The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [155]
Children plainly have a ‘language organ’ in their brains ready and waiting to apply the rules. They infer the basic rules of grammar without instruction, a task that has been shown to be beyond the power of a computer unless the computer has been endowed with some prior knowledge.
From about the age of one and a half years until soon after puberty children have a fascination with learning a language and are capable of learning several languages far more easily than adults can. They learn to talk irrespective of how much encouragement they are given. Children do not have to be taught grammar, at least not of living languages that they hear spoken; they divine it. They are constantly generalizing the rules they have learnt in defiance of the examples they hear (such as ‘persons gived’ rather than ‘people gave’). They are learning to talk in the same way that they are learning to see, by adding the plasticity of vocabulary to the preparedness of a brain that insists on applying rules. The brain has to be taught that large animals with udders are called cows. But to see a cow standing in a field, the visual part of the brain employs a series of sophisticated mathematical filters to the image that it receives from the eye – all unconscious, innate and unteachable. In the same way the language part of the brain knows without being taught that the word for a large animal with an udder is likely to behave grammatically like other nouns and not like verbs.4
The point is that nothing could be more ‘instinctive’ than the predisposition to learn a language. It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired. It is not learnt. It is – horrid thought – genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself. The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.
If I am right and people are just animals with more than usually trainable instincts, then it might seem that I am excusing instinctive behaviour. When a man kills another man, or tries to seduce a woman, he is just being true to his nature. What a bleak, amoral message. Surely there is a more natural basis for morality in the human psyche than that? The centuries-old debate between the followers of Rousseau and Hobbes – whether humanity is a corrupted noble savage, or a civilized brute – has missed the point. The evidence supports Hobbes. We are instinctive brutes, and some of our instincts are unsavoury. Of course, some instincts are very much more moral, and the vast human capacity for altruism and generosity – the glue that has always held society together – is just as natural as any selfishness. Yet selfish instincts are there, too. Men are much more instinctively capable of murder and of sexual promiscuity than women, for example. But Hobbes’s vindication means nothing because instincts combine with learning. None of our instincts is inevitable; none is insuperable. Morality is never based upon nature. It never assumes that people are angels, or that the things it asks human beings to do come naturally. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is not a gentle reminder, but a fierce injunction to men to overcome any instincts they may have, or face punishment.
Nurture is not Necessarily the Opposite of Nature
The Jamesian notion that man has instincts to learn things at a stroke demolishes the whole dichotomy of learning versus instinct, nature versus nurture,