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ous damage to society. When the concept of genetic compulsion is ad-
vanced in moral choices, then someone who commits murder can say,
"I had to do it—my genes made me." In such a case, since genes cannot
be punished, there is no crime and no criminal. In his claims, Pinker is
discounting human reason and conscience, imagining that everything
can be explained in terms of genes. Encountering a reaction from soci-
ety, he makes a few changes to his terminology, but this time finds him-
self in an internal inconsistency.
One of those to criticize Pinker was Andrew Ferguson, who wrote
in The Weekly Standard:
They make us see it not as a moral horror, but as a genetically en-
coded evolutionary adaptation... 2
Pinker is able to defend the claims in question despite their rest-
ing on absolutely no scientific evidence. One of the criticisms of
Pinker's claims is that they consist of nothing more than conjecture
based on evolutionists' illusory world views. Ferguson, for example,
criticized Pinker's logic and stated that he offered no evidence for his
claims. The fact is, all of evolutionary psychology is based on proofless
conjecture and the power of the imagination. In his book The Wedge of
Truth, Phillip Johnson says:
Basically, evolutionary psychology proceeds by erecting a mountain
of speculation on the basis of fragmentary evidence about primitive
cultures. 3
Ferguson makes this diagnosis on the subject in his criticism:
Conjecture solidifies into fact; the fact then becomes a basis for fur-
ther conjecture, which evolves into another factual premise, and so
on. 4

1. Steven Pinker, "Why They Kill Their Newborns," New York Times, 2 No-
vember 1997.
2. Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works", The Weekly Stan-
dard, January 12, 1998, p. 16.
3. Philip Johnson, The Wedge of Truth, Intervarsity Press, Illinois, 2000, p.
113.
4. Andrew Ferguson, "How Steven Pinker's Mind Works," The Weekly Stan-
dard, p. 16.

Harun Yahya