The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Press Science)

The Blank Slate is a brilliant synthesis of biology, psychology and humanism, composed by a polymath who is also a gifted writer. Perhaps the highest compliment I can give it is that in the future it will be regarded as boringly obvious. Today, however, it is a presentation of insights that, singly, are recognized by only few, and combined, by practically no one.
Drawing to a considerable extent on the work of R. Trivers and E. O. Wilson, The Blank Slate carries their thinking further, constructing a coherent thesis of human nature based on the insights of evolutionary psychology. Pinker�s sensitive humanism allows him to avoid the reductionistic trap that many other evolutionary psychologists fall into. The net result is a work that offers surprising insights into almost every realm of life; and one that is destined to become a classic.
By the way, I�m a published author, and rather a polymath myself; I�m not easily pleased. This encomium is the first I�ve ever written.

I quite enjoyed Pinker's The Language Instinct. In it, Pinker introduces the idea that those who oppose the concept of a universal human nature on political grounds have gotten it backwards. While they argue that human possibility is limitless and that the very idea of a universal human nature is fascist and ethnocentric, Pinker counters that a completely malleable human nature (a blank slate) is a dictator's wet dream, that an understanding of our shared human nature instead places limits on how much we can be forced to change, and rather than being ethnocentric highlights our commonalities. The Blank Slate is an expansion of this view.
I came to this book as a sympathetic reader, but I feel that Pinker did not successfully defend his point of view. The biggest flaw is that he never quite solves the chicken-or-the-egg problem of human nature and human ethical belief. He argues that the human mind and therefore moral sentiment are evolutionarily conditioned. But if both violent conflict *and* an abhorrence of violence are innate features of the human mind, there doesn't seem to be any *ethical* reason for preferring the condemnation of violence to the use of violence. This problem is not fatal, but does need to be confronted. Instead, Pinker baldly asserts that just because our moral sentiment is an accident of evolution we are still justified in condemning certain other evolutionarily conditioned human behaviors. He amusingly but self-defeatingly quotes Katharine Hepburn from The African Queen as saying "Nature ... is what we are put in this world to rise above."
One way that he tries to get himself out of this mess is by introducing Peter Singer's concept of the Expanding Circle and Robert Wright's concept of evolutionary "progress" as a nonzerosum game. That is, civilization advances as our moral sentiment, based largely on in-group / out-group distinctions, recognizes a larger and larger in-group; and game theory combined with evolutionary theory suggests that culture will move towards greater and greater degrees of complexity, cooperation, and interdependence due to nonzerosum outcomes for all involved. While, again, I am sympathetic to this line of attack, Pinker has been stumping for a fairly orthodox version of Darwinian theory, and therefore needs to make clear that Wright's speculation is nowhere close to being accepted theory, and perhaps spend more time shoring it up himself.
While disappointing (and more polemical) compared to Pinker's other books, Blank Slate is nonetheless written in his usual engaging and witty style, with his typical wide breadth of reference and facility for making the arcane accessible. To sum up, a competent work, but it tries too hard to be a Big Statement, and fails.

A very bold look at three issues in psychology- the "Blank Slate" (you are taught everything you know, nurture over nature), the "Noble Savage" (people are inherently good until modern society and 'civilization' ruins them), and the "Ghost in the Machine" (you have a soul which isn't just your brain, and isn't accountable to the laws of neurobiology and neurochemistry). Pinker's take is fairly controversial (I saw him speak in 2002 and members of the audience alternatively praised and savaged the man's ideas during question-and-answer), but he's undoubtedly an important thinker, and someone worth exposing yourself to. Like Douglas Hoftstaeder, he keeps his very serious message intact despite diversions which keep it entertaining, including a number of discussions based on comic strips from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes.

Astounding: If you only read one book in your life, make it this one. If you don't understand it all, read it again.
I myself do not understand how Steven Pinker has brought together so many threads and woven them into such a brilliant and rich cloth.

He summarizes almost all I have read over some years and more that I was not aware of. Perhaps time will show that the information he provides is not perfect, however I somehow doubt it. I am sure that it will be expanded upon as new research emerges.

Arguements about human nature are centuries old, but in this book they are considered and dealt with, using the most up-to date knowledge. This volume is encyclopedic in content and vast in scope. If you have even a slightly open mind you will learn a great deal.

You owe it to yourself to read this book, it will expand your mind and your horizons.

I have been an avid reader of books on neuro-cognitive sciences and the new field of evolutionary psychology.

And this book of Steven Pinker's is astounding in its depth and breadth of knowledge and the clarity of his arguments in defending these new fields of research which I think will be the next BIG LEAP in our civilization ..

A lot of it is going to rub many orthodox, conservative minded people the wrong way for precisely the reasons that he outlines in the book ... But for open minded intelligent detractors it poses a challenge to come up with an equally strong rebuttal if they have one that does not descend into empty rhetoric OR below the belt attacks ... that degrades any informed debate when there are strong egos being hurt.

Pinker comes across as extrememly fairminded, pitting himself quite ruthlessly against all those difficult questions that detractors have come up with till date .. often becoming even the sympathetic "psychiatrist" as he gently hand holds us thru our fears of the alternatives to the Blank Slate/Noble Savage/Ghost in The Machine theories.

It has been such a long and pleasurable read ... I would say it opened windows in my mind that were being rattled anyways by the winds of the twenty first century science and research.

Our current age needs writing like this to become more part of mainstream reading.

Thank You Pinker for the gift of this book.

Pinker's book is a remarkably well-written refutation of the so-called "blank slate" theory. In terms of style and language, I rate him in the same category as Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley.
In terms of content, the voyage that Pinker took me on is truly unforgettable. The book does not underplay the mind's complexity, rather on the contrary. Pinker demonstrates how science can enable us to better understand human nature, without thereby falling into the trap of either "nature" or "nurture". This is a balanced account of the condition we are all in.
I disagree with The Economist's "Books of the year 2002" [issue December 12th 2002] where it is said that "his jokes, his quarrelsomeness and his weakness for digression are a drawback". But I do endorse its claim that the book's main argument, when the author sticks to it, is well made.

This is the book I've been waiting for all my life.
"The Blank Slate" is an utterly brilliant work. Its science is unassailable, its conclusions are astounding, and its implications for the future of both science and the humanities are enormous.
Like Samson toppling the temple of Dagon, Pinker casts down three of the major pillars of modern political and academic debate: the Blank Slate (the view that the mind is infinitely malleable, and is shaped entirely by parents and/or the media), the Noble Savage (the view that indigenous peoples of the world are far more peaceable and enlightened than the citizens of modern societies, and, consequently, that modern civilization itself is the root of all social ills), and the Ghost in the Machine (the belief that the human "soul" is made up of some magical material somehow separate from the operation of the human brain).
This book builds a desperately-needed bridge between the sciences and the humanities. It presents a worldview that is simultaneously pragmatic, moral, ethical, scientifically defensible, and unflinchingly moderate. In the process, Pinker brilliantly smashes many of the most extreme intellectual and political fallacies of our day -- the intellectually bankrupt social constructionism of academia, the racist theories of modern Nazism, the fallacious social-engineering ideals of modern Marxism, the absurd relativism of modern gender feminism, and the sanctimonious moralistic paranoia of modern religious conservatism.
I should note that a few reviewers inaccurately complain that "Nobody believes in the blank slate any more." This is a gross mischaracterization. Pinker's book is not intended for the scientific community, which has generally accepted the facts and conclusions presented in this book for decades. The Blank Slate is intended for a much broader audience. The arts, the media, the humanities, and the political extremes of both the right and the left frequently behave as though the doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine were self-evident truths. As science continues to shovel dirt onto the graves of these fallacies, much of modern political and intellectual debate continues as though they still lived.
This book has the potential to radically transform our shared worldview. We as a society desperately need to heal these mischaracterizations of the human mind and learn from the discoveries of modern science.
I for one will be rereading this book for a long time to come.
I cannot recommend any book more highly.

Professor Pinker surveys the established findings and views of humans' fundamental attributes as they have emerged from evolutionarily-informed work in genetics, biology and psychology, and contrasts them with inherited views of "human nature" rooted in pre-scientific Enlightenment philosphies and in pre-modern religions. He makes persuasive arguments that these earlier views, which still hold held sway among some intellectuals, both political and scientific, not only do not jibe with factual observations and inferences, but that they -- for example the empirical "blank slate" concept that the human mind is born with no inherent information or conceptual tendenciees -- have and have had dangerous down-side implications, such as those evident in the actions of despotic governments that attempt to re-establish societies by eliminating entire populations of tainted or "inferior" people. He applies the new principles especially well to discussions of gender and childhood development, in an immediately accessible, clearly understandable, and sometimes sharply witty way. Since you know you have a brain, you probably should read this book. Chances are good that you will enjoy and learn from it.

I quite like Pinker's book and think that some of the reviews (such as Patrick Bateson's in Nature) are off the wall in misreading it. This in not a book about nature-vs-nurture in the usual sense but a much broader book about three beginners' mistakes (my term, not Pinker's): The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine. Pinker's concern is not only that they appear to be wrong but that the policies based on them are likely to do more harm than good.

I believe that what differentiates humans from other intelligent species is not the use of tools or language. Tool use in bonobo and other chimpanzees is well documented. Scientists are debating whether behavior observed in octopuses constitutes tool use and play. I believe that chimps, porpoises and killer whales have demonstrated a better understanding human language than we have learned of their languages.

What differentiates us from the other intelligent species is finding patterns of complex series of causes and effects. We call these paradigms in the humanities and soft sciences and Laws of Nature after they withstanding the rigors of science. We humans are very good at finding these complex series of cause and effect, we even find them when they do not exist. The placebo effect and organized religion are two examples.

Pinker presents rigorous scientific evidence that strongly supports his arguments that the "Blank Slate", the "Noble Savage" and the "Ghost in the Machine" are three paradigms of cause and effect that do not exist. He also documents public policies and cultural practices based upon the faulty paradigms imbedded in our culture that result in human societies acting in ways that work against our best interests and make us less humane.

The Blank Slate is a "must read for students of human nature", ethical conduct, public education policy and survivability of our species, Humans the pattern finders.

Pinker provides a lucid explanation of the current state of knowledge on genetic influence on human behaviour and definitively debunks the "blank slate" idea that our culture and environment is the dominant factor.

I gained a real understanding of how humanity can behave in such apparently strange and arbitrary ways, and Pinker's exploration of the implications of this was well-reasoned and thought provoking.

I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to understand human behaviour better.

I came to "The Blank Slate" having been most impressed by Pinker's "The Language Instinct" and while the newer book added some useful insights it also disappointed in a couple of areas.

Pinker seems to have convinced himself he is being balanced by attacking both the "blank slate" assumption he ascribes to the Left and the "nobel savage" assumption he ascribes to the Right, though when he goes as far as to suggest that the Nazis were no worse than the Marxists, you have to be concerned as to how much he has been caught up by the hysterics of the resurgent Right. He manages to stretch his net to encompass every imaginable atrocity that could possibly be attributed to authoritarian regimes flying Marxist flags while failing to mention the many other atrocious authoritarian regimes which would deny any assoiation with Marxism, save the Nazis.

