Ed Mayo
It’s 34 years since the famous Pepsi vs Coke taste test produced its curious results. In a blind test, half of subjects preferred Pepsi to Coke. But when they knew which was which, three quarters of them liked the Coke best. It went down in marketing history: massively powerful global brands could now override the rationality of our own preferences.
This low-tech test confirmed conventional thinking that clever slogans and appealing product claims persuade us to believe that brand X is better than brand Y—a conscious and rational process. But now, in places like the Human Neuroimaging Lab in Houston, sophisticated new tools are being used to show something quite different. Here you can see a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, a massive piece of kit worth millions of pounds that measures changes in blood flow and blood oxygenation. It allow us to see which areas of the brain are working at any given time. If you wire it up to someone who is watching television, you can identify how marketing stimuli affect our conscious and subconscious emotions, desires and associations. Welcome to the world of “neuromarketing.”
As the marketing industry embraces such new technology, we must ask what the rules of the game need to be—particularly for our children. Today, regulation rests on what experts call the “persuasion model” of marketing. In this world the phrase “Don’t Forget the Fruit Gums, Mum!” is not allowed because it tries to persuade young children, who don’t yet know they are being manipulated, to pester their parents.
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Judith Rich Harris
During much of the 20th century, it was considered impolite and unscientific to say that genes play any role in determining people’s personalities, talents or intelligence. But we’re in the 21st century now, the era of the genome. So when Robert Winston informs us, at the opening of each episode of the BBC1 documentary series Child of Our Time, that we’re going to “find out what makes us who we are,” we know he’s going to say that people are the way they are partly for genetic reasons. (In case you’ve missed it, Child of Our Time is a project tracking the lives of 25 children for their first 20 years, returning to them each year to assess their progress. This year’s series—the seventh—is being screened in three episodes, starting on Sunday 6th May.)
Child of Our Time is itself a sign of scientific progress because of its enlightened approach to the genome. Nevertheless, the series is scientifically misleading. Simply depicting the lives of 25 children, or sprinkling little “experiments” here and there throughout the programmes, sheds no light on the nature vs nurture question. Psychologists studied child development in this way for the better part of a century and learned remarkably little. Observing children at home or in school, individually or in groups, is not the way to answer the question of why they turn out the way they do.
The problem is that most children are reared by their biological parents, so the parents provide both the genes and the home environment. The effects of the genes are therefore impossible to separate from the effects of the environment. Young Johnny has a strong drive to succeed? Well, that’s not surprising—so does his father! But does Johnny’s drive to succeed come from lessons learned from his father, from genes inherited from his father, or from some combination of the two? Most 20th-century developmental psychologists assumed it was mainly Johnny’s experiences at home that made him who he is today. Even those who admitted that genes may play a role continued to feel that the child’s environment—by which they meant the home environment—was of greater importance.
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Natasha Walter
A few years ago progress towards sexual equality seemed to be moving forwards—not at a sprint, but nevertheless with some momentum. When I wrote my book The New Feminism in 1998 (just after publication of Naomi Wolf’s Fire with Fire, which tapped a similar sense of optimism in the US in the early years of the Clinton administration), there was a strong feeling that old traditions were cracking and giving way to a more equal society.
Many of the reasons for this optimism are still with us. None of the opportunities and freedoms that women have won in recent generations have been ceded. But the sense of energy that accompanied those women who found doors swinging open that had not been open for their mothers has begun to turn into a quiet fatalism.
When women look around, they can see that full equality is still a distant promise. In the UK, women in full-time work earn just 85 per cent of the average male full-time salary; women make up only 4 per cent of executive directors in all listed companies; and only one of the 12 most senior judges is a woman. Women are also far more likely than men to earn less: in 2001, 30 per cent of female employees earned under £4.86 an hour, compared to 18 per cent of men. Meanwhile, mothers put in twice as much time as fathers on unpaid work in the home.
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Richard Dawkins
“Race” is not a clearly defined word. “Species” is different. There really is an agreed way to decide whether two animals belong in the same species: can they interbreed? The interbreeding criterion gives the species a unique status in the hierarchy of taxonomic levels. Above the species level, a genus is just a group of species whose members are pretty similar to each other. No objective criterion exists to determine how similar they have to be, and the same is true of all the higher levels: family, order, class, phylum and the various “sub-” or “super-” names that intervene between them. Below the species level, “race” and “sub-species” are used interchangeably and, again, no objective criterion exists that would enable us to decide whether two people should be considered part of the same race or not, nor to decide how many races there are. And of course there is the added complication, absent above the species level, that races interbreed, so there are lots of people of mixed race.
