The Asymmetrical Bridge
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The Asymmetrical Bridge Book Review of James Tabery’s Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture David S. Moore1
Received: 2 September 2015 / Accepted: 9 September 2015 / Published online: 19 September 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
1 Introduction More than a decade ago, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker published The blank slate, a book that weighed in on the centuries-old debate about the contributions of nature and nurture to human psychological characteristics (Pinker 2002). When the eminent British biologist Sir Patrick Bateson needed a title for his review of the book in Science, he chose to call it ‘‘The corpse of a wearisome debate,’’ because by 2002, Bateson already considered this debate to be ‘‘tedious and increasingly irrelevant’’ (Bateson 2002, p. 2212). But the public’s reaction was different: Pinker’s book was a bestseller that ultimately qualified as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Today, published studies continue to compare the contributions of genes and environments to complex human traits (Plomin and Deary 2015; Polderman et al. 2015) even as numerous theorists insist that such comparisons are pointless and that the Nature–Nurture debate should be considered passe´ (Blumberg 2005; Gottlieb 1997; Moore 2002, 2013b; Weaver 2007). So the question is, why do some people continue to think the Nature–Nurture debate is still worthy of attention? Into this morass wades James Tabery, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, whose admirable new book, Beyond versus: The struggle to understand the interaction of nature and nurture, explains the persistence of this debate by pointing out how the two groups of disputants in the Nature–Nurture debate have been talking past one another for more than 100 years. As Tabery sees it, by failing to agree on what is meant by the phrase ‘‘interaction between nature and nurture,’’ the disputants have found themselves separated by an ‘‘explanatory & David S. Moore [email protected] 1
Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA
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divide,’’ whereby they disagree about what sorts of natural phenomena need to be explained, what qualifies as suitable explanations for those phenomena, and how one should go about studying them (among other disagreements). As a result, when one group claims that nature and nurture interact to produce a particular trait—a phenotype—the other group remains unconvinced, so the debate continues, even as more and more empirical data pile up, data that would otherwise have been thought sufficient to end the debate. So, Tabery’s book is fundamentally about how different theorists in the past 150 years have worked with different concepts of interaction. In an effort to make real progress on this front, Tabery endeavors to construct an ‘‘explanatory bridge’’ that could help researchers on each side of the explanatory divide understand how their work relates to the work of those laboring on the other side. Tabery’s boo
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