But essentially Pinker is trying to mount an updated defence of E.O. Wilson's oft mistakenly criticised notion of "human nature", and that is certainly a worthy goal as the denial of human nature is a road to delusion.

Yet even there Pinker seems to have been seduced by the anti-intellectual fashions of the moment, going to some length to try to legitimise the idea that assured retribution is the natural human way to keep a lot more than psychopaths in check.

Personally, I don't see that we have reason to confine our thinking to a polarised spectrum between the excessive relativism of the Left, which brings us political correctness and equal outcomes, and the naive realism of the Right which proclaims absolute values of right and wrong, good and evil. Rather I see relativism as the first imperfect step beyond realism from where we need to take not Pinker's three-quarters of a step backwards but rather another full step in a completely different direction to a more systemic understanding of the way the world works, both naturally and socially. I expect Pinker might protest that such understanding does not come naturally to many humans and could easily find plenty of supporting data, but from there a case can at least be made that trusting a broad and transparent elite, such as the open source software movement, is more likely to help us share this planet in relative comfort than the naive trust that in-groups will continue to expand so as to take in not just six billion plus humans but also all those other critters essential to a healthy global environment. I don't expect Pinker really wants the world to continue in a perpetual state of government by intimidation, but that is what The Blank Slate seems to be trying to legitimise.

Those reservations aside, Pinker certainly lines up a lot of clear evidence, and a few interesting rhetorical devices, against the blank slate and the nobel savage.

He also hypothesises an interesting candidate to account for the 50% of variation between individuals across a range of psychological tests that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. His claim that parenting sans genetics has so small an influence as to defy measurement is not winning him many friends, although the data certainly seems to support it. However his hypothesis that the bulk of the remaining variation can be traced to peer relations needs to be scrutinised very carefully.

Even as an avowed atheist and double-sided skeptic, I am bemused that Pinker totally ignores any possibility that the development of embryonic brains might be influenced by electro-magnetic patterns in the world due to the passage of other lives. Even without conjuring up a spiritual dimension, any honest student of natural history must admit that there is still a lot more we don't know about the workings of the world at such levels. If it was not so far beyond the scope of this review, I'd be tempted to spell out the symbiogenesis case for there being more going on in the development of mind than can be accounted by inheritance and overt social interaction, be the later peer or parenting.

I also took the chance during the southern summer to try to observe the evolution of peer relations, both amongst younger humans and, through fortuitous opportunity, some avian species. In retrospect, the biggest problem I have with the peer hypothesis is that much of the psychological variation seems to manifest itself well before much is worked out between peers. Certainly there can be an edge to peer interactions which is as shaping as any parental relationship, but so also there is an edge to early explorations of the natural and built environments. The jury should probably stay out a while on this one.

A book on different subjects surrounding people, society, and especially how the genetic makeup of a person has a significant effect on who he/she is in that society. The book also analyzes how those innate predispositions sometimes do not make sense with current government policies as well as some mass public opinion. The author supports his opinions with scientific research and touches on subjects such as conservatives/liberals, art, feminism, violence, and parenting and often provides controversial views. For example, the author does not believe that violence on television has any significant effect on violence in society because most violent people are genetically "programmed" to be violent. He also analyzes many of the genetic predispositions with regard to evolution and selection for fitness such as women being better at language and humanities skills, in order to be better child raisers, and men being better at mathematical and spatial abilities so they could be better hunters.

This book is about the idea that the brain is sort of a Swiss Army knife of cognitive functions. The alternative idea is that there is some form of pure reason which exists in brains - and maybe computers too - that has reached critical mass in humans.

(There is also the idea that our souls are "shards of the Creator" split off at conception, or the breath of life, or reincarnated cows, or fallen angels, or something, but none of that is handled here.)

The idea of critical mass of pure reason is very widely accepted. It is the basis of Behavioralism, and it is widely cited by sci-fi authors & naive AI fans. A good example of the latter is Raymond Kurzweil's (truly awful) book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines". Kurzweil claims that when individual computers get as big as huaman brains, they will automatically start saying "I am lonely and bored; please keep me company."

Pinker has argued convincingly in his other pop sci books that this is not going to happen - you need some kind of specific mechanism to get complex behavior like loneliness, not just lots of transistors. This is the emerging science of neuropsychology. As the ability to observe the brain's behavior in real time improves, neuropsychology will get more and more interesting.

"The Blank Slate" fights what I regard to be a rearguard action against Postmodernism. Postmodernism is firmly in the "critical mass" camp. For example, there are feminists that claim that there is absolutely no difference between boy and girl brains, and that all behavioral differences between the sexes are cultural artefacts. Such talk obviously drives Pinker nuts, and "The Blank Slate" is his answer.

Ok, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not a rearguard action. But when I read popular science, I want to be wowed by cool ideas, not embroiled in effete academic disputes. So I give the book three stars, and recommend you read some of Pinker's other stuff.

I found Dr. Pinker's new book to be very disappointing. He relies on authors known to hold incredibly extreme ideas in developmental and personality psychology (which are not his own areas, so his need for, amd lack of, appropriate scholarly sources are obvious). Yes indeed, Pinker knows language. But he does not seem to know enough about the species called bonobos. And when it comes to the latest brain science about the human capacity for self-awareness, the Blank Slate is rather blank. There is a book, published at the same time as Blank Slate, that understands bonobos and human self-awareness: Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are, by Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski. So I'm afraid Pinker's Blank Slate has lost the competitive struggle for being THE breakthrough general psychology book of 2002. Of interest to all, in particular, is the way cognitive neuroscientists Quartz & Sejnowski define the distinction between 'evolutionary psychology' and 'cultural biology' -- this explains why 'evolutionary psychology' flourished in the 20th century but is headed for extinction now, as 'cultural biology' takes over the intellectual life of this scientific ecological niche.

The most obvious grounds for reservation about this book are twofold. One is that it is flogging a dead horse in that the idea under attack (the relative insignificance or even non-existence of innate human nature) has been largely relinquished. The other is that the author's skill as a creator of rhetorical prose will result in his delivering a exercise in polemics.
In my view Steven Pinker addresses both these concerns. As a previous reviewer has stated, he addresses the first concern in the opening paragraph of the book. He makes it clear that he is addressing all scholars and educated people, not merely acdemic specialists in the disciplines central to the Darwin Wars. If the annecdotes (some very recent) that he retails are not sufficient to establish the need for this book, then the content of some of the negative reviews below adds to their force.
The first quarter of the book is a forensic examination of the various, related but distinct, strands of the mindset which he seeks to undermine. Where he is indignant, his ire is always directed at identified instances of dubious scholarly behaviour rather than at generalised, `socially responsible', caution towards the idea of innate human nature. Equally valuable in this portion of the book, is the clarity with which Pinker demonstrates that much hostile incomprehension towards the new biology arises from a confusion between proximate and ultimate causes. In particular, on reading his identification of a tendency to conflate Dawkins' metaphor of the Selfish Gene with vulgarised Freudian pschodynamics as the root of the hostility that Dawkins arouses, I was amazed that this point has not been more extensively explored by those who have previously undertaken to chronicle the Darwin Wars (for example Andrew Brown).
As the reader approaches the core of the book, the sound of knives being sharpened does grow louder, but Pinker's style, though robust, never leaves one feeling sullied. The fine details of particular analyses offered by Pinker may be debated, but the evidence that he marshalls is persuasive and is more than adequate to refute those who sought (and still seek) to deny the legitimacy of science addressing the questions at issue.
As previous reviewers have pointed out, the one place where Pinker appears to take pains with his readers' sensibilities is in the issue political balance as calibrated on a traditional left/right spectrum. Strategically, this is understandable: Pinker's book is one of advocacy and he has every reason to avoid reducing the scope of his audience. In detail, he makes a virtue of this necessity by explaining in terms of human nature (and its variation) the links between the issues that define a leftwinger or a rightwinger where these are logically tenuous but sociologically entrenched.
In itself, this treatment of political ambidexterity is a worthwhile addition to previous commentaries such as that of Alan Sokal. More generally it suffers from a practical assymmetry of which Pinker fights shy. His barb towards the right that contemporary Conservatives echo Marx ``that religion is the opiate of the masses' (thank God)' is hardly news: the explicitness of this point in Leo Strauss's writing was explored by Stephen Holmes in `The Anatomy of Antiliberalism'. Pinker contrasts Throne and Altar Conservatives such as Strauss, and his disciple Allan Bloom, with the `Secular Right' even though in his treatment of the different demands on the institution of the nuclear family of innately different male and female natures he can sound uncannily reminiscent of `The Closing of the American Mind'. Once Pinker has adopted his apparent euphemism for Neo Liberals he fails to articulate any substantial point of disagreement with them leaving the bulk of his political exhortation devoted to the familiar `struggle to save the left from itself'. The reaction of a rightwinger to this would recall Harold Wilson's quip on the divisions of the British Conservative Part of his day that `he never intruded into private grief'. Given that the left wing political program that Pinker derives calls for a restoration to welfare policy of the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, and the restatement of the logic of deterrence in criminal justice policy (in detail the abandonment of the claim that punishment of the individual for the social purpose of deterrence is inadmissibly illiberal state instrumentalism), it seems likely that left wing reaction would be less intemperate.
The book is not without flaws. Despite his insistence on the physical origin of consciousness, Pinker fails to refer to Douglas Hofstadter's `Godel Escher Bach' which represented an enormous effort to bridge the intuitive gap in credibility for this notion. There are a number of passages that are synergistic with this source. Pinker's choice of the Dred Scott case in expounding the difference between strict constructionism and judicial activism is unreferenced, and a glance into James McPherson's `Battle Cry of Freedom' shows that this interpretation is so back-to-front as to undermine, rather than reinforce, his point. Pinker might have made a fist of his case by citing Strader vs Graham (1850), but would have been better advised to have steered clear of the history of slavery altogerth in this context. Finally, though Pinker may find it too obvious to labour the point once again, he could have pointer more clearly to the confusion of proximate and ultimate causes in his refutation of the critics of Thorhhill's work on rape.

On the whole, I thought the "Blank Slate" was a thought- provoking and lively book on human nature. I disagree with Mr. Pinker, however, on his argument that parents are not central to their children's development. It is true, as he states, that the general personality and intelligence of children are determined by their genes. But, even though nature gives children the "chess pieces" they will have in life, it is parents who must teach their children how to play the game. Biological parents are most effective at nurturing their own offspring because parents share their children's traits and have learned the coping strategies that best exploit family talents. Extended families -- grandparents, uncles, fathers, mothers-- develop unique family cultures that provide a rich source of advice and understanding for new members, who after all, are "chips off the old block."