The interbreeding criterion works pretty well, and it delivers an unequivocal verdict on humans and their supposed races. All living human races interbreed with one another. We are all members of the same species, and no reputable biologist would say any different. But let me call your attention to an interesting, perhaps even slightly disturbing, fact. While we happily interbreed with each other, producing a continuous spectrum of inter-races, we are reluctant to give up our divisive racial language. Wouldn’t you expect that if all intermediates are on constant display, the urge to classify people as one or the other of two extremes would wither away, smothered by the absurdity of the attempt, which is continually manifested everywhere we look? But this is not what happens, and perhaps that very fact is revealing.
People who are universally agreed by all Americans to be “black” may draw less than one eighth of their ancestry from Africa, and often have a light skin colour well within the normal range for people universally agreed to be “white.” In the picture on the next page of four American politicians, two are described in all newspapers as black, the other two as white. Wouldn’t a Martian, unschooled in our conventions but able to see skin shades, be more likely to split them three against one? But in our culture, almost everybody will immediately “see” Colin Powell as “black,” even in this particular photograph which happens to show him with possibly lighter skin than both George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
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Gabrielle Walker
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection struck a body-blow to human hubris. We were not, after all, an elevated species, untainted by the vagaries of nature. Instead, we had obtained our exalted powers in the same manner as all other living things – through fortuitous evolutionary adaptations to a natural world characterised by what Darwin called “blind, pitiless indifference.”
Natural selection works on us because millions of random mutations occur in our genetic blueprint between one generation and the next. Suppose one of those gives rise to a trait that enhances your capacity to survive some environmental hazard; you live in the tropics, say, and a genetic mutation means that you are born with slightly darker skin than your parents. In that case, you will have a slightly better chance than your paler peers of coping with intense sunlight, and hence surviving to have babies of your own. It is through this incremental matching of mutations with environment that people from the tropics have browner skin than those in cooler climates.
But evolution has equipped us with inventive minds that let us mould the environment to our own specifications. We can eliminate the hazards and leave evolution nothing to work on. As we daub ourselves with sunblock creams, there is no longer a selective advantage to brown skin, and asthma, which used to be a killer, has become a mild inconvenience.
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Raymond Tallis
If I were leafing through Prospect wondering where to begin, I would probably pass over this article. Given its theme??nature or nurture??I would expect to be bored. And for several reasons: for the confused arguments that are mobilised by those who want to prove either that our character (behaviour, personality) is entirely, or mostly, genetically determined or entirely, or mostly, environmentally determined; for the straw men each party conscripts to represent the views of its opponents; for the banality of middle positions which remind us that both nature and nurture contribute to our being the kind of creatures we are; and, most of all, because the warring parties tend to walk straight past the places where the really interesting questions about human nature are to be found.
Much of the excitement of the nature versus nurture debate comes from the nastiness that it brings out in the participants. The spectacle of charismatic communicators at each others? throats almost compensates for the tedium of a muddled debate. In his recent onslaught (The Blank Slate), Steven Pinker accused those who minimise the role of genes in the shaping of the human mind, in explaining differences between individuals or determining their attainments in IQ tests, life and everything else, of being in thrall to an ?anti-life, anti-human? abstraction.? The genophobes can be just as rude. When EO Wilson launched ?sociobiology??whose central notion is that behaviour and society are ?the extensions of genes that exist because of their superior adaptive value??he was accused, in a letter in the New York Review of Books from Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and others, of reviving ideas that provided the basis for ?the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.?
Yet often the similarities between the two sides are more important than their differences. The progressive environmentalists, who emphasise nurture, are as determinist as the reactionary hereditarians, who emphasise nature. And both parties tend to overlook most of what it is to be human. Matt Ridley?s book Nature via Nurture admirably defuses this simplistic antithesis. Though Ridley does not take the obvious next step and reject the terms of the ?nature versus nurture? debate altogether, he does provide ammunition for those of us who feel that neither naturians nor nurturists properly engage with?to echo his subtitle??what makes us human.?
