On CRISPR
COWEN: Let’s take bioengineering technologies, gene editing, CRISPR, and the like. Imagine a much more advanced version than what stands right before us. Imagine that parents could to some extent influence or design the children they would have, above and beyond eliminating a few particular diseases.
Does that worry you, or does that get you excited that we’re going to have smarter, better people?
PINKER: I’m skeptical of the premise. As someone who is very interested in genetically influenced traits, and was excited in the ’90s at the possibility that we’d find the gene for this and the gene for that, and there were a number of discoveries which turned out to be false alarms.
Now more and more I appreciate that even traits that have a heavy genetic component, which most traits do, the genetic influence is distributed over thousands and thousands of genes, each of which increment or decrement the trait by a smidgen, and many of which have a mixture of positive and negative effects.
The idea that you’ll put in the gene for musical ability in your child just turns out to be factually incorrect. That’s not the way genes work.
COWEN: But not now. Say we apply big data, Monte Carlo methods — you only raise the chance of your kid being a certain way by 1 percent, but there’s that technology — and let it rip for 50 generations. At the end, aren’t people very, very different?
PINKER: Depends on what the tradeoffs are. We don’t know how much boost in brain power you can get without an increase in the chances of brain cancer or of other tradeoffs. A neural network that’s too dense actually is stupider.
I’m rooted enough in what we know about behavioral genetics to think that these science-fiction scenarios are not particularly productive. It’s probably a scenario that we’re not going to have to worry about just because it’s too complicated, especially since every time you monkey with a gene you are taking some chance that something will go wrong.
Admittedly CRISPR‑Cas9 has become extraordinarily accurate. But if you’re talking about changing 1,000 genes in your offspring, or 10,000 genes, we’re so risk‑averse in genetic manipulation even when it comes to our tomatoes. People won’t eat a tomato if it’s genetically modified. The idea that you’re going to take that kind of risk with your children — I think it’s extraordinary unlikely that we’ll get there from here.
Do you want me to speculate about the science-fiction scenario in which we do?
COWEN: Sure, speculate a bit.
PINKER: I don’t think it would be a terrible thing, but I think it’s idle speculation. I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about it.
COWEN: Last question before we get to Q&A. What is a book we might be surprised to find on your shelves that you’ve read, or will read, or want to read? We’re not surprised to hear Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky are on your shelf. What would surprise us? What’s there that we don’t think of as a Steven Pinker kind of book to read?
PINKER: I have a big stack of bicycling magazines, and I am obsessed about the difference in weight in grams between various kinds of derailleurs and water bottle cages.
[laughter]
COWEN: So it’s aerobic exercise being underrated again?
[laughter]
PINKER: Yeah, maybe.
COWEN: Steven Pinker, thank you very much.
PINKER: Thanks so much, Tyler.
Q&A
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, Mr. Pinker — thank you for speaking today. You mentioned the preservation of uncommon words and dialects that evolved as a result of geographic isolation, such as Appalachia and remote islands.
With international connectivity caused by the Internet, do you think that we are on track for more linguistic homogeneity?
PINKER: We almost certainly are. We’re in the midst of a mass extinction of languages.
I don’t think it will result in everyone speaking English. Even under the most dire predictions, say 90 percent of languages go extinct, that leaves 600. No one is going to be giving up Spanish or Hindi or Russian or Chinese any time soon. In fact, the growth of translation software and of national media — combined with old‑fashioned national pride and just the inertia of growing up with a language and feeling more comfortable in it — means that we’re not going to have a single language driving out all the others.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.
COWEN: On this side.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I appreciate the book, and quite an amazing thing that Bill Gates is recommending this book, so I have it.
Do you believe that mankind has the ability to get prophetic dreams, like Joseph in the Bible? Do you believe that we can act on those prophetic dreams? I did psychiatry, so I’m interested in your answer from that perspective.
PINKER: No.
[laughter]
PINKER: No. I think dreams are a kind of screen saver. It would violate much of what we know about physics for a dream to be able to prophesy the future. Our understanding of physics, I think, is good enough to rule out the possibility that dreams can be prophetic.
COWEN: On this side.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was influenced by some essays you’ve written about the limits of language to advance political change. You’ve written about the euphemism treadmill and stuff like that.