The Blank Slate deserves all the praise it has received. Steven Pinker presents an extremely eloquent, well reasoned, comprehensive and entertaining renunciation of the holy trinity of social science - the blank slate, noble savage, and ghost in the machine; ideologies that have created serious obstacles to the application of modern scientific research in genetics, biology and psychology to a better understanding of who we really are.
The more widely this book is read, the sooner we can increase the effectiveness with which we understand and tackle real personal and social problems from a fact-based and positive perspective of human nature.
The book is academically very strong and the arguments are well presented and convincing, so much so that this book will doubtless receive future credit for putting the study of human nature back onto the social science agenda. Steven Pinker may surprise you, perhaps provoke you but he will definitely educate you, entertain you and leave you thinking about human nature in a very new way.

Reading this book is like taking a university degree in biology, psychology, ethics and society. Along with Richard Dawkins, I think Steve Pinker is the best science writer in the world.

I like every chapter, but my favourites are:

The Many Roots of our Suffering - to know what we are, and why we feel the way we do, we must look at our evolutionary history.

Political Scientists - in which the arguments against sociobiology are dismantled.

The Voice of the Species - a wonderful merging of art and science.

Science books can often be dense and confusing - this one is like diving into the crystal clear blue water of understanding.

I can't wait for his next book!

I found Dr. Pinker's new book to be very disappointing. He relies on authors known to hold incredibly extreme ideas in developmental and personality psychology (which are not his own areas, so his need for, amd lack of, appropriate scholarly sources are obvious). Yes indeed, Pinker knows language. But he does not seem to know enough about the species called bonobos. And when it comes to the latest brain science about the human capacity for self-awareness, the Blank Slate is rather blank. There is a book, published at the same time as Blank Slate, that understands bonobos and human self-awareness: Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are, by Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski. So I'm afraid Pinker's Blank Slate has lost the competitive struggle for being THE breakthrough general psychology book of 2002. Of interest to all, in particular, is the way cognitive neuroscientists Quartz & Sejnowski define the distinction between 'evolutionary psychology' and 'cultural biology' -- this explains why 'evolutionary psychology' flourished in the 20th century but is headed for extinction now, as 'cultural biology' takes over the intellectual life of this scientific ecological niche.

The most obvious grounds for reservation about this book are twofold. One is that it is flogging a dead horse in that the idea under attack (the relative insignificance or even non-existence of innate human nature) has been largely relinquished. The other is that the author's skill as a creator of rhetorical prose will result in his delivering a exercise in polemics.
In my view Steven Pinker addresses both these concerns. As a previous reviewer has stated, he addresses the first concern in the opening paragraph of the book. He makes it clear that he is addressing all scholars and educated people, not merely acdemic specialists in the disciplines central to the Darwin Wars. If the annecdotes (some very recent) that he retails are not sufficient to establish the need for this book, then the content of some of the negative reviews below adds to their force.
The first quarter of the book is a forensic examination of the various, related but distinct, strands of the mindset which he seeks to undermine. Where he is indignant, his ire is always directed at identified instances of dubious scholarly behaviour rather than at generalised, `socially responsible', caution towards the idea of innate human nature. Equally valuable in this portion of the book, is the clarity with which Pinker demonstrates that much hostile incomprehension towards the new biology arises from a confusion between proximate and ultimate causes. In particular, on reading his identification of a tendency to conflate Dawkins' metaphor of the Selfish Gene with vulgarised Freudian pschodynamics as the root of the hostility that Dawkins arouses, I was amazed that this point has not been more extensively explored by those who have previously undertaken to chronicle the Darwin Wars (for example Andrew Brown).
As the reader approaches the core of the book, the sound of knives being sharpened does grow louder, but Pinker's style, though robust, never leaves one feeling sullied. The fine details of particular analyses offered by Pinker may be debated, but the evidence that he marshalls is persuasive and is more than adequate to refute those who sought (and still seek) to deny the legitimacy of science addressing the questions at issue.
As previous reviewers have pointed out, the one place where Pinker appears to take pains with his readers' sensibilities is in the issue political balance as calibrated on a traditional left/right spectrum. Strategically, this is understandable: Pinker's book is one of advocacy and he has every reason to avoid reducing the scope of his audience. In detail, he makes a virtue of this necessity by explaining in terms of human nature (and its variation) the links between the issues that define a leftwinger or a rightwinger where these are logically tenuous but sociologically entrenched.
In itself, this treatment of political ambidexterity is a worthwhile addition to previous commentaries such as that of Alan Sokal. More generally it suffers from a practical assymmetry of which Pinker fights shy. His barb towards the right that contemporary Conservatives echo Marx ``that religion is the opiate of the masses' (thank God)' is hardly news: the explicitness of this point in Leo Strauss's writing was explored by Stephen Holmes in `The Anatomy of Antiliberalism'. Pinker contrasts Throne and Altar Conservatives such as Strauss, and his disciple Allan Bloom, with the `Secular Right' even though in his treatment of the different demands on the institution of the nuclear family of innately different male and female natures he can sound uncannily reminiscent of `The Closing of the American Mind'. Once Pinker has adopted his apparent euphemism for Neo Liberals he fails to articulate any substantial point of disagreement with them leaving the bulk of his political exhortation devoted to the familiar `struggle to save the left from itself'. The reaction of a rightwinger to this would recall Harold Wilson's quip on the divisions of the British Conservative Part of his day that `he never intruded into private grief'. Given that the left wing political program that Pinker derives calls for a restoration to welfare policy of the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, and the restatement of the logic of deterrence in criminal justice policy (in detail the abandonment of the claim that punishment of the individual for the social purpose of deterrence is inadmissibly illiberal state instrumentalism), it seems likely that left wing reaction would be less intemperate.
The book is not without flaws. Despite his insistence on the physical origin of consciousness, Pinker fails to refer to Douglas Hofstadter's `Godel Escher Bach' which represented an enormous effort to bridge the intuitive gap in credibility for this notion. There are a number of passages that are synergistic with this source. Pinker's choice of the Dred Scott case in expounding the difference between strict constructionism and judicial activism is unreferenced, and a glance into James McPherson's `Battle Cry of Freedom' shows that this interpretation is so back-to-front as to undermine, rather than reinforce, his point. Pinker might have made a fist of his case by citing Strader vs Graham (1850), but would have been better advised to have steered clear of the history of slavery altogerth in this context. Finally, though Pinker may find it too obvious to labour the point once again, he could have pointer more clearly to the confusion of proximate and ultimate causes in his refutation of the critics of Thorhhill's work on rape.

On the whole, I thought the "Blank Slate" was a thought- provoking and lively book on human nature. I disagree with Mr. Pinker, however, on his argument that parents are not central to their children's development. It is true, as he states, that the general personality and intelligence of children are determined by their genes. But, even though nature gives children the "chess pieces" they will have in life, it is parents who must teach their children how to play the game. Biological parents are most effective at nurturing their own offspring because parents share their children's traits and have learned the coping strategies that best exploit family talents. Extended families -- grandparents, uncles, fathers, mothers-- develop unique family cultures that provide a rich source of advice and understanding for new members, who after all, are "chips off the old block."

The Blank Slate deserves all the praise it has received. Steven Pinker presents an extremely eloquent, well reasoned, comprehensive and entertaining renunciation of the holy trinity of social science - the blank slate, noble savage, and ghost in the machine; ideologies that have created serious obstacles to the application of modern scientific research in genetics, biology and psychology to a better understanding of who we really are.
The more widely this book is read, the sooner we can increase the effectiveness with which we understand and tackle real personal and social problems from a fact-based and positive perspective of human nature.
The book is academically very strong and the arguments are well presented and convincing, so much so that this book will doubtless receive future credit for putting the study of human nature back onto the social science agenda. Steven Pinker may surprise you, perhaps provoke you but he will definitely educate you, entertain you and leave you thinking about human nature in a very new way.

Reading this book is like taking a university degree in biology, psychology, ethics and society. Along with Richard Dawkins, I think Steve Pinker is the best science writer in the world.

I like every chapter, but my favourites are:

The Many Roots of our Suffering - to know what we are, and why we feel the way we do, we must look at our evolutionary history.

Political Scientists - in which the arguments against sociobiology are dismantled.

The Voice of the Species - a wonderful merging of art and science.

Science books can often be dense and confusing - this one is like diving into the crystal clear blue water of understanding.

I can't wait for his next book!

I read this book before "How the mind works" although the logic order must be the reverse. All that can be told of the first can be told of the second... and more. "The blank slate" continues the line of thought about why our values are put in danger by the same ones who believe are defending them. By the way "The blank slate" is easier to read, because Pinker skips complicated (although fascinating) explanations about computation and vision and focus on human nature.
Read it!

This is a great book - well almost. In 24 punchy chapters, Pinker counter-blasts the culture-only theories of human nature that have dominated the social sciences over the last 70 years. Franz Boas and his students are often praised (or blamed) for having successfully decoupled the social and the biological sciences and thereby blunted the Darwinian Revolution of the 1860s. Pinker's book is the latest in a series that joins together what Boas did asunder. In the catacombs and labyrinths of academia, in the research labs and debating halls, in specialist after specialist journal, evidence from behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive neuroscience has been ushering in a counter-revolution in the behavioral sciences. Much of what Pinker ably pulls together is a far-ranging review of this research on children and family life, love and attraction, personality and temperament, religion, politics, and the arts. Time after time he shows how scientifically necessary it has now become to examine genetic as well as cultural influences.
Pinker rarely meets a phenotype for which he can't find some genetic variance. But alas, Pinker then blinks and stumbles when it comes to race, "gender" (i.e., sex), brain size, and IQ. Early in the book, he explains in detail about how it was the political ramifications of the controversy over issues of race that undermined the Darwinian perspective in the 1920s and established what he terms the Blank Slate Orthodoxy whose stranglehold on the behavioral sciences he now hopes to break. Perhaps this is why when it comes to the topic of the "Black-White IQ gap in the United States," Pinker safely opines that, "the current evidence does not call for a genetic explanation" (p. 144) and omits telling us what this evidence is or what, if anything, is wrong with it. For Pinker, apparently, traits may run in families for genetic reasons, but not in families of families. Race is the glaring exception to his otherwise general rule that phenotypes require genetic as well as cultural explanation.
Since Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, it is even more surprising that he doesn't give his readers a clue as to the latest research on brain size and IQ. ...High-tech, state-of-the-art MRI imaging studies reveal a 0.40 correlation between brain size and intelligence test scores. Other brain size studies show an average Black-White and male-female difference amounting to about 100 grams (the size of a quarter-pounder), favoring Whites over Blacks, and men over women. When Pinker does dare whisper of such forbidden truths, he quickly shouts out enough technical details about small brain parts (men also have larger "interstitial nuclei in the anterior hypothalamus, and a nucleus of the stria terminalis, also in the hypothalamus" (p. 347), whereas women have larger "cerebral commissures") that the central theme is drowned out by a cacophony of qualifications, caveats, and minutiae. He is silent about the average 15 IQ point difference between African Americans and Europeans, or the 30 IQ points between unmixed Africans in Africa, and Europeans, although these have been repeatedly corroborated by over 100 years of research on millions of people. He also skirts the evidence of the large male greater than female differences in spatial and mathematical ability, which may explain the comparable sex differences in brain size (even after adjusting for body size).
One novel, braver message is Pinker's marrying of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics. For the most part these disciplines tactfully avoided each other. Many evolutionary psychologists worry about being perceived as fellow travelers of behavioral genetics, some of whose disciples have, on occasion, carried out research on IQ, crime, and race. Some behavioral geneticists, in turn, dismissed the evolutionary psychology "science of just-so stories." Here, Pinker performs his greatest service to the behavioral sciences, advocating consilience over fragmentation. This book sweeps Blank Slate orthodoxy toward the dustbin of history. One only wishes Pinker had used a wider and stiffer broom.

