The power of suggestion

Interesting article–but Derbyshire mixes together “blank slate” and “psychic unity of mankind.”

The blank slate says there is no such thing as human nature” “The nature of humans is to have no nature.” With the right environment, you can make anyone anything.

The psychic unity of mankind says that “whatever human nature is, it is the same for all people.” This nature can be very constraining; it simply has to be the same everywhere. That seems to be, for example, Larry Arnhart’s view. He argues that evolution has given people twenty natural desires that are best satisfied by what a few decades ago would have been called “democratic capitalism.”

There is no question that populations which are reproductively isolated diverge genetically. The question is how much of that divergence is just “neutral,” DNA changes that make no practical difference in how people behave.