There seems to be modern versions of that, where to abolish gender binaries, we’re going to abandon pronouns and so forth. You work on a university so you’re probably familiar with a lot of this.
I’d like your opinion on some of these strategies for advancing social change through abandoning certain languages and certain words and forms of language.
PINKER: Politically motivated campaigns to change language can have an effect, as we see in what I call the euphemism treadmill — that is, the fact that we don’t use the word negro anymore, even though it was a perfectly respectful and unexceptionable term through the 1970s. Martin Luther King frequently referred to Negroes. You had the United Negro College Fund. That got replaced by black, which then got replaced by African American.
But it’s easier to do it with what linguists call open-class vocabulary items, nouns and verbs, than with closed-class or grammatical items like pronouns.
Since the ’70s, there have been a number of proposals to introduce a gender‑neutral pronoun into the English language, so that we wouldn’t have to say he or she, or the clumsy he or she. None of them have caught on.
Language doesn’t change in terms of its — it does change, but not quickly, and usually not by deliberate engineering when it comes to things like articles, pronouns, past tense and plural markers, and so on.
There’ll be just a natural resistance. They’re learned early. They are highly frequent. They are distributed across millions of people conversing with one another.
I don’t think we have to worry about that changing too, too quickly. But, sure, there are more respectful and less respectful ways of referring to people. We’ve seen those change, and they’ll probably continue to change.
What I call the euphemism treadmill refers to the fact that the reason there often is a cycling is that the change in attitudes that you want to affect by changing the language will meet resistance in terms of the rest of our psychology. I don’t think it’s true that language determines your attitudes and beliefs, although it can push against them.
As long as there’s still some kind of negative connotation to an entity, then changing the label for it will just result in the new label picking up the emotional aura of the concept rather than the other way around.
As long as there is prejudice against African Americans where the connotation is not as positive as you’d like it to be, there will be the urge to find a new label that has not yet absorbed the taint of the existing one.
African American I think took over pretty quickly sometime in the 1990s. I think Jesse Jackson was the force behind it. We have gone now for more than 20-something years without a replacement of that, which might be a reflection of the fact that prejudice against African Americans is declining.
In other cases like Asian replacing Oriental, that stayed put, possibly because there was less prejudice against Asian people and there wasn’t a need to find a fresh replacement for that.
COWEN: If I could just interject on this, given this campaign season and also what you can, say, see on Twitter if you look for it, do you think public speech is now evolving to become less polite? In America?
PINKER: It’s possible. I don’t think that the Trumpism shows that our attitudes have changed, that we’re becoming more misogynistic or racist. You can do some Google searches that are quicker than Gallup or Pew polls to track some of these changes.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown that, for example, if you Google for various racist or sexist terms that are used in jokes, you get a pretty good barometer of racism that people may not be willing to admit to in public. If you do that, you don’t see a sudden U‑turn in the popularity of racist jokes in the last, say, six months.
I think it is more a question of people who kept their attitudes to themselves now feeling that they’re allowed to get away with it, that some of the taboos have been broken. Whether they will reassert themselves with the decline of Trump, we don’t know.
I kind of hope so. I think there is a benign taboo against overtly racist, misogynistic, and homophobic language. There are ugly attitudes, and there always will be: there is a benevolent hypocrisy and taboo where there are certain things that you just don’t say in public because that does legitimate them.
They can be threatened. We saw that with taboo words for sexuality starting in the ’60s. Words that you could not say in print or on the airwaves are now common. That could happen with racist and homophobic terms. I hope not. Too early to tell.
COWEN: Next question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks to both of you for inviting us to an intelligent, literate conversation that I’d like to imagine you always have over almost every meal.
[laughter]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d like to hear you speak about just how central language is to being human. I’m thinking of J. L. Austin and John Searle on speech acts in a social constructed world all the way up to — I think it’s called — the Whorf hypothesis, that the language we use limits what we can experience and do.
PINKER: I think language is central to everything else that’s human. I think that it has very much figured in our evolution by making social cooperation that much easier — namely, with language, for example, you can make an agreement to do a favor for someone now in exchange for a very different payback or a payback very far in the future, something you can’t do when you’re just bartering physical goods.
