ChalkituptotheBlankSlate中英文字幕.doc

TED：Chalk it up to the Blank Slate A year ago, I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing, that has come out in the interim, and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired. The book is called The Blank Slate, based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience. The blank slate was an influential idea in the 20th century. Here are a few quotes indicating that: Man has no nature, from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset; Man has no instincts, from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu; The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none, from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould. There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense. As many people have told me over the years, anyone whos had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents; it doesnt all come from the outside. Oh, and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child, exposed to speech, will acquire a human language, whereas the house pet wont, presumably because of some innate different between them. And anyone whos been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable. There are also, I think, increasing results from the scientific study of humans that, indeed, were not born blank slates. One of them, from anthropology, is the study of human universals. If youve ever taken anthropology, you know that its a -- kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here. But if you instead look at what is common to the worlds cultures, you find that there is an enormously