Which might be determinism vs. empiricism.
Let's at least get the names of the teams right.
On a side note, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Steven Pinker Meets Richard Dawkins | On Reason and Rationality
snippet of transcript: 05:40
I have to credit you with this argument and the blind watchmaker you uh noted that the what natural selection can explain and nothing else can explain is how signs of design the illusion of engineering can appear in the natural world
so that's the extent to which I'm an evolutionary psychologist
well I suppose that they feel it's fine to talk about Darwinism for physical structures when it comes to behavior or the mind that's what kind of off limits especially if it's human
well it is and it was in part the reaction that uh some of the reactions that I got to how the mind works that led me to realize that these were not just scientific disagreements that there were moral and emotional and political colorings to the very idea of human nature uh in and in particular many people many intellectuals many the critics many writers seem to feel that the idea that we are blank slates that there is no such thing as human nature that Evolution did not shape our um our our motives our emotions our ways of learning that that somehow politically more desirable we should hope that it's true and pretend that it's true
so I wanted to answer that you're the very question why now any particular hypothesis about an Adaptive function it could be false let's hope many of them are false because that's what makes it science
but many people treat them not as hypotheses that are true or false but hypotheses that are are evil to think
and I wanted to know why and I think there are a number of reasons
one of them is that if we're blank slates because nothing equals nothing equals nothing it's the ultimate guarantor of equality
the men can't be women different from women and and races can't be different ethnic groups can't be different because we're all zero there's nothing there so there can't be any innate differences
now I think it's a non-sequitur or at least it's a maybe it's a fallacy of affirming the consequent because even if it's true that if we are identical if we because we have because there's nothing in the brain at Birth that would make it easy to endorse political equality
on the other hand it is not the case that if you endorse political equality you have to believe in them in the blank slate
I do endorse political equality uh for for All Humans
but it doesn't depend on our being blank slates or clones it just depends on the moral commitment that people ought to be treated as individuals and not prejudged by the statistics of their their race or sex or ethnicity
that's one of these the other is as I call it the fear of of inequality
there's the fear of imperfect stability that is if we're blank slates it holds