group; or belongs to a group that sees the stereotyped group as an outgroup (p.204-5)
7. Stereotypes may end up being accurate also as self-fulfilling prophecies. For instance, at a time in America, blacks were not seen to be fit as leaders. But this was due to institutional barriers (e.g. schools that refused admission to black students). This meant that there were less educated black people – thus, justifying the stereotype about black people not being fit for leadership. (p.207)
8. Social constructionists also argue language has the power to constrain thought. Pinker counters this by arguing that the mind has properties that are independent of input through senses (p.207)
9. Deconstructionists are another group who argue that language is a system that has no connection reality. As a result, the ruling power can manipulate its use to preserve power or oppress others. (p.208)
10. Pinker argues that creating new words for minorities and other disadvantaged groups suggests that words and attitudes are so intermingled that the only way to change peoples’ attitudes is to change the words. (p.211)
11. Euphemism treadmill: when new words used to replace changed words also become changed themselves because of association (p.212)
12. Pinker argues that the euphemism treadmill suggests that concepts, not nominal labels are what stand out in the mind (p.213)

Chapter 13

1. Pinker provides a list of cognitive faculties and institutions: (a) An intuitive physics to understand objects and how they move in the world; (b) An intuitive biology to understand the innate essence of all living things; (c)An intuitive engineering for converting things to tools to achieve a goal: (d) An intuitive phycology to understand and interact with other people; (e) An intuition about space to orient the self in the physical space; (f) An intuition about numbers to estimate quantities of things; (g) An intuition about probability to deal with uncertainties; (h) An intuition about economics to exchange things; (i) A mental database and logic to represent ideas; (j) Language to share ideas (p.220-221)
2. Pinker argues that education is a technology that makes up for knowledge that are not innate or intuitive (p.221)
3. Pinker argues that fear of GMOs arises from human intuitions about biology applied to plants – whereas, in the real sense, GMOs aren’t necessarily inferior to natural plants because of how they were bred (p.231)
4. Alan Fiske taxonomy of human transactions: (a) Communal sharing: share without keeping track; (b) Authoritative ranking: Dominant members of the group take from lower-ranking members; (c) Equality matching: exchange goods that are similar or comparable; (d) Market pricing: modern economic system of rents, wages, prices and interests (p.233-234)
5. Physical fallacy: The belief that the value of an object comes from its innate characteristics, rather than what someone would pay for it. (p.237)
6. Famines still occur, not necessarily due to population explosion but because of man-made interventions that prevent food from getting to those who need it (p.237)
7. Pinker argues that the Malthusian prophecy underestimated how technological progress increases availability and efficiency of resources (p.237)
8. Paul Rome’s perspectives: (a) Constraint on human prosperity isn’t material resources but ideas, e.g. petroleum used to be a water contaminant before becoming fuel; (b) Ideas, unlike material resources, e.g. food, fuel, etc., are non-rival goods. This means that they can be duplicated without depleting the original stock (p.238)

Chapter 14

1. Family love can evolve into nepotism (p.234)
2. Leaders from history who have tried to rally a social group around a cause have typically used family terms, e.g., brethren, brothers to facilitate solidarity (p.247)
3. Pinker argues that the idea that human are innately communal stems from the noble savage doctrine (p.255)
4. In the ultimatum game, proposers tend to offer almost half of the total while respondents reject anything less than at least half (p.256)
5. Hunting in hunter-gatherer societies is treated as a public good. If the hunter who makes the largest catch refuses to share, he is punished with gossip and ostracism, and if he shares, he is rewarded with prestige (p.258)

Chapter 15

Part 5

Chapter 16

1. According to Pinker, from sociological perspective, individuals are mere parts of the larger society, while from the economic perspective, society is an arrangement emerging from some sacrificing their autonomy for security from others flexing their autonomy (p.285)
2. Thomas Sowell’s “Two visions”: (a) Tragic vision: An individual is limited on his/her own and must depend on social arrangements; (b) Utopian vision: An individual’s limitations arise from the society, but a better society would let humanity reach its potential (p.287)
3. Research from Frans de Waal and colleagues show that low-ranking primates can coordinate to depose the alpha primate (p.298)
4. Failings of the US constitution according to Pinker: (a) Silent on genocide of native Americans; (b) Silent on slavery of African Americans; (c) Silent on women rights; (d) Sees equality of opportunity as the only way to distribute wealth; (d) Not stipulating the values and customs needed for a democracy to work (p.298)
5. Pinker argues that traditions and adopted not just to human nature, but also the prevalent material and economic conditions. Therefore, respecting human nature doesn’t mean keeping all kinds of past traditions (p.299)
6. Robert Frank’s policy recommendation: Instead of taxing income, governments should tax consumption. This would prevent the hedonic treadmill (p.303)

