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The Rediscovery of Human Nature and Human Diversity
Charles MurrayAmerican Enterprise Institute
When this conference was organized, I was asked to prepare a lecture on the“implications of evolutionary theory for sociology,” which put me at a disadvantage onthree counts. I have never formally studied evolutionary theory, never formally studied sociology, and my partner in this session is one of the world’s leading authoritiesspecifically on the evolution of sociality. He will be followed by leading experts in theevolution of altruism and cooperation, morality, religion and politics. What, precisely,might I have to contribute? Nothing. I was trained as an analyst of public policy, and thatis how I have made my living for forty-six years.So I asked myself, how does the analysis of public policy relate to evolutionary psychology? The answer is that I am in a profession whose practitioners almostuniversally believe that evolutionary psychology is irrelevant to the questions they ask or answers they get. Evolution did not produce inborn human nature and evolution did not produce human diversity that separates groups of people in any meaningful way. Since both of these positions are wrong, and yet my profession also has great impact on thekinds of laws and regulations that are enacted, I thought it might be useful to devote mytime to discussing this peculiar situation.My thesis in this lecture is that growing knowledge about evolutionary psychology and its genetic foundations is going to lead to the rediscovery of humannature and the rediscovery of human diversity among groups. In the long run, both of these reversions to age-old understandings about the human animal are going producemuch better public policy than has been produced in the last half century. In the short run,they are going to cause turmoil. I will first briefly recount how human nature and humandiversity came to be eclipsed, then turn to some of the areas in which the received wisdom is going to have to change, and conclude with some speculations about what willfollow in the wake of these changes. I should note that my presentation will refer only to
 
2the experience of the United States. My impression is that many of the same forces have been at work throughout Western Europe, but I will leave those of you who are fromEurope to evaluate that possibility for yourselves.
How Human Nature and Human Diversity Were Eclipsed
Human nature began to be unpopular with the French Enlightenment and fellfurther out of fashion during the 19th century as sociology developed. It is appropriatethat Karl Marx was the intellectual founder not only of communism but (at least in IsaiahBerlin’s view
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) of sociology. The very slogan of communism, “from each according tohis ability, to each according to his need,” betrays a starry-eyed idealism about how theunimportance of inborn human nature. But even among the moderates of the Left, theconstraints of human nature could not count for much. For them, reform of socialinstitutions was the way to a better world. If that is the case, it is essential that socialinstitutions be malleable. If it is essential that they be malleable, it is also essential thatthe constraints of human nature be unimportant. There is one conspicuous oddball in thishistory—Herbert Spencer—but otherwise the rise of sociology and of socialist thought inthe 19th and early 20th centuries went hand in hand.The built-in hostility toward the importance of human nature within sociology and socialist politics found support from developments in psychology during the first half of the 20th century. B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning was only the most extreme form of the view that human behavior can be shaped at will by properly constructed environmental influences. At least through the first two-thirds of the 20th century and continuing to some extent to this day, psychologists were comfortable with the role of theunconscious and of childhood experiences in shaping human behavior, but considered even those to be malleable through the right psychotherapy. The most prominent psychologists of that era did not dwell on the proposition that humans in large numberswill always and forever tend to behave in certain ways no matter how hard one tries tochange them.The concept of human diversity fared better during the 19th century than theconcept of human nature. Throughout the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, physical anthropologists accepted the concept of race with little dissension, and it was
 
3taken for granted that the physical differences were accompanied by personality and cognitive differences as well. Carleton Coon’s magnum opus,
The Origin of Races
, was published in 1962, and provoked no outrage when it appeared.Then came two developments that above all others led to the intellectual eclipseof human nature and human diversity in the United States: the triumph of the Civil RightsMovement in the 1960s and the triumph of the Feminist Movement in the 1970s. Thesetwo developments working in combination led to what I have elsewhere called theEquality Premise: the belief that people
 
are equal not just in the way that the AmericanDeclaration of Independence meant—equal in the eyes of God and before the law—butequal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics.
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 The Equality Premise applies only rhetorically to individuals. People say thingslike “everybody should go to college,” but I suspect that few of them really believe thatall children have the cognitive ability to handle college-level material. The strictinterpretation of the Equality Premise applies to groups of people. In a fair society, it is believed, different groups of people—men and women, blacks and whites, heterosexualsand homosexuals, the children of poor people and the children of rich people—willnaturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life in a fair society. When thatdoesn’t happen, it is because of society’s unfairnesses and imperfect institutions. TheEquality Premise demands that groups may differ only in purely physiological ways suchas possession of a uterus or epicanthic folds. Differences in groups cannot possiblyembrace important personality and cognitive characteristics.The Equality Premise also has sweeping implications for the permissible role of human nature. For example, the constellation of role differences based on sex are allsuspect under the Equality Premise. Why don’t men take an equal role in child-rearing?Because culture has socialized men and women into accepting this sexist arrangement.Why do little girls, given toy trucks to play with, arrange them in a circle so they can talk to each other, while little boys, given dolls to play with, point them at each other and say“bang bang”? Same reason.The triumph of the Civil Rights movement also indirectly led to the eclipse of human nature. Many of the social and educational programs of the 1960s were
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