Lionel Tiger of Rutgers University delivered the fourth of the Institute's 2002-2003 Bradley Lectures on December 9. Edited excerpts follow. (The complete lecture is available online as well.)

We segregate social science from biology for two reasons. First, we have a broad allergy to "reductionism"--trying to explain a social phenomenon by a physical or genetic cause. Second, the appropriation of biological and nonbiological materials by various fascist groups has inspired plausible and understandable suspicion of attributing to genes any major social or cultural phenomena.

The weight of new research makes it imperative that we go beyond these errors and allergies of the past and try to fashion a sophisticated knowledge of human nature. 

For this exercise, we become our own zookeepers and we can compile a list of behavioral vitamins based on what we need to prosper as a species in our own native environment.

Behavioral Vitamins

The first vitamin is the opportunity to be governed by rules concerning maturity. Small children do not and should not have the same rights and responsibilities as adults. Responses to immaturity are almost certainly programmed genomically, and legal systems customarily respond to this program.

In order to indulge in agreeable behavior, we should enjoy the vitamin of access to fresh air and natural light. In certain societies, access to light has a defined economic value. Devotees of torture and solitary confinement deprive their prisoners of these vitamins because they know that lack of air and light is psychologically destructive.

Greenery is a vitamin. Because we evolved in nature, we try to import the upper Paleolithic into our high-rise apartments by buying plants whose only serious function is aesthetic. 

The opportunity for large-muscle movements is a vitamin. There is ongoing curtailment in American schools of play involving large-muscle movements, bodily movements over space, and the conduct of lively games. These restrictions indicate the feminization of school systems through an attempt to remove potentially rough behavior from the playground. Through the prescription of Ritalin and similar behavioral management drugs, boys are penalized, although the males in all primates like to move around more than females.

Social contact is a vitamin. Good zoos provide opportunities for animals to communicate with their fellows. It may take the form of freedom of expression, and it also applies to the issue of censorship--who determines which methods of communication a member of the species may indulge in? 

The opportunity to reproduce is a behavioral vitamin. Certain political regimes have sought to curtail reproduction with varying degrees of success and human cost. Although regimes may intend to affect the sexual behavior necessary for reproduction, there are subtler ways to affect reproductive freedoms--for example, the antinatal ideologies at the core of modern feminism, which have induced women to miscalculate the value of human reproductive nature. 

Children need the opportunity for durable and predictable connection to their parents. We are entitled to ask whether recent changes in the welfare system requiring women with children to earn money, often by raising the children of other women in a similar bind, are the desirable solution to a core mammalian issue--how to protect mothers and babies from the ruckus of the wider system. 

The opportunity for gender-specific behavior is a chronic vitamin factor in human arrangements. We can expect that males and females will act differently in certain situations and in others they will act the same. Sex differences are not necessarily the result of conspiracy, patriarchal oppression, and formal inequity. 

Finally, an awareness of communal protection energizes a community when it exists and hinders a community in its absence. Authority must provide the citizenry with protection from internal criminality and the threats of warfare.

Looking Inward

Where does this approach fit in the larger currents of contemporary social policy? There are no easy answers to the myriad problems posed by the industrial system and its complex vastly rambunctious stimuli. However, a model exists: In the early splurges and the effective triumph of the industrial way of life, there was a reasonable assumption that the environment was self-correcting and capable of easy adaptation. With the advent of the environmental movement, it became clear that our water and air, adapted to an ancient nonindustrial world, could not repair what we had produced.

We need an inner environmental movement about our internal nature, just as we have stretched to comprehend the workings of the natural environment. We have uncovered our history and prehistory by examining our genes. Therefore we should not be blind to the forces that permitted us to perdure and prosper and that remain a part of human nature.