A friend lend me this book after a discussion. I am not impressed.

In "The Blank Slate", Pinker attacks the concept, giving the book its title, that we are born without any behavioral predispositions, and "The Noble Savage", that pure humans were all complete, moral beings. Although I agree with him that both of these are wrong, I think he is clearly attacking straw-men here. I don't know anybody who has given the topic any serious thought who would think that way. Pinker gives some examples of opposition to the idea that human behavior has a biological basis, but I think these trends are more fringe than he makes them seem. You will always get a segment of society opposed to any politically relevant scientific insight - look at evolution. There is no serious intellectual discussion anymore that behavior has partially a genetic basis.

But the main problem is that Pinker is at most half-educated when it comes to some of the subjects he writes about. He makes statements which are either plainly wrong or so overly simplistic that they are meaningless. He takes the fact that the cortical folds are relatively conserved across humans as an argument that our behavior is genetically imprinted. But really any type of "Blank Slate" hypothesis would still be consistent with a constant large-scale brain anatomy.
Another striking example (also noted by another reviewer) is his claim that "Bonobos are some of the most peaceful mammals known, chimpanzees some of the most aggressive. Chimps have sex for procreation, bonobos for recreation". First of all, that is simply not true - there are highly interesting, but certainly gradual differences between these apes, but none of them that radical. No chimp can match a lion in terms of aggression (both as a predator and as a practitioner of infanticide). Sexuality equally has a social role in chimps (and of course a reproductive role in bonobos).
Second, it is just not a scientific statement - I am not aware of any zoologist making a ranking of the most aggressive or peaceful animals, and these qualities can probably not be expressed in scalar values (and thus ranked) anyway. Pinker sounds like somebody who has talked at a party to someone who had read a book about chimps. The book is filled with such over-generalizations, exaggerations and mistakes. Especially neuroscience (my own field) is not Pinker's strength!

So, a rather sloppily argued book falsifying some opinions which had been falsified a long time ago. I am not sure what this is supposed to achieve? It might be that I am not the target audience for this book, but it is not the type of reading material I want to better myself as an intellectual. This is clearly not an original contribution to any scholarly debate, and not a well researched popular science book likely to convince anyone still believing that biology has nothing to do with human behavior either.

It is a great art to write science books interesting to the expert but understandable to the layman, readable and without jargon, but not dumbed down. Writers like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins have mastered this art, Steven Pinker has not.

Pinker presents nothing new, he is simply popularizing and tracing out the implications of the discoveries in the sciences of human nature. The book is very enjoyable to read. He rips apart such nuisance ideologies as relativism, constructionism, Utopianism, gender-feminism, and modernism/post-modernism. Most importantly, he takes the moral high ground, showing that the Blank Slate is an unacceptable moral position. The book drips with insights. For example, he shows that parents have virtually no influence on how their children turn out, thus invalidating a huge body of parenting advice. I was surprised at how well read Pinker is, the book is remarkably cross-disciplinary. He definitely did his homework.

I have never read such a highly detailed book on human nature coming from Pinker. This book is a culmination of his past works, it does in fact rehash past books but investigates more sub areas. To me it looks as though Pinker decided to further his own studies and this is an update of original thesis. Also this edition covers why we resist or deny, Socially, what he had written in How the Mind Works. This is a good extention, however I feel one has to be very serious about this subject to enjoy it.
Do not get me wrong on being serious, this book is superbly written, easy to understand, was edited well. The ideas put forth of Ideology and Philosophy do go further than most, I would recommend reading All of his prior works however before starting this, without that there is a lack of full understanding. I would like to recommend a good philosophy ideology book, similar, which I enjoyed more, SB or God.

Mr. Pinker provides illuminating, well written insight into how our minds work. In the process he provides compelling arguments to negate the dreams of social engineers to remake society in the image of the "New Soviet Man", the Nazi Superman, or, by extension, the "New Liberal Man" of the West.
Still, one is left with questions. If the human mind were simple enough to comprehend, might we (even Pinker) be too simple to comprehend it? Why are we here? Why do we wonder about such things as human nature and how our minds work?
It is there you are deposited, to consider the alternatives.

A straight forward look at how the sciences of the mind explode the social "sciences'" standard view of the mind. He also lays into the fraud that is post-modernism.
Certain to outrage the lit-crit pond-scum crowd, who will however simply ignore the science. For the rest of us its mostly just common sense.

This is an mazing book which changes the way you treat everyday life and are forced to rethink what you take for granted - children, parents, the sexes etc. I particularly liked Part V ( and would highly recommend that to anyone familiar with EP concepts and not wanting to read the whole book) in which Pinker takes on especially challenging topics and issues and argues them very methodically and emphatically.

"The Blank Slate" is reminiscent of the venerable John Locke's "Some Thoughts Concerning Education: On Politics And Education". Steven Pinker gives us an intellectually scholarly discussion of this subject. Readers might also like to know, after reading "The Blank Slate", that Norman Thomas Remick's book, "West Point: Character Leadership Education..", also picks up on Locke's philosophies very nicely, but put into easy-to-understand terms. "The Blank Slate" is a must read for anyone interested in this subject. In fact, this subject is a must read for anyone who is a thinking person. A hearty "well done!" to Steven Pinker.

I have enjoyed other books by Pinker and was expecting to enjoy this one as well. However it did not take me very long to tire of this tedious book. Pinker does not hide his opinions. Indeed he is most certain of them and expounds them tediously in page after page of description. With that, I found myself quickly growing tired of him building up strawmen only so that he can knock them down. I am not a scholar but even I could tell that his descriptions of opposing philosophical theories are shallow and designed to prove his point.
Mr. Pinker obviously has deep convictions about human nature. This book reminds me of being forced as a student to listen to a professor profess his pet theories before a captive audience. I found no great exploration of ideas here but just a declaration of Pinker's beliefs. I kept thinking of strawmen and fish in barrels while I read this.

It's nice to see someone logically comment on the attacks on science that have been going on... well, forever. Pinker does an excellent job describing how current dogmas curtail logical thinking in regard to scientific issues. He also does it very responsibly, pointing out how and why these scientific claims do not threaten some of our prized beliefs about how we should treat others. A must read for anyone who wants a well written argument for science and human nature.

This is a reasonable and impressively documented, deep yet colorful discussion of nature vs. nurture, making convincing points against nurture extremists. It's a breath of fresh air in a modern world where thinkers are more worried about belonging to the elite of intellectuals (so they reject common sense because too obvious) rather than using their acumen to understand.
However, the simple reader may find somewhat disturbing the animosity of the nature/nurture confrontation, which resembles more to warship than to a scholarly debate (I'm not saying sociobiologists should avoid fighting back, I just find this situation unfortunate). One result is that the opponents become defensive, spending more time stressing what they didn't say than saying what they think, and treating awkwardly certain arguments in order not to give ammunition to the enemy.
One example is the thorny question of the "black-white IQ tests". Pinker starts saying (p. 142) that "human nature does not mean that the differences among individuals, races, or sexes, are also in our nature". Then he admits that "each person is genetically unique", but the differences are "random mutations" which, being random, converge presumably to the same average in large groups, such as the totality of black or white persons. So the differences "are found to a far greater extent among the individual members of an ethnic group or race than between ethnic groups or races". But then he remembers, p. 144, that genetic traits are not random but inherited, and that "Europeans, having mostly bred with other Europeans for millennia, are on average more closely related to other Europeans than to Africans" so that "races are still discernible" and "some of the varying genes could affect personality or intelligence". But this is not really important, he concludes p. 145, since our morality "condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups". Great. Now, why not saying this to start with, and then searching for truth?
One problem may be the objectionable choice of the parameter, intelligence, which is perceived as an index of superiority rather than specificity, and which does not appear to be a direct consequence of genes. More directly genetic are certain personality traits (as stated p. 50 or pp. 374-5) such as introversion, neuroticism or conscientiousness. Now, if it was observed, say, that Central Europeans are on the average more introverted, neurotic, and pessimistic than Central Africans, one could look for possible causes. One might say, for example, that because of the hardship of european winters only the most anxious and thus forward-thinking individuals could survive in Paleolithic Europe. While in central Africa, because of the abundance of fruits and wild game all year around, the evolutionary advantage may have been related less to survival and more to sexual choice. Which might have favored individual characters such as exuberance, in the same way that male birds are selected according to the splendor of their feathers or the charm of their singing.
And finally, one could observe that a typical Polish American, being more introverted and less easy-going than the average African American, is normally quieter, more conscientious, and less promiscuous, thus faring better at school. And for similar reasons he's more used to musing and thinking, analyzing and rationalizing, so he's better in IQ tests. Which may not be exactly the same as saying he's more intelligent, as EI (emotional intelligence) tenants stress. But, as Pinker says p. 149, "Academics are obsessed with intelligence". Perhaps because they love talking about intelligence, of which they are proud, rather than about introversion, of which they are not.

I adored this book, but this review for myself. How valuable it may be for others is especially difficult to tell in this case; it strongly depends on how much you care one way or the other, what are your present beliefs, and how patient you are (this is not an easy reading, for the most part). But consider this: Steven Pinker seem to have read them all. Not only those you've read yourself and glad you did, and those you would want to read. He read all the vicious, all the nudniks, all those who have nothing to say but still claim they do and write sophisticated, unintelligible books. He read the very abstract ones, the ones that are written in difficult language, the ones that are hard to find. And he gives you the essence of it, with the strongest arguments I've encountered. I adore his deepness and grateful for doing or us all what I consider to be very exhausting and sometimes down right a dirty job.

This human nature book is like Pinker's "The Better Angels Of Our Nature" book in so many ways, readers might enjoy and profit from reading my review of the latter. The two books differ from each other in two ways. First, the main topic explored in the "Modern Denial" book is weaker and less in need of attention than the main topic of the "Better Angels" book. Second, the length of the "Modern Denial" book is only double an optimal length compared to triple optimal for the "Better Angels" book. This "Modern Denial" book reminded me of a Wild American West sheriff who routinely shot bad guys independent of crimes "when they need killing" to get more notches in his belt.