Chapter 17

1. Although aggressive parents raise aggressive kids, Pinker argues that aggression may also be a trait that is inherited (p.310)
2. Pinker argues that the public health approach to stemming violence may not be effective (p.312)
3. Pinker argues that the roots of violence doesn’t have to be reduced to just genetics as this would mean blaming ethnicities with more violence on average for having “bad genes”; he also argues that even if people have inherited a “gene of violence” it doesn’t mean they can’t help but get violent (p.315)  
4. Because of human nature and human history, the question is not, “why are people aggressive” but “how do people learn not to be aggressive?” (p.316)
5. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita study: Analyzed 25 conflicts in the past 200 years and found that the aggressor made the accurate decision to initiate the attack (p.319)
6. ‘Lex talionis’: Law of retaliation (p.324)
7. Societies that herd animals tend to have an honor culture, likely due to livestock easier to steal than farmlands. A herdsman who takes an insult is signaling that his possessions can be taken from him without issue (p.327)
8. Inner city African American neighborhood tends to have high levels of violence because they have an honor culture. However, since they were never herdsmen, they likely picked it up from the descendants of Scottish and Irish herdsmen who settled in southern United States (p.328-329)
9. “Violence is a way to enforce property rights in the absence of legal recourse” – Jeff Grogger (p.329)
10. Considerations for human conflict resolution: (a) Submit to the rule of law; (b) Have conflicting parties back down without losing honor; (c) Realize people can deceive themselves, and you can do the same to yourself; (d) See overlaps between your interests and those of others (p.336)

Chapter 18

1. Reasons for gender equality in recent years: (a) Expansion of moral circle to include women rights; (b) Technological and economic progress; (c) Economic value of brains over brawn; (d) Increase in human lifespan; (e) Affordability of extended education; (f) Feminism (p.337-338)
2. Gender equality doesn’t imply that all genders are psychologically identical, but that people in either gender shouldn’t be judged based on average characteristics of their group members (p.340)
3. Two school of feminism: (a) Equity feminism: Opposes gender discrimination; (b) Gender feminism: Posits that women are enslaved by a system of male dominance (p.341)
4. Gender feminism is committed to the following claims: (a) Gender differences are not grounded in biology but are socially constructed; (b) Power is the single source of human motivation and we understand society by understanding how power is used; (c) To understand human interactions, don’t look at the individuals but look at the groups they belong to (p.341)
5. According to Pinker, the only way inequality of outcome is proof of inequality of opportunity is if all members of comparative groups were blank slates, and thus identical in all psychological traits (p.353)
6. Not all sex differences in various occupations are caused by gender discrimination (p.355)
7. Average differences in ability may be irrelevant, but average differences in preferences of members in each gender are not irrelevant (p356)
8. “If you insist on using gender parity as you measure social justice, it means you have to keep many men and women out of the work they like best and push them into work they don’t like” – Linda Gottfredson (p.359)
9. The noble savage influence is seen in those who see the motive to rape not coming from human nature (which they see as natural and good) but from social institutions (p.362)

Chapter 19

1. Heritability: Proportion of variance in a trait that corresponds with genetic differences (p.334)
2. Judith Harris argues in her “Group socialization theory” that behavioral tendencies don’t just come from genes or what parents model in the home, but from what peers’ model during the during the process of socialization (p.390)

Chapter 20

1. Thorstein Veblen posited that the psychology of taste is driven by conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste (p. 406)
2. In art, modernism was a reaction to the certainty and complacency of the Victorian era. Post modernism, on the other hand, argues that there are many perspectives on reality and one is not necessarily better than the other (p.410-411)
3. “Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness but storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape” – A.S. Byatt (p.419)

Part 6

Pinker argues that post modernism is inconsistent because it claims to deconstruct power but refuses objective standards that could be used to hold those in power accountable.