I think that since our species lives on information, information is the ultimate trade good because it is a nonrivaled good. You can share it with someone else without being deprived of it yourself. It can be multiplied, and that makes it the ideal medium of reciprocity, conferring a large benefit to someone else at a small cost to oneself.
It lubricates the kind of cooperation that is hyperdeveloped in humans. It’s also, I think, tied in with the fact that we’re a technological species, that we live by our wits, by our know‑how. That with language, if you make a discovery, you can spare other people from having to remake that discovery.
You can pool innovations that are invented across a huge catchment area. I don’t, though, endorse a version of linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, according to which we can only think thoughts for which there are words in our language.
If that were true, then you’d have to ask how did language originate in the first place. It wasn’t given to us by Martians. We developed language because we had ideas that existed prior to our being able to articulate them, for which we coined words.
Language is always changing. Again, this gets back to Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order and distributed intelligence. Even though any given language is an exquisite system for conveying complex thoughts, it was never designed by a committee.
It emerged because millions of people had ideas that they struggled to express. They would coin a bit of jargon. They would invent a circumlocution. It would go viral. It would become entrenched as part of the language.
Languages, of course, are always continuing that cycle. Our language is different from the language of the Founders, which is different from the language of Shakespeare. The fact that we’re always adding to the language, we’re losing bits of the language, as we talked about in the case of irregular verbs, shows that it isn’t itself the medium of thought.
You can always invent a circumlocution if your language doesn’t have a preexisting word. A lot of the brain is devoted to forms of thinking that are not just trading in words, not just assembling words.
I think Whorf went too far, but there’s no doubt that language is an inherent part of what makes us unusual as a species.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And unique?
PINKER: Yeah, I would say unique. Other species communicate, but grammatical language in which the meaning of the combination depends on the arrangement of the meaning of the parts and, moreover, that the number of such combinations is unlimited — this goes back to the idea of recursion, which is nowadays often associated with Noam Chomsky — is something that, without doing Procrustean stretching, I don’t think you see in other species.
There are some aspects of birdsong that are combinatorial, but birdsong has no semantics. That is, the calls don’t mean anything.
You can have some kinds of primate calls where maybe if you have two of them they’re in one order, versus not the other. There are different circumstances in which the primates utter them. I think it’s different enough from human grammatical language to say that it really is unique.
COWEN: Next question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: All right. Thank you, Dr. Pinker, for a fascinating discussion. While we’re going through this, thinking about language, society, culture, in your answer, your response to Tyler’s question on the likelihood of a catastrophic event, someone being willing to go out and take such extreme measures, it seems like all this discussion is leading to us thinking that there’s a group effect or a cultural effect on the individual through evolution.
I’m much more less aggressive than my ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago were. Do you agree with the theory of group selection? Think E. O. Wilson or Jonathan Haidt. Do you think that’s a correct response to what we were talking about?
PINKER: There are two ideas that I think you broached here. One of them is groups as the unit of analysis in evolution and natural selection. If you Google “false allure of group selection” or “Pinker group selection,” you’ll see that I have pretty strong opinions on that. I think that the idea of group selection is a big blunder.
No, I don’t think that there is a Darwinian process of differential survival of replicators that applies to groups in the way that it applies to genes. I think it’s a bad analogy.
You referred specifically to the case of violence. A frequently asked question that I get is, Are we literally evolving to become less violent in the biologist sense, that genes that encourage violence are becoming less common in the gene pool? I doubt it, but I can’t rule it out.
A fellow economist, Gregory Clark, argued that in Europe between the Middle Ages and the present, in a process that I actually wrote about in terms of the quite spectacular declines in rates of violence, he speculated might have been helped along by a genetic change.
I’m a little more skeptical, but I can’t rule it out. The reason that I’m skeptical is that you can see declines of violence that take place on time scales that couldn’t possibly be due to Darwinian natural selection.
For example, the fact that Germany went from the world’s most militaristic culture to the world’s most pacifist culture in pretty much a generation, or that the American homicide rate fell in half in eight years. There you didn’t have a turnover in generations that occurred long enough for it to be a genetic change.
