The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker - PREFACE (part 2) | Текст песни

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• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
• PREFACE (part 2)

If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with this issue. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.

This is not going to be one of those books that says everything is genetic: it isn't. The environment is just as important as the genes. The things children experience while they are growing up are just as important as the things they are born with.

Even when a behavior is heritable, an individual's behavior is still a product of development, and thus it has a causal environmental component. ... The modern understanding of how phenotypes are inherited through the replication of both genetic and environmental conditions suggests that ... cultural traditions -- behaviors copied by children from their parents -- are likely to be crucial...