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Kenan Malik
Where once the idea of human nature was treated with suspicion, today there is barely a human activity for which someone does not have an evolutionary account. A key figure in bringing about this change has been the psychologist Steven Pinker. Books such as The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works have established Pinker’s reputation both as one of the finest science writers of his generation and as a swashbuckling champion of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker, however, remains unconvinced that there has been such an intellectual transformation. Human nature, he insists, remains “a modern taboo.” It’s a taboo “that distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse and our day-to-day lives.” In his new book, The Blank Slate, Pinker seeks to to restore balance to the discussion of what it is to be human.
The “modern denial of human nature,” he argues, is rooted in three beliefs: “the blank slate,” the “noble savage” and the “ghost in the machine.” According to the blank slate view, human infants acquire all their knowledge socially. The ideology of the noble savage suggests that humans are naturally born good, and that society corrupts them. The “ghost in the machine” is the term that the philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave to Descartes’s view of the mind as an immaterial spirit distinct from the physical world.
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Marek Kohn
An actress tosses her hair and lets drop the catchphrase, “because I’m worth it.” By her own estimation, she is worth $1m per episode of the sitcom in which she stars, but settles for $750,000. A pop star spends ?15,000 a month on flowers. A top footballer wants earnings of ?100,000 a week, the rate phrased as if he was still a worker on a wage.
People raise their eyebrows at sums like these, but rarely their voices. The public feels resentment when bosses seem to appropriate wealth whose source is public: in utility businesses, or high street banks which hold substantial fractions of the public’s money. Stars, on the other hand, have always been felt to deserve their wealth for the pleasure they give, especially if they have emerged from humble origins.
In any case, we now have half a century’s experience of mass prosperity and when all but a few are secure in the essentials, the force drains out of arguments about inequality. Who cares if David Beckham is paid ?100,000 a week, while those watching him earn ?20,000 a year? If his “wages” were redistributed around the stadium, they would stretch to a round of drinks; but the spectators don’t need an extra pint any more than he needs the money.
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Raymond Tallis
There is no question more interesting, important and emotionally charged than what it is to be human. The unswerving commitment of many leading intellectuals over the last 100 years to promoting an utterly debased account of human nature is therefore profoundly depressing. We are told that a human being is not such a fine thing after all; that men and women are beasts (and beastly beasts at that); or that they are well-nigh unconscious automata, culturally or genetically programmed to further their own interests or those of their genes.
Vehemently anti-humanist views, once the preserve of far-right misanthropes such as Joseph de Maistre, are now commonplace. As Kenan Malik says, at the turn of the new millennium “we might think of man as weak, wretched, barbarous, savage, inhuman… But never again, it seems, as dignified and noble, or as the measure of all things.”
School children who study William Golding’s Lord of the Flies-a GCSE set text-get marks for noting how thin is “the veneer of civilisation” and how badly civilisation suits us. They will get no additional marks for wondering how, if this is the case, civilisation got going in the first place and how it seems to continue from day to day.
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Kenan Malik
There were two broad responses to the unveiling, in June, of the first draft of the human genome. Some over-enthusiastic scientists and some gullible journalists gushed about having deciphered “the book of life.” Sequencing the human genome, they said, will enable us to “understand what it means to be human,” and will transform our ideas of man. “We used to think our fate was in the stars,” James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has said. “Now we know it is in our genes.”
For others, the success of the geneticists was an occasion for dread, not celebration. Many feared that genetic manipulation will lead not to medical advance but to social regression. The Campaign Against Human Genetic Engineering has called for a halt to cloning and genetic manipulation, because it worries about eugenics and genetic discrimination. The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, questioned the morality of tampering with nature. “What will become of love and loss, of the sanctity of human life?” he asked. “If persons are no longer individuals but rather genetic types that can be replicated at will, what then becomes of our most central values?”
Both responses are mistaken. The Human Genome Project has immense potential, but it certainly will not reveal the secrets of human life; there is more to life than a string of genes. The fears about the project are equally misplaced. Genetic advance, like most technological advances, throws up many social and moral challenges. But that is exactly what they are: social and moral issues, not scientific ones. Holding back genetic research will not help us to tackle them.
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