I expected the majority of this book to be an account of research into human nature that disproves the Blank Slate, and of the social causes and consequences of upholding the Blank Slate in spite of the research.

Such accounts are present, but comprise the minority of the book. The majority is an account of unfair criticism and illogical conclusions from Pinker's academic opponents, the apparent accuracy of which does not save it from being tedious. Narrative shortcuts such as "the leading theoreticians of the radical science movement" are not helpful references to an objectively described or self-identified group, but are instead mere rhetoric, making it harder to keep Pinker's opponents straight but easier to hate them without thinking. I wish that Pinker would have, from time to time, taken a few minutes to punch a pillow and returned to his writing with less aggression and more ideas; when he does focus on his ideas and not on their detractors, I find myself impressed and in agreement.

I was immensely impressed by this book. It is well argued and well worth reading, although I thought that his treatment of art was ill ventured and shallow.

For an equally fascinating contrary view, I would recommend reading Greenspan & Shanker's book "THe First Idea".

I can't say I can read Pinker but only study him. I felt punch-drunk after ingesting The Blank Slate. It was like taking an intellectual super roller coaster ride hanging upside down. Wonderful. John Locke, the fool who had come up with the idea of the blank slate, is finally dead.
Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?

After reading the Language Instinct by this author, I excitedly picked up "The Blank Slate". Unfortunately, this book mostly repeats the same old arguments that have been repeated and analyzed since the 50's. I was hoping for a more detailed look at the study of the brain and linguistics and how it effects our understanding of why the blank slate theory is ultimately invalid. I'm not sure why Pinker even bothered writing this one. He even says in his introduction that many of his colleagues advised him not to cover such already familiar territory.
I was also disappointed in Pinker's writing. In his other books his prose kept me on my toes. This one however, tends to drone on and on. I did find a few of the chapters at the end of the book, The "Hot Buttons" part interesting so I gave it 3 stars. If you want the real Mccoy parts of this argument, just look back at the articles published by Chomsky and Skinner on the subject half a century ago.

Pinker reviews it better than I can in his introduction:
"When it comes o explaining thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as an hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think."

This is a great book, and I think it can be enjoyed by those familiar with or new to the field of philosphy/neurosciences.
I also realize this is NOT a discussion board, but I have to say I am baffled as to why anyone would insult this book with a low rating and then continue to blab about thier own personal opposing theories. Pinker is brilliant in his ability to cross reference so many peoples works, and though I may not understand or agree with the entire book, I give it 5 stars easily.

This is the third book I've read by Stephen Pinker, and his commonsense and straightforward approach to viewing real-world problems, issues, and questions is, as always, refreshing and interesting. His reliance on statistics to debunk or confirm "conventional wisdom" is refreshing in this day and age.

The effects of childhood to a person's life all the way to adulthood can be explained by CHAOS THEORY, which teaches us "sensitivity to initial conditions." This means that powerful childhood influences affects us as we go through life which affects our path in life all the way to adulthood. This is because childhood creates a "ripple effect" where one condition leads to another and so forth. Even in a example diagram of CHAOS THEORY examining the initial conditions of movements of clouds and numbers inputed in a computer a scientist like EDWARD LORENZ could theoretically predict the outcome based on the initial numbers inputed in the computer, but any slight changes in the sequence of numbers could produce a much diffirent ending. This is what happened in 1960, when he left his computer he wanted to save on time and paper print out so he started the sequence in the middle instead of the beginning...one hour later when he came back he saw that the resulting sequence of numbers was highly divergent from his previous sequence of numbers, that is when he found out that he inputed decimal numbers slightly diffirent from the original decimal numbers. So just like in the sequence of life we have a choice now instead of having a harder choice later, for if you don't think hard about the result now you would have harder choices later on for the effects COMPOUNDS. Childhood has a powerful effect so think hard now about your future before its late!

After spending some weeks moving through Pinker's work, I can say he has rehabilitated the notion that there is a human nature, that homo sapiens is a species with some basic patterns of perception and response. The idea that the human race can be molded beyond its species-capacity meets with damaging evidence to the contrary. We are very adaptable but we are not blanks slates. A good reminder to "know your species and know yourself".
Highly recommended

I will be brief so as to emphasize my point. This book is a deeply refreshing gem. It is a godsend to anyone who has been frustrated by the dreary social engineering propaganda that proliferated in the 20th Century. Do not let the social engineers deter you from reading this book. They hate him precisely because he is the manchild to declare, finally, that the imperialistic social engineers are wearing no clothes.

Pinker attempts to do four things in "The Blank Slate":
1. demolish "the blank slate" concept
2. demolish "the noble savage" concept
3. demolish "the ghost in the machine" concept
4. use statistics according to Disraeli.
Strawman-baiting notwithstanding, Pinker makes a good show toward his first two goals. He only deserves partial credit, however, as those ideas have far outlasted their intrinsic value and deserve the burial he gleefully supplies.
Unfortunately for Pinker, the same cannot be said of "the ghost in the machine". That it should be conflated with the previous two over-ripe ideas is odd. While the "ghost" has appeared in many dubious incarnations, some of which Pinker uses as foils, "the ghost in the machine" can be reduced to the idea that "there is something about human nature that is beyond our ability to understand (AKA 'science')". Put in those terms, the concept resists sophisticated attempts at dismissal, let alone the light-weight ones Pinker employs. A clause like "we have every reason to believe that" (consciousness [derives from] neural networks in the brain - p.240) really means "we cannot conceive other than that" or "our faith affirms that". Apparently, what should be obvious is not: science is unable to define its own limits.
Pinker also gets the proverbial raspberry for playing fast-and-loose with statistics in the final chapters. At least he is honest enough to mitigate his stance with some necessary caveats. He admits that prizing apart genetics and environment can be a tricky business. He admits that the adopting demographic has huge correlation within it. He mentions the crucial differences between "determines/affects" and "variance/outcome" but appears to have trouble interpreting these differences on occasion. He mentions the necessity of systematic influence. He could have mentioned the sample set size problem for twins-reared-apart studies, studies that have shown as much as 25% environmental influence, linearity and independence assumptions, free will as a source of measurement noise, etc. I suppose that the glosses were made in an attempt to make the whole more accessible to the masses, but the end result is that conclusions derive more from the assumptions than from the evidence itself.
Finally, Pinker also indulges in the just-so-story-making that true believers have gobbled up throughout history. Passive? Aggressive? Got them both covered. Ethical? Violent? No problem. We can "explain" them both with ease. If a theory can explain any two conflicting phenomena without so much as a flinch, it is non-falsifiable and hence non-scientific.

Bottom line: I learned precious little about human nature from this book. Plenty about the foibles of academia, the politics of science, and the inertia of dogma -- but I was already familiar with all those topics. Recognizing this weakness in his book, Pinker defers, in closing, to the real experts on human nature: poets and novelists. Wanna learn about human nature? Read Tolstoy, Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Dostoevsky...

So THIS is a controversial book. It just goes to show how utterly backward the intellectual culture is. Pinker mercilessly exposes the delusions of the liberal-left and the vain pretensions of artistic voluntarism. Get it straight you artistic fops! Your art is (1) ugly (2) boring (3) stupid. As for the liberals who are utterly clueless of the facts (and there are only two: 50% of you is your genes and 50% of you is your genes' reactions with the biochemical environment, with nothing left over for culture and experience), you can't make an omelette without cracking a few heads. This is the greatest book of the new millenium. Those who demure from its clear and plain propositions need to be selected-against.

The book which ultimately made me become realist from optimist (the sign of maturity?). Interesting book to read. I re read this book more times than any, even above "Selfish Gene", the book which made me become an Atheist finally.

The nature vs. nurture question reminds me of the lawyer who asks the man on the stand if it is true that he has recently stopped beating his wife. The questions all but precludes the consideration of possible truths which are highly likely. It is, simple put, a profoundly bad question.
First, evey social scientist should study one simple genetic circuit, such as the lactose operon of bacteria. The lac operon is a simple circuit that regulates the metabolic response of a bacterial cell to the presense of sugars in its environment. This genetic circuit determines possible states (responses) by the bacteria and these are indeed limited by the gentic make- up of the bacteria. On the other hand, the actual outcome at any given moment is determined by the environment the bacteria is in. So, even at the simplest level of a bacteria metabolozing sugar, we have a complex interplay of genetics and environment. To put it in Pinkerian terms, bacteria never tap dance when presented with sugar (that's a weak kind of genetic determinism for sure) but how they do respond depends on the environment and this is the half of the equation Pinker wants to all but ignore.

One example Pinker loves to pull out is a study done on MIT ungdergards where individuals approach members of the opposite sex and offer to have sex with them. Pinker recounts the amusing differences in response between men and women. But what is amazing is that Pinker assumes the difference is ENTIRLY DUE TO BIOLOGICAL/GENETIC differences. In fact, there is a huge amount of evidence that the response of men and women to such questions is profoundly affected by cultural norms and expectations. For example, about five years ago, a large sex survey was done in this country and one question asked of men and women was how many opposite sex partners they had had in a lifetime. The men reported an average of 5 and the women reported an average of 2!! Given that there are nearly equal numbers of men and women the mathemtaical fact is that the two numbers should be nearly identical. Almost certainly the large reported difference is due to cultural ideas each sex has about their own sexuality since it cannot be based on actual behavior.

As a neurobiologist, I am sympathetic with Pinkers goal to elucidate our basic nature, but he gives such ludicrously simple examples he hurts his own cause. Here's another example from social science (though I am not blaming Pinker for it), it may seem to make evolutionary sense that women should have a "desire for children" or a "maternal instinct" but if we examine the biological assumptions this idea is based on we find the notion has no basis. There is no evolutionary need for a desire for children or a maternal instinct in women who do not have children. The presense of a sex drive will ensure (at least before the days of birth control when we were evolving) that children will happen. Biologically or evolutionarily speaking, women only need to feel "maternal" AFTER they actually have the child. Differences between the sexes in desire for not yet existant children may thus be largely be due to cultural attitudes. (Also instincts are not a mandate for behavior. They are not hard-wired and non-surrmountable. This is a grave misconception people seem to have when they hear "instinct", they hear "can't be helped" when that it not the case.)

What is amazing is that the average man on the street seems to understand, more than the academics do, that human behavior is due to a complex interplay of biology with environment. If you ask any American to explain the conduct of other members of their community the answers will range from "He's like his granddady" or "it's in his blood" to things like "he was beaten as a child" or "he was hit in the head with a baseball bat at the age of 6". Average people seem to understand that both genetics and environment interact in complex ways to produce an output.

So why do allegedly educated social scientists (they never actually study genetcis or neuroscience to get a deeper understanding of what they are talking about) still think it's nature vs. nurture?

