January (Web-only) 2001

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Our subject, taken up before the welcome interruption of Christmas and New Year's, is the 100th anniversary issue of Natural History magazine, and in particular a special section of that issue, "On Being Human," with contributions from a number of leading scientists. In the previous column we focused on one of these: Jared Diamond's essay, "Threescore and Ten," in which Diamond argues that "our exceptionally long life span may have influenced the evolution of how we learn and think." Taken at face value, that sounds rather bland—how could it be otherwise?—but as Diamond begins to flesh out his thesis, things get wild. "Our outlook is shaped especially strongly by early events," he asserts, having adduced the receptiveness and impressionability of the child's mind, "and our experiences later in life form only a thin veneer on which we draw during more rational moments."

Diamond's anecdotal evidence for this remarkable assertion is his memory of an evening he spent in 1962 in the company of assorted eminences at Harvard University. President John F. Kennedy had just announced the U.S. blockade of Cuba in response to the Soviet missiles installed there, speaking soberly of "the risk of all-out nuclear war." To Diamond's surprise, the company of brilliant scholars was almost unanimous in dismissing "contemptuously both the danger and Kennedy's response to it." Diamond attributes this collective blindness to the formative early years of the generation chiefly represented in that Harvard gathering, for whom the "defining experience" was "the horror of World War I." Of these Harvard professors, Diamond says that "they may have been sufficiently programmed by the horrors of World War I that not even the mistakes of the ...