| By the end of World War II, a new paradigm for the scientific understanding of human development had emerged. For a variety of reasonsmethodological, metaphysical, political, even empirical!the idea that human nature is the preeminent force at work in shaping the character of a person and the contours of her life had given way to a resolute empiricism. For the first time since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, experience, and not our innate endowment, was universally accorded the primary role in the making of ourselves and our society. By the time of the war in Vietnam, however, the newly resurrected empiricist orthodoxy was being challenged by a vigorous resurgence of nativism. Far from playing a minor role in the making of a person, human nature was again taken to be the chief factor at work in determining the nature of people and the milieux in which they live. |
| Today, "Nativism Rules, OK." In both the popular and academic presses, books and articles claiming to have found a `substantial genetic basis for,' or `instinct for,' or even `the gene for' a variety of traits and behaviors have proliferated. Features as diverse as scholastic performance, sexual orientation, violence, "[a]ltruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice," poverty, alcoholism and other substance abuse, susceptibility to diseases, sexual mores, the desire to rape women, the attainment of concepts, language use, even attitudes toward divorce and religionfeatures that were formerly held to be substantially under environmental controlare now routinely claimed to be largely, if not wholly, innate.1 |
 | | | | 1. The quotation is from Wright (1994:12). See Herrnstein and Murray (1994), esp. 317-68) for the innateness of IQ and poverty; Hamer and Copeland (1994) and LeVay (1993) for the innateness of sexual orientation; Nobel et al. (1991), Bruner et al. (1993), and Wright (1995) for the innateness of violence; Williams and Nesse (1991) for the innateness of disease susceptibility; Thornhill and Thornhill (1992) for the genetic basis of men's alleged compulsion to rape; Nesse (1994) for nativist perspectives on substance |
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