I have written about this before but this morning I read a comment in my all things adoption group about it – “The blank slate theory is I think one of the most degrading things to subject a person to.” I agree.

A piece by the American Psychological Association titled LINK>Not-so blank slates notes that infants understand more than you might think. Scientists who explore what’s going on in those adorably tiny heads, find that babies have a surprisingly rich understanding of the social worlds around them. In the 1980s, Renee Baillargeon PhD, director of the Infant Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues developed a method to test what babies understood about objects and events in the environment around them. The technique is based on their finding that babies look measurably longer at events that defy their expectations.

Helpfulness, fairness and kindness are “prosocial behaviors” that research indicates may be detectable in babies just a few months old. In one study, 3-month-old infants were shown a googly-eyed circle puppet trudging up a hill. In one scenario, a helpful triangle helped push the circle upward. In another, a not-so-nice square knocked the circle back to the bottom of the hill. Later, an experimenter showed both characters to the babies. The infants preferred to gaze at the helpers over the hinderers. By 5 months old, after they’ve mastered more motor skills, babies actively reach toward the nice character over the mean one — suggesting that the 3-month-olds’ extended gaze was an indication of their preference. The findings suggest that babies can distinguish between good guys and bad guys before they can even roll over.

In one study, babies stared longer at cookies divvied up unequally between two animated giraffe puppets than cookies handed out in even rations. That is, the babies seemed to expect equality and were surprised if one puppet got shortchanged. Research indicates that recognizing fairness emerges between 9 months and 12 months of age. An early sense of fairness may have evolved to help humans work together to survive. Collaborative work is the cradle of equality. Babies understand the concept of “us” versus “them” from an early age. It seems to be fundamentally about a shared preference: You value aspects of the world the same way I do, so I like you.

As scientists continue to study infants’ social and moral development, one big question remains unanswered: Are social-moral principles learned, or are babies born with these systems already in place? So, the old nature vs nurture question has not yet been entirely proved or disproved. Steven Pinker wrote a book – LINK>The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker has argued against a belief that the mind is essentially silly putty, and that commonalities and differences in how people think can be traced to commonalities and differences in their environments.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker endeavors to tell us why that belief is destructive and dangerous. Biological determinism is considered by many as heresy. Any suggestion that genetic factors play a role in shaping patterns of human behavior, including the scientists who study the heritability of traits like intelligence and aggressiveness, or who advance evolutionary explanations for some aspects of cognition, are commonly denounced as racist (or fascist or sexist), picketed, harassed, and sometimes assaulted by protesters.

Pinker believes that the Blank Slate belief has had socially and morally disastrous consequences, and he devotes the considerable force of his talent to demolishing it. Discoveries in neuroscience have shown that the mind comes equipped with various specialized functions, including those responsible for learning languages, estimating numerical quantities, picking out objects in the world, and attributing thoughts and intentions to other human beings. Some of these systems, moreover, vary from person to person in ways that are influenced by the genes. Behavioral geneticists have shown that about half of the variability in a trait like IQ is biological in origin, confirming the long-held suspicion that—all other things being equal—smart people tend to have smart children.

This is not to say that environmental factors play no role in determining how an individual mind works: for example: Japanese babies do not learn Japanese, if their parents speak English. However, if the “slate” were actually blank, nobody would learn any language, or possibly anything at all. One of our deepest anxieties about studying human nature: is the fear that free will may turn out to be only an illusion. Pinker believes the fear actually is existential – that our lives have no meaning or purpose; that all men are not really equal; that our nature is deeply and permanently flawed.

He establishes that our political ideals are safe: the fact that human beings are not literally equal does not justify discrimination; it does, however, force us to think about the tradeoff between freedom and material equality, and about how to ensure that the talented are not punished while the less fortunate are not cast down. Even if biology influences our behavior, every decision we make is the product of fine-tuned cognitive and emotional mechanisms designed to weigh temptation against the possibility of punishment. Pinker believes that morality must be based on a fundamental regard for the interests of each and every human being; and that we ought to punish cheaters who harm or exploit others for their own advantage. Pinker uses everything he can think of to make the case for an inborn and largely immutable human nature.

The science of human nature can inform us about the trade-offs involved in making decisions about what kind of society we want to live in. Whether or not we should take children away from the parents who conceived and gave birth to them is one that we really need to be analyzing based upon the experiences and voices of adult adoptees.