We know that the overt violent behavior can change really, really quickly. That just means that we don’t need to invoke a genetic change for reductions of similar magnitude that we see in history.
COWEN: Next question.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the evolution of fashion. It seems like language has much stronger network effects than fashion does, and it’s easier to mix and match parts of fashion from different cultures.
As we go forward and culture continues to conjoin across different continents, are we heading towards a global super‑fashion, or are the cultural meanings of fashion too embodied and are we going to maintain different circles of fashion still?
PINKER: It is a fascinating question. I think we are seeing a kind of globalization of fashion, combined with a globalization of youth culture. That you can go to an awful lot of parts of the world and see similar baggy shorts in eras when baggy shorts are in fashion.
Or, for that matter, in elite fashion as well. It’s actually quite astonishing what percentage of male elites wear neckties and jackets not too different from this. It is surprising why there’s such a reduction in diversity of fashion.
At the same time as that, you have this globalization. There’s also a churning over time. There is an interesting theory with an analogy from biology, biological evolution, of frequency‑dependent selection.
This goes back to the art historian Quentin Bell, who in turn was influenced by Thorstein Veblen. That in the competition for status, in differentiating yourself as an elite, from the hoi polloi or the rabble, you want a look that’s different enough that distinguishes you.
In Veblen’s day that took the form of sumptuosity. That is, fine fabrics and tailored suits that were unfakeable enough that you were broadcasting the information that “I can afford things that you can’t, and you can’t fake them.”
With advances in clothing manufacture and everything manufacture, with everything becoming cheaper, you can’t differentiate yourself through sumptuosity and riches. Also, because of democratization and informalization, it’s kind of tacky to look like you belong in a Donald Trump hotel.
[laughter]
PINKER: That kind of flashy ostentation has lost value as a status symbol. Instead, there’s a value placed in simply being out of the mainstream enough that there’s something special about you, combined with enough of an aura of confidence that it’s not just that you’re hopelessly unhip. Rather, you’re seen as setting the next trend.
When everyone has long hair, you show up with a crew cut, or vice versa. When everyone has fat lapels, you have skinny lapels. Or long skirt length, or short skirt length.
People who have some claim to already being in the elite will then reinforce it with an unusual look, which then trickles down. When it starts to be sold in Target, then the elite have to jump to yet another look. So you get a kind of churning.
This is unlike language in that it may not have a semiotics, in the sense that there’s a lot of commentary on fashion, on what are you trying to communicate by your long hair, your short hair, your fat lapels, your skinny lapels — and the answer may be nothing. That is, all you’re communicating is “It’s different from what you’re wearing, and I’m getting away with it.”
[laughter]
PINKER: It’s similar to cases in evolution — often in parasite‑host coevolution, where simply being rare is an advantage. When being rare is an advantage, paradoxically it starts to become more common, meaning that you then have to look to something completely different that’s rare again. That was Bell’s analysis of fashion, and I think that will continue.
COWEN: Two more questions. One.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you very much for a fascinating talk. I’d like to ask you very quickly about language acquisition in infants and then language learning in adults, and finally the implications for neurological development or deterioration.
First off, in China generally it’s recognized that infants, long before they can do the labials or fricatives, and do ba or ma, they get the tone correct. Speech pathologists generally in China for five- and six‑, seven‑year‑olds, they correct for the ba, and the consonants or the vowels; very, very seldom or almost never for the tones.
Paradoxically, the US government State Department and the intelligence agencies spend a tremendous amount of money putting people through two‑year, intensive programs in Chinese. The thing that maybe one person in a thousand gets are the tones, the thing that every Chinese infant automatically gets and never forgets, in a sense encoded in indelibly.
Do you think that, in a sense, at some point at five, or six, or seven there is a modular capability, a neurological capability to hear, mimic, and reproduce? That, in a sense, gets shut off in some way around the age of 15, 20?
For the State Department and the intelligence agencies, the median age for beginning Chinese is 35 or 36. A quixotic venture, to say the least.
PINKER: [laughs] There is evidence for at least probably several critical periods, or at least sensitive periods, in language acquisition. In particular phonology — that is, the sound pattern of the language, the accent — including in the case of Chinese tones, although that also blends into the morphology, that is, the distinctions among words. That that’s the most sensitive.