No one believes the blank slate one reviewer said and I tend to agree. Pinker is fighting a straw man. It is a worthy goal to draw attention to our genetic tendancies and the fact that there is such a things as "human nature" but when it is done in a slipshod, intellectually careless way, that worthy goal is actually harmed. One doesn't want to pose ridiculoous dichotomies that appear to give us false alternatives. Genetic determinism is as nonsensical as the blank slate as I should hope Pinker knows. But his presentation is so biased that it simply fuels this ridiculous nature/nurture controvery (whether he intends to or not).

In short, a much more thoughtful presentation would do more to further an understanding of the limits of human nature and help us adopt social policies that were senisible.

This book has some solid ideas, but they get lost in the wording. If the author wasn't trying so hard to use his SAT vocabulary, then I'm sure the book would've been at least a bit more fluent. It seems to be targeted towards a very academic background, and makes references to advanced topics in several areas of scientific research. All in all, an interesting read if you have the necessary background and the time to decrypt it. For me, that wasn't possible.

No Mo Po Mo = No More Postmodernism.
Steven Pinker has joined the "No Mo Po Mo" group by writing this book. Good for him!
If you want to understand human nature, or (a much lesser goal) -- if you wanna understand a little bit more about human nature, you would do well to read J.R.R. Tolkien.
Of course, the PoMo crowd cannot stand Tolkien, and froths at the mouth when he is mentioned. BUT (somehow) the greatest poet of the 20th century (W. H. Auden) loved Tolkien.
How it will turn out remains to be seen!
HIWATORTBS, all! :-)
Jimmy

How can we understand ourselves if we don't get a grasp on human nature? This book is a deep exploration of just that. I found it helped me to understand my kids, my husband, and that person in the mirror. Great book. Another book that helped me in this manner that I recommend is "The Little Guide To Happiness".

Cultural relativism, the intellectual underpinnings of which rest on a faith (whether acknowledged or not) in the supremacy of nurture over nature, has had a long run. But has its boiler run out of steam at last?
In his latest and by far his most ambitious work, Steven Pinker tells us, in a lively but dispassionate voice of sweet reason, that the answer is yes. His demolition of cultural relativism may well make him a lot of enemies. He's touched on many of these same ideas before, but now he is spelling out the consequences - and the incompatibility of those consequences with the received wisdom of most of the last century.
His fundamental message is: Yes, Virginia, there is a human nature. People of all cultures are born with a host of inborn predispositions - to acquire language and music, to favor kin over strangers, to desire sex and to be ashamed of it, to value even trades and to punish cheaters, and dozens more. Our common nature springs from our common biology; it is not very malleable, and it is not "socially constructed." Cultural diversity is marvelous, but it is all a variation on an immutable theme; and there have never been any human cultures free of war, of greed, or of prescribed gender roles. (Any more than there have ever been any free of conflict resolution techniques, altruism, and shared parenting.)
His secondary theme is that the differences between people, so much smaller than what we have in common, are also primarily biologically determined. A juggernaut of data has finally put the nature/nurture controversy to rest, at least from a scientific standpoint, and the final score is pretty much nature one, nurture zero. Fifty to seventy percent of the variation between individuals - in intelligence, in personality, in political leanings, or just about any other mental character you care to name - derives from the genes; zero to ten percent derives from the home environment; and the mysterious remainder is due to chance or to non-parental environment.
We have been conditioned in recent decades to think of both these contentions as shocking. They violate two precepts Pinker designates the "sacred doctrines in modern intellectual life." He calls them The Blank Slate (with a nod to Locke), and The Noble Savage (with a nod to Rousseau.) The first holds that ideas, likes, dislikes, and personalities are all the result of what Locke called "sense impressions", that is, they are all imprinted on us by our environments. The second is a little more modest, but forms the seductive core of the first, because we'd all like it to be true. It holds that all our unpleasant ideas, likes, dislikes, and neurotic tics are forced by a wicked society upon an infant slate which is, if not blank, devoid of all blemish.
Pinker spends the first hundred pages tracing the lineage of these sacred doctrines (and of a third, neither so carefully examined nor so carefully defined, which he calls The Ghost in the Machine. The philosophers who originated the phrase were trying to deny the reality of consciousness, but what Pinker is trying to deny turns out to be narrower - essentially, the doctrine that whatever biological nature we may have can be overriden by a soul or self with a free will independent of biology.) He explores what has made the three doctrines attractive to all of us, but especially to the academic left, and the deep fears which have made it taboo, as E.O. Wilson found to his cost, to contradict them.
He then explains, carefully and (at least with respect to the first two) convincingly, why the fears in question are groundless - and why we should rather fear the ill effects of suppressing this new knowledge about human nature.
Finally, he takes up in a series of individual chapters several of the hot-button political and social issues that are affected by the existence of an objective human nature, and by the largely genetic basis of most human differences: the source of the left/right divide in politics, the root causes of violence, what objective gender differences (and the biological influences bearing on rape) do and do not mean for public policy, the coming irrelevance of the child-rearing advice industry, and a rather curmudgeonly take on what he sees as the well-deserved unpopularity of avant-garde art.
The child-rearing chapter is particularly eye-opening, while the violence chapter offers some fairly fresh ideas, not so much on its origins, which are the same for us as for chimpanzees, but on the variables affecting its expression. Also notable is Pinker's calm, complete demolition, on strictly biological grounds, of the notion that an embryo is "ensouled" at the moment of conception. (Perhaps still more notable, and indicative of the book's even tenor for all its polemics, is his refusal to draw any pro-choice conclusion from that.)
It's a joy to see some of Pinker's more irrational targets, from die-hard Marxism to the rejection of science itself by "critical theory" to the bromide that rape isn't "about" sexual desire, skewered with such swift and classical neatness. The longer lasting pleasures will come from a leisurely unpacking and sifting of all his positive conjectures, conclusions, and insights. It's a book you can zip through in a couple of nights, or return to for thought-fodder for years.

This book exemplifies - for the most part valiantly and eloquently -- the continuing gulf between being all-knowing and being a know-it-all. Pinker synthesizes, or attempts to synthesize, thinkers in a wide range of disciplines hovering around the extended topic "What is human nature, why is it thus, and what difference does this make?" His conclusion -- that "we have reason to believe that the mind is equipped with a battery of emotions, drives, and faculties for reasoning and communicating, and that they have a common logic across cultures, are difficult to erase or redesign from scratch, were shaped by natural selection acting over the course of human evolution, and owe some of their basic design (and some of their variation) to information in the genome" (p. 73) - is persuasive, if too generic and equivocal to rank as an earth-shattering paradigm shift. Pinker is perhaps most intriguing in showing how polarized extremisms along the continuum between those viewing nature or nurture (i.e., the innate or the culturally-specified) as the primary determinant of the human condition have made, and continue to make, strange bedfellows of the Right and the Left.
Pinker's magnum opus, however, suffers from puzzling lacunae. In selected areas he lets loose with laundry lists of a dozen researchers whose work he deems relevant, but in other areas the bibliography is far skimpier. For instance, although as a cognitive scientist purporting to explain the basis for human thought patterns he is clearly venturing into the turf of philosophy, and although he appears somewhat adept with the concepts of such pioneers in this field as Descartes, Locke and Hume, Pinker's book is completely devoid of mention of Immanuel Kant's epistemology. This is all the more curious in that the author not only makes several passing references to Kant's moral doctrines, but indeed arrives at a system of how the mind is structured to categorize experience (based, in Pinker's version, on forms of reasoning that presumptively served the species' survival), and of how these categories limit that of which we can conceive, which strongly echoes the system set forth in Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." Either Pinker is suffering from severe "anxiety of influence," or he needs a genius grant to afford him more time to complete his reading.
Pinker also tends (presumably for evolutionary reasons) to caricature those with whom he elects to disagree, such as asserting that Steven Jay Gould's attack on the abstract quality of "intelligence" as a one-dimensional basis for ranking individuals and (by aggregation) groups equates to the denial of inborn talent (p. 149), or that Jerome Kagan and other child development experts are without a rational basis for arguing that parents can affect how their children turn out (p. 394).
Most annoying, however, is the extent to which Pinker falls prey to the instinct to follow through the perceived implications of his system into such diverse areas as aesthetic theory and political philosophy. For instance, he plays out his concept of human nature to postulate a biologically-based critique of modernism (abstraction) and post-modernism as causing the "decline and fall" of the arts (p. 411). The aesthetic connection has some merit (although here again Pinker is unable or unwilling to place his pontifications within the context of a vast literature of relevant predecessors ranging from Kant (in his third Critique) to John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Suzanne Langer), but itself becomes an extreme overstatement inasmuch as it fails to recognize the phenomenological aspects of human perception and intelligence that make conceptual or non-representational art intriguing to some percipients.
It is not a priori impossible to become a bona fide polymath or to develop a comprehensive system for understanding human nature and affairs. But those who have tried it have derived increased power and flexibility from recognizing (as did Aristotle, to whom Pinker deigns to give a mere bit part as a theorist of tragedy) that every discipline has its own differentiating subject matter and set of rules, or from stipulating (like Richard McKeon) a pluralist schema that can alternately utilize several discrete approaches to fundamental problems and questions and thereby achieve multi-dimensional depth of insight. Many before have fallen into the trap of extrapolating too far from one idea or set of ideas, even a promising and well-thought-out one in an area over which they had relative mastery. Such an intellectual approach risks something akin to the dilettantism of a Michael Jordan dabbling at baseball or golf, or the futile and narcissistic valor of a youngster who, having fashioned the best slingshot in town, sallies forth to conquer the world. Ultimately, "The Blank Slate" is too wide and insufficiently deep, and is at most an intriguing prolegomenon to a bio-psychologically grounded unified field theory of all things human.

I read this book and it had elements in it of my favorite writer. It was philisophical in some cases. Scientific in others. And even at times spiritual. In essence it is a socioligical study of human nature and it's evolution. Our children start out as blank slates. And we can grow and learn, or not, depending on what we write on that slate. This Author reminds me of the same Author who wrote "I Talked To God And He Wants To Talk To Me" in the sense that he too explores the sociological evolution of man's belief system, only in more spiritual terms.

The fact that nobody actually beleives in the idea that humans are a blank slate doesn't stop Pinker from acting as if they do. Over and over again in this book, Pinker quotes his purported opposition and follows up his quotation with an interpretation which is clearly a distortion.
This book is merely a diatribe: I can read "adaptionist" books with great pleasure when they are written by people with some subtelty of mind--Richard Dawkins or EO Wilson, say. But Pinker, either through willfulness or incapacity, utterly misses the nuance in arguments made by anyone for whom he considers to be an enemy.
A witless, unsubtle and closing-in-on-useless book.
Of course, if what you are interested in is seeing Pinker take a bludgeon to a bunch of strawmen, then you'll probably like this book.

