Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, discuss a fundamental question: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?
Both outspoken appreciators of Darwin, Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will compare their visions -- perhaps complementary, perhaps contrasting -- of what Darwin's legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Bio
Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik is an award-winning journalist and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1986. He broadcasts regularly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and wrote the article on American culture for the last two editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. His books include Angels and Ages, Through the Children’s Gates, Paris to the Moon, Americans in Paris and The King in the Window.
Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
After teaching at MIT for 21 years, he returned to Harvard in 2003 as the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Pinker's experimental research on cognition and language won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institute of Great Britan, and two prizes from the American Psychological Association.
He has also received several honorary doctorates and numerous awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching, general achievement, and his critically acclaimed books the Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate.
Pinker has also appeared in many television documentaries and writes frequently in the popular press, including in The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic.
Theory of the evolutionary mechanism proposed by Charles Darwin as an explanation of organic change. It denotes Darwin's specific view of how evolution works. Darwin developed the concept that evolution is brought about by the interplay of three principles: variation (present in all forms of life), heredity (the force that transmits similar organic form from one generation to another), and the struggle for existence (which determines the variations that will be advantageous in a given environment, thus altering the species through selective reproduction). Present knowledge of the genetic basis of inheritance has contributed to scientists' understanding of the mechanisms behind Darwin's ideas, in a theory known as neo-Darwinism.
Theory that persons, groups, and “races” are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had proposed for plants and animals in nature. Social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and William Graham Sumner in the U.S., held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” in Spencer's words. Wealth was said to be a sign of natural superiority, its absence a sign of unfitness. The theory was used from the late 19th century to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Social Darwinism declined as scientific knowledge expanded.
Half way in I just skipped past all Gopnick chunks.
Pinker drove straight into his verb tornado and stood steadily on his feet staring into the storm's eye, responding calmly: the civilized man of today must always judge the individual on his merits, but accept the that group differences exist. Between men and women, black and white, and on and on. Neuroscience isn't on the Gopnik-leftist's side, and within the next 2 decades it wont be possible to claim that race is a human fabrication. Pinker knows this.
'Survival of the fittest' means the individuals (phenotypes) who 'fit in', i.e. who can cope best with prevailing conditions. It certaily doesn't imply survival of the strongest. We are one of the weakest, slowest animals on earth but we now easily dominate species much stronger and faster.
Another thing to remember is that all species, including homo sapiens, are temporary. Our existence as individuals and as a species is limited. At some time in the future the conditions on the earth will change and we will disappear. In a couple of hundred million years you'll never know we were here.
"This preservation, during the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term "natural selection" is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity". Darwin
member. 