Often people who are perfectly articulate and fluent in a second language will give themselves away by their accent because the mastery of the accent seems to be more dependent on being of tender age when you acquire it than, say, syntax or vocabulary.
For that matter, for vocabulary there is no critical period. We learn new words all our lives, including names for people and places. Syntax may be somewhere in between.
In fact, I have a paper that’s in one of these interminable cycles of revision and review, doing plea‑bargaining with journal referees to please publish our paper, which suggests, as you speculate, that when it comes to grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, probably the beginning of the end for mastery comes in the teenage years.
That something happens starting around the age of 15 or so that makes it harder to achieve native mastery if that’s when you begin to learn a language.
In general, younger is better. Of course, there are 6,000 languages. You don’t necessarily know when you have a child if they’re going to grow up to be a Chinese diplomat or do business in China, so you don’t know if it’s Chinese that you should start them with early, or some other language. That, of course, might change.
But in general, there is a benefit to starting early. No one has identified a particular change in the plasticity of the brain that explains it. There probably is one, but we’re just ignorant of what, if anything, changes in the brain that makes it harder to learn a language to native levels of mastery if you begin too late.
COWEN: Last question is from Bryan Caplan. Steven, at the end of your answer, please conclude everything by telling us what your next book will be about.
BRYAN CAPLAN: When Tyler argues about the power of reason, usually I’m taking your view, but when I was sitting in the front row and looking at the titles of your books, I was particularly thinking about The Blank Slate. It seems like it’s an entire book about how really smart people are really wrong about something.
Many of your other books I think also could be described in that way. The smartest people in the world who think about the subjects the most are just deeply misguided. What do you think is going wrong there, and more generally, what is wrong with academia that there’s so few Steven Pinkers out there?
[laughter]
PINKER: I won’t answer the last question, not in those terms. I think that there is an intellectual equivalent of tribalism. Jon Haidt writes about it. You’ve written about it. We tend to think of intellectual disagreements like the Red Sox versus the Yankees. It’s deeply pleasurable to read arguments that support a view that you already hold. It’s really annoying to read something that calls one of your beliefs into question.
Ideally, what we want is an arena in which the rules of the game make it so that no matter how emotionally tied you are to your belief, if it’s wrong, it’ll be shown to be wrong and it’ll just be too embarrassing to hold on to it or at least for other people to hold on to it indefinitely. That’s what I consider to be the ideal of what science is all about, and intellectual discourse in general.
When it works, how to make it work better, are really good questions. Certainly, there are disturbing signs that the process in some ways is getting worse.
I see Greg Lukianoff is here, the director of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which does a brilliant job in combating some of the restrictions on free speech that we’re seeing in university campuses, which would be a paradigm case of going in the wrong direction in terms of setting up rules that allow the truth to come out in the long term.
I’m hoping that naming and shaming and arguments will give free speech a greater foothold in academia. The fact that academia is not the only arena in which debates are held, that we also have think tanks and we also have a press. We also have the Internet.
How we could set up the rules so that despite all of the quirks of human nature — such as intellectual tribalism — are overcome in our collective arena of discourses is, I think, an absolutely vital question, and I just don’t know the answer because we’re seeing at the same time — there was the hope 20 years ago that the Internet would break down the institutional barriers to the best ideas emerging.
It hasn’t worked out that way so far because we have the festering of conspiracy theories and all kinds of kooky beliefs that somehow the Internet has not driven out, but if anything has created space for. How we as a broader culture can tilt the rules or the norms of the expectations so that if you believe something that’s false, eventually you’ll be embarrassed about it, I wish I knew. But that’s obviously what we ought to be striving for.
COWEN: And your next book?
PINKER: I’m writing a book whose tentative title is The New Enlightenment: A Manifesto for Science, Reason, Humanism, and Progress, where I argue that the enlightenment philosophers got a lot of stuff right, that a lot of their dreams are starting to come true, that a lot of dimensions of human well-being, when quantified as I tried to do in The Better Angels of Our Nature, turn out to be going in a good direction — that a lot of aspects of human life are improving.
COWEN: Steven, thank you for such wonderful content.
PINKER: Thank you, Tyler.