Steven Pinker's book is a wonderful explication of what we now know about human nature. As such, it mounts a powerful attack on postmodernist attemps to argue that humans are completely malleable and socially constructed. The book reminds me most of David Hume's A Treatise on Human Nature. Like Hume, Pinker attacks the reigning orthodoxies and pieties of the politically and religiously correct. Because of such sacrilege, he will be attacked as an immoralist, just as Hume was. But like Hume, Pinker is in reality engaged in a deeply moral enterprise. By dispelling myths that are often propogated by ideologues to advance their agenda (such as the myth that the average man and woman differ only anatomically and not in their desires and interests), he makes it easier to understand the real costs and benefits of different social policies (such as quotas for women, whether in college athletics or on the job). By helping us understand the biologicaly wellsprings of our conflicts with others, be they parents, children, friends, or mates, he provides an important step to living with them more humanely and kindly. In perhaps its most completely original chapter, the book even uses his a theory of biologically shaped human nature to diagnose the discontents of much modern art, and if taken to heart, may show a way out of the cul de sac in which those who claim the mind is a blank slate have trapped many proud artistic traditions. The Blank Slate is a vaccination against the characteristic follies and errors of postmodernism and as such should be required reading for all students at our often diseased universities.

Steven Pinker's book 'The Blank Slate' offers a fairly humane picture of human nature. The later chapters are unobjectionable in their liberal slant regarding feminism, politics, child development etc. It is in the first few chapters where Pinker bares his teeth, as he lays out the scientific argument for his stance. His arguments here are mainly directed against the three obstacles to what he sees as a scientific view of human nature, namely The Noble Savage (NS), the Blank Slate (BS) and the Ghost in the Machine (GIM). It is in these 'scientific' chapters that he curiously expresses himself in a more forceful manner, reserving especial disdain or even contempt for the third (GIM) of these offending ideas. At times the vehemence of his criticisms of the GIM is possessed of an unexpected force bordering on bitterness. This is reminiscent of a similar vehemence encountered in Dennet's 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' regarding what he sees as 'sky hooks' or any hint of deviation from a purely materialist/mechanist view of human nature. According to Dennet, natural selection is an acid that eats through all resistance, ruthlessly destroying any vestige of the 'sky hook' mentality.

Pinker's argument that 'Our incomprehension of sentience does not impede our understanding of how our mind works' is indicative of his desire to ignore the GIM or anything falling outside the reductionist understanding of the brain. Admittedly reductionism has produced all the wonders of technology and modern science in a relatively short time, namely the 3 or 4 centuries since Galileo, Copernicus and Newton initiated the modern scientific revolution. Paul Davies in 'The Mind of God' talks of the 'god of the gaps' as losing more and more ground as the scientific revolution explained more and more of the mysteries or gaps in our understanding of nature. Thus Newton himself removed the 'magic' from the dynamical behaviour of objects, and thinkers such as Descartes used the new understanding of the world in terms of maths and physics to imply that all living creatures were machines. For Descartes the gap had shrunk to the human mind or soul which interacted with the body via the pineal gland. Later scientists and philosophers would close off more gaps ? Darwin that of biblical creationism and modern neuroscientists many of the functional details of the brain-mind system. However, while many of the gaps spanned by modern science were considerable, they pale in comparison with the 'explanatory gap' of modern philosophers of consciousness. This is Chalmers' 'hard problem' of how subjective experience arises from the objective neural processes we may detect via CAT scans, NMR, EEGs etc. But even Chalmers' 'easy' problems are still beyond the ability of modern science to solve, and include many of the processes associated with cognitive functions like intelligence, memory, thinking etc. Pinker also admits that many aspects of abstract thought are far beyond any of the achievements of Artificial Intelligence. For example, neural networks, while good at recognizing certain patterns, need complex steering algorithms to make sense of the real world. Pinker indicates that some of these steering algorithms come from information in the genome. Though Malik criticises the tendency to see a brain module for everything as a modern form of phrenology, Pinker does cite considerable evidence for at least some modules, such as those for seeing, hearing, social restraint etc. Malik points out that for example in the case of the 'theory of mind' needed for us to make sense of the actions of others, the modular approach is faulty as the module has to change with time as understanding of others' actions grows. Malik also points out that this theory of mind first arises around the age of three, at exactly the same time as linguistic ability reaches sufficient proficiency to allow the expression of grammatically complex sentences. Thus the theory of mind is more likely a corollary of increasing linguistic ability. So the inherent linguistic 'module' first mooted by Chomsky may support the development of many cognitive abilities without the need for further inherent modules.

Pinker points out that:

"Some theorists believe that there are indeed certain questions that humans are incapable of answering because of our evolved nature. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking. We cannot hold ten thousand words in our short-term memory. We cannot see ultra-violet light. We cannot mentally rotate an object in the fourth dimension. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience."
Malik sees things very differently - he points out that we have solved all kinds of problems:

"from the structure of DNA, to the physical composition of the sun despite our evolutionary legacy, not because of it. It is true that the development of science requires mental skills, many of which are evolved adaptations, but science has enabled us to go well beyond those adaptations. We can do science only because we can transcend our evolutionary heritage and act as subjects, rather than as objects"
i.e. the standard issue kit typically consists of rudimentary modules. But Einstein's brain had a big math centre and musicians develop bloated music centres, but neither neccessarily have big ones to start with - it's interest, will power and use that develop the skill - use it or lose it.

Pinker's discussion of the brain-mind system steers clear of such quandaries as the subject. He also avoids mentioning the binding problem, or how the image on the retina, once dissected into its myriad features such as colour, motion, lines of different slant etc. all processed in different parts of the brain, comes together in our subjective awareness as an integrated image. The problem of qualia or subjective feel of red, c-minor, Chanel nr. 5, etc. is also not addressed. But coming back to the scientific arguments against NS, BS and GIS, in many instances bald statements are made without sufficient backing. For instance, qualitative arguments are presented of the ability of the information in the genome to specify largely the functions of the brain, not to mention the 11 physiological sub-systems of the body. But these arguments are vague or imprecise. For example he repeatedly refers to 34,000 genes, but currently 23,000 seems to be an upper limit. At other times he refers to the 780 Megabytes in the genome specifying the body and brain, ignoring the fact of 95% junk DNA, much of the latter being repeats, viral or other non-coding DNA. Then he quotes James Watson as saying "Imagine watching a play with 30,000 actors. You'd get pretty confused" in support of the ability of the 15 Megabytes of actual gene DNA (and non-protein-coding RNA) to generate so much complexity. However this comparison is somewhat disingenuous, as each of the actors in such a play would be a complex subjective being, while the genes are just strips of chemicals with on average 1000 'letters' of the amino acid alphabet. And to say that multiple copies of the genome is comparable to re-arranging the alphabet to produce the works of Shakespeare is similarly specious, as the comparison is more with chopping up multiple copies of 30,000 paragraphs, tossing them into a hat and hoping that Hamlet will somehow emerge. Protein folding origami tucks away many of the codons to leave only a few active sites on the protein surface. Its information content might be thought of now as appreciably lessened: just the ability to dock at a receptor site or block the action of some other protein of the proteome - Later splicing will produce a few variation on the protein theme, but no fundamentally independent new shapes. Take for example a corkscrew shaped protein and a wavy one. By splicing we get a cross between a corkscrew and a wave, but the chance of this being useful is not very high. Granted, evolution will have streamlined things so that such combinations may find a use, but by its nature that use is unlikely to vary from those of the parent proteins. Pinker fails to explain how to get around the hard mathematical limit of 15 megabytes - massage that data in whichever way you want, you will always be limited by the sheer paucity of hard bits. And those who postulate miraculous feats of genetic coding fail to consider that there is also massive data loss in protein folding: the latter process, though an amazing bit of origami that even the most powerful supercomputers have yet to crack in a reasonable time, neatly folds away masses of nucleotides - all you're left with are a few active sites and jigsaw bits: you're only using the nucleotides on the surface of a volume. This is hardly efficient coding. Note also that experiments in cutting out sections of the mouse genome sometimes failed to affect the normal development of the mouse; these sections being gene-bearing ones several kilobytes long.

Looking at some of the higher cognitive functions of the brain/mind, Malik pointed out that the logic of computers can get at the outside of words, but not their inside, which metaphor some linguists use to discuss the difficulty of coding for language. A scene in 'Matrix Revolutions' is reminiscent of this. The man of the nice Indian couple, who were the manifestations of programs of some sort, when queried by Neo as to the appropriateness of using the term 'love' for his software 'daughter', pointed out that Love was just a word with many connections - now maybe all that neural connectivity is enough to make various words redolent with associations, but whether that is the same as meaning is another matter. It might be that since Kant made the 'subject' fashionable the scales fell from people's eyes and they saw the subjectivity of qualia everywhere - not only in the red of red, but in the meaning of meaning. It's similar to what Roger Penrose wished to convey with the example of a chess problem on which Deep Blue came to grief. One might say that he got the blues for not being deep enough! The idea there was that human players saw the problem in a flash, as we understood its meaning, but the poor old computer failed to apprehend the meaning or rather the inside of the problem. Again it's analogous to qualia ? e.g. in the example of neuroscientist Mary (Chalmers, 2002) brought up in a black and white environment, who was an expert on roses and the theory of colour perception, but despite being able to write tomes on the sensory impressions elicited by a rose, was amazed by the actual redness of the rose once she'd been let out of her colourless environment. You could say she just didn't understand the meaning of red - or rather, the 'true' meaning, in the sense of the subjective impression of colour.

Returning to Pinker's vitriolic denunciation of the ghost in the machine, one is led to ask: What had the poor old ghost done to occasion such wrath? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Pinker is a member of CSICOP, the 'PSI-COPs' or thought police of the 21st century. The agenda of the latter organisation is to 'debunk' anything 'paranormal' or which they see as contradicting the orthodox materialist/reductionist/mechanist stance of modern science. This fact might explain Pinker's eagerness to dismiss Alfred Wallace simply because he committed the sin of seeking the ghost in the machine by joining the spiritualist movement of the 19th century. Yet he was arguably as important as Darwin in starting off modern evolutionary theory. On the other hand, Pinker turns a blind eye to William James' preoccupation with the same subject matter, whilst availing of the latter's psychological insights. James and Wallace were aware of the machine like nature of the human body and even then there was a surprisingly detailed knowledge of the function of different brain regions. Yet they still saw it worthwhile to pursue the ghost within that machine. They didn't rage against the machine or against the ghost. But Pinker definitely does the latter.

Another point is that the nature of these subjective feelings or qualia is that they are qualitative feels and therefore not necessarily ultra-precise. Thus qualitative feelings may change and transmute without fundamentally changing the subject having those experiences. This answers those who maintain that since we can change consciousness by taking alcohol or other drugs then there is no true subjective consciousness. Chalmers' main point is that the hard problem is how the water of objective processes gets turned into the wine of subjective experience, even if that wine can change its flavour somewhat depend on the state of the water..

"Can't subjective time be sufficiently explained using memory content? I have the feeling that yesterday is before tomorrow because I have memories of yesterday and none of tomorrow. This generates the whole (to the physicist spurious, and rightly so, say I) illusion of an advancing edge of present at which future becomes past. A creature with no memory can have no sense of time passing and, setting aside the slight impediment of comprehensive amnesia, would probably make a better physicist than you or me."

