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When Richard Mulcaster referred in 1581 to "that treasure... bestowed on them by nature, to be bettered in them by nurture," he gave the world a euphonious name for an opposition that has been debated ever since. People's beliefs about the relative importance of heredity and environment affect their opinions on an astonishing range of topics. Do adolescents engage in violence because of the way their parents treated them early in life ? Are people inherently aggressive and selfish, calling for a market economy and a strong police, or could they become peaceable and cooperative, allowing the state to wither and a spontaneous socialism to blossom? Is there a universal aesthetic that allows great art to transcend time and place, or are people's tastes determined by their era and culture? With so much seemingly at stake in so many fields, it is no surprise that debates over nature and nurture evoke more rancor than just about any issue in the world of ideas.
During much of the twentieth century, a common position in this debate was to deny that human nature existed at all - to aver, with José Ortega y Gasset, that "Man has no nature; what he has is history." The doctrine that the mind is a blank slate was not only a cornerstone of behaviorism in psychology and social constructionism in the social sciences, but also extended widely into mainstream intellectual life.1
Part of the blank slate's appeal came from the realization that many differences among people in different classes and ethnic groups that formerly were thought to reflect innate disparities in talent or temperament could vanish through immigration, social mobility, and cultural change. But another part of its appeal was political and moral. If nothing in the mind is innate, then differences among races, sexes, and classes can never be innate, making the blank slate the ultimate safeguard against racism, sexism, and class prejudice. Also, the doctrine ruled out the possibility that ignoble traits such as greed, prejudice, and aggression spring from human nature, and thus held out the hope of unlimited social progress.
Though human nature has been debated for as long as people have pondered their condition, it was inevitable that the debate would be transformed by the recent...