Hui Lin Zheng - Pinker

In Pinker's article "Blank Slate" there were several points he brought up that I thought were interesting and thought provoking. One of Pinker's arguments is that the blank slate is not a valid theory. That people, in particular children, are not empty slates that can be molded into something desired by their environment. Biology is responsible for human behavior. On page seven of his article, Pinker backs his argument by observing adoptive siblings and that "they share an environment, but don’t share their genes.  And the repeated findings of those studies is that adopted siblings are not similar in personality or intelligence at all.  That is, by the time they’re adults, two adoptive siblings growing up in the same home are no more similar than two people plucked from the population at random. What all this suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents, but in part—but only in part—by their genes".

However, I disagree with his argument that children are shaped mostly by their biology-their genes. He claims that a child's temperament and personality is predisposed from birth by heredity and that good parenting is only because of a moral obligation to their children. I believe that the environment and our biology both play an equal part in the behavior of people. Although biology does determine their temperament from birth, the environment that they grow up in also shapes their behavior. I was raised with more of an authoritarian parenting style and I believe that I would not be the person that I am today without my parenting. I believe parents who strongly enforce right from wrong, good from bad, being lazy or hard working, being a good citizen or a criminal to their children can impact their children's behavior when they grow up. I believe punishing children when they have misbehaved and rewarding them when they do something good does make a significant impact on what kind of person they will be when they grow up.

Pinker and I are acting out the 'science wars' by addressing the nature verses nurture controversy. Pinker states that people are the products of nature while I state that that people are the products of the equal interaction of nature and nurture. Although behavior is partially due to biology, effective parenting does make an impact in what kind of people we become. I believe that children born from criminal parents can in the proper environment grow up to become good people. Likewise, children born from kind parents could become criminals if raised in a negative environment with neglectful parents. It is too simple that state that the kind of person and the lives we will have are determined mainly by biology.