Memory content a la computer data storage ('working memory') is just an objective correlate of the subjective impression of the recent past fading away gradually, while we have a stronger subjective awareness of the present. Simlarly we anticipate the near future in planning, but it is not yet present in subjective time awareness to the same extent as the 'now'. This is really a koan - how time's arrow is subjectively felt. No words can express it, just as words fail when describing red or C minor. They are ineffable. Philosophers before Descartes were caught up in the adulation of rationalism as true thought, and often failed to see the paradox of subjective experience. The 'koan' of the sound of one hand clapping is nothing compared to the koan of the subjective impression of red of the scorched palm. An exception might be Saint Augustine, who in the 4th century already stated the basic paradox of the subjective nature of the arrow of time:

"What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."

Maybe music is a good example of 'breathing fire into the equations' - that's a good phrase of Hawking: originally applied, I think to the universe as a whole - Physics gives us, "no idea of what breathes fire into the equations and makes there a world for us to describe".

Being new to the cognitive sciences I chose to read Pinker's book after seeing him on TV, and being entertained by his engaging topic, as well as his comfortable style of communicating. The book's content is highly thought provoking, and covers a lot of ground regarding human nature. Unfortunately Pinker's style of writing is too magniloquent, making the book a difficult read. Pinker should have made the book eminently more readable so that it could have appealed to a broader audience. His style of writing is complex and I fear the core teachings will be missed by the majority of readers. Peter Drucker once said that an academics job is not the acquisition of knowledge itself, but the dispensing of this knowledge in such a manner that humanity at large gets to benefit therefrom. In this regard I think Pinker has achieved only slight success. But as he put it, academics are obsessed with intellect therefore it is highly probabilistic that this obsession would manifest itself in a book, in this writing style. Too bad. Nevertheless at the price the book is worth a read.

Yeah.....and? The author beats a dead horse for a lot of pages. I thought Better Angels of our Nature was worthy of 5 stars but this book covered ground that I felt did not need to be covered. I also read How the Mind Works and was very disappointed in that mish-mash of random barely coherent ideas.

This charmless, even bitter survey of the admittedly overwhelming evidence against purely behaviorist theories of human development is greatly weakened by Pinker's too frequent appeals to the authority of those he agrees with -- sometimes he literally just gives the names of a half-dozen colleagues who agree with him!-- and by his nearly total lack of sympathy for opposing views. As another reviewer wrote, it feels as if Pinker is paying back a few grudges he's been nursing since grad school.

Pinker's knowledge of cognitive psychology is of course immense, and the endnotes and bibliography provide an excellent guide to the literature, but as history of science this is naive at best. I would suggest that anyone interested in arguments for innatism begin with Judith Rich Harris, who sticks to what she knows, and writes far better than Pinker does here.

Ok - firstly let me state that this is actually a great book - if you are studying the subject in great depth. As a casual reader the book is way too heavy.

Everything I read, I agreed with. Steven gives a great coverage of the subject and if he ever decided to create a condensed version for the casual reader, thenI'd be first in line to buy it.

After one Honors degree and a Doctorate, I'd prefer not to have to study too in depth to understand Mr Pinker's theories - and perhaps I missed something if he has already created an introduction to the subject?

All in all, this is a great book for the professional - and as such I would rate it as a "5". For the casual reader - i.e. me - it is a 2.

If Steven ever reads this then my recommendation is to either write the book for the amateur - or direct us to the one you have already written.

If you have ever witnessed human denial in the way that reveals human self preservation not just that individual, you can grasp at Steven Pinkers theme, but only the tip of it. This is absolutely a fascinating book which in fact is a character builder if you're willing to accept anything in this wonderful philosophy that is as close to fact as possible. Do not be fooled by my short review, Steven has a pronged approach that is built on solid evidense, no shortcuts are taken in this detailed read. On human nature, yes, but this book truly moves us forward into a desire for a much more civil way. That is what is pleasing to me, Steven, in my opinion is a valuable contributor in that he wishes humans to advance. I have that desire after reading this. Other authors are also coming forward with this similar desire, I recommend reading Mad Light, by Maddox

In his bestselling book The Blank Slate, psycholinguist Steven Pinker recalls how sixteen hours of lawless mayhem during a police strike in Montreal shook his faith in the perfectability of human nature and set his idealistic former self on the high road of science. Here is the passage:

As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960's, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 am on October [7], 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order.

"Montreal is in a state of shock," the CBC reported on Oct. 8, 1969--and so was young Pinker, barely fifteen years of age. "Shattered shop windows and a trail of broken glass are evidence of looting that erupted in the downtown core when 3700 members of the Montreal Policemen's Brotherhood walked off the job over a pay dispute. With no one to stop them, students and separatists joined the rampage." By the time the trucks had hauled away the shattered glass, a police officer lay dead, 108 people had been arrested; thirty citizens had been injured, and a certain Russian anarchist had lost a teenage fan. In the minds of some Canadians, moreover, their country had lost its special exemption from the large-scale urban violence that had seemed to be the special province of its southern neighbor. Since Harlem 1964, more than one hundred "riots" south of the border had claimed more than one hundred fatalities. But Canadians wanted to believe that their country was different. A year after the Police Strike, a Canadian rock band produced a hit song that proclaimed, perhaps too self-righteously, "I don't need your war machines, I don't need your ghetto scenes." But by that time Canada's pacific self-image bore a battle scar or two.

The police strike had put to the test Pinker's assumption that humans, left to their own devices, "all just get along," as Rodney King put it, in the form of a request, two decades later. "Montreal's Night of Terror" had tested those assumptions and falsified them. As soon as Pinker's fabulously peaceable fellow citizens had noticed that the thin blue line had faded for a day, they reverted to conduct unbecoming of Canadians. "L'anarchie frappe Montréal," announced a Radio Canada report of October 7, and this anarchie did not look pretty. "When law enforcement vanishes," Pinker concluded, "all manner of violence breaks out: looting, settling old scores, ethnic cleansing and petty warfare among gangs, warlords, and mafias." One can imagine the wagging finger and the eyebrows raised for emphasis.

The Montreal Police Strike came about as close to a crucial experiment in history or sociology as one could expect. And the verdict was clear to all who even for a moment dropped their ideological blinders: thanks to intractable human nature, utopia is indeed a nowhere destination. "This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters," Pinker reported, and then added parenthetically: "and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist." Disabused of his Bakunin-stoked illusions, the young Pinker learned to accept the verdict of evidence, even when it confuted his most cherished assumptions. And this, as the historically inaccurate cliché would have it, is what science is all about. The foretaste of life as a scientist was the taste of a bitter pill, and in the fall of 1969 Steven Pinker swallowed an adult dose.

The bank robbers, the looters, and the armed shopowners who tried to fend them off are all exemplary embodiments of human nature. Presumably, the in-group solidarity of unionized taxi drivers, or of undergraduates and Québécois separatists was another instantiation of out-group bias in Montreal. In this respect they did not differ much from gangs and mafias. Even the solidarity of 2400 metropolitan firefighters who joined the strike in support of the Policemen's Brotherhood could easily be explained as an instance of reciprocal altruism at best, or as an extended and ramified instance of kin selection. Or to a xenophobic closing of ranks against mutual outsiders. Or perhaps it was just radical-chic street theater. If humans were angels, of course, rulers would be unnecessary. But humans are incapable of pure altruism; the compass of communal sharing is narrow, and so we require "government"--which notably includes the repressive power of the police--to keep a lid on the violence that boils up otherwise.

Pinker has presented us with a dramatic story of lost innocence, and to his credit he kept the story short. In the end, young Pinker swallowed the bitter pill, accepted the facts of life and human nature, and followed the trail of shattered glass to the high road of science. Reluctantly, sadly but stalwartly, he embraced the Tragic View of Life, the realization that life is not fair.

The author of The Blank Slate, of course, would acknowledge that the Wretched of the Earth do not need a Harvard professor to teach them that life is not fair. Sweatshop workers, refugees, targets of tyrants and death squads, mothers of a billion children who go to bed hungry every night--these people can figure out on their own that life is not fair. But Pinker's more likely audience, including overeducated Up-Towners and graduates of Comp Lit programs, need a little reminder every now and then.

The high road of science, we have heard, is paved with objectivity. Objectivity, presumably, involves taking the facts as they are, without embellishment or spin. To be objective, one must acquire a taste for bitter pills.

But here and there in The Blank Slate one encounters less-than-optimal modeling of the prescribed behavior. Here, for instance, is Pinker's version of an old French tale, recounted in Marcia Brown's Caldecott Honor book, Stone Soup, first published in 1947:

In the children's story called "Stone Soup," a hobo borrows the use of a woman's kitchen ostensibly to make soup from a stone. But he gradually asks for more and more ingredients to balance the flavor until he has prepared a rich and hearty stew at her expense.

We return once again to the hard facts of life: there is no such thing as pure altruism; people are out for themselves and their nearest of kin. The woman was a fool; the hobo was a knave, and as long as knaves conceal their knavery, they come out on top.

But compare this to the familiar story as Brown tells it: not a hobo in the famous children's tale nor in the older tale, either; rather, three hungry soldiers returning from a war. (In the older version of the story, it was a Napoleonic war.) Not one woman, but the entire village. Not a private kitchen, either, but a public space. And "at her expense" in what way? The soldiers set up a borrowed pot in a conspicuous spot, light a fire, fill the pot with water and plop stones into it. At first the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the hungry soldiers, but one by one, reluctantly, they add ingredients to the pot, and in the end the soldiers and the villagers eat their fill, dance, and laugh together into the night. The clever soldiers tricked villagers out of their greed and xenophobia, and as a result of sharing and working together, advantages accrued to each and all. That, one can pretty confidently conclude, is the moral of the unreconstructed story. As Pinker has spinned it, though, the story has a very different moral, a moral more in keeping with the tragic view of life that "the new sciences of human nature" are said to certify.

Here and throughout The Blank Slate, Pinker has done us the favor of supplying the morals to the stories that objectivity and human nature require. Those famous ideological blinders, it seems, are a funny sort of accessory: only former selves and other people ever wear them.

If you accept reason and evidence, you will find this book to be fascinating. If you are one of those who try to prevent the teaching of evolution in school or believe in the supernatural, you will probably try to have this book banned.

The conclusions Pinker reaches in this book are by and large valid, but he too often arrives at them through shallow rationalizations and cherry-picked facts. His arguments hit you at a visceral level, not a cerebral one. For example, he often glosses countervailing viewpoints by citing atypical (and often undocumentable) sources far outside the mainstream (I'm suspicious of any argument that begins, "Some people say..."). Statistics are likewise an exercise in skewing data to fit pre-determined outcomes. In actuality this does make for a fun read, with a wealth of pejorative anecdotes and contrived dichotomies, but the approach reminds me more of something Sean Hannity would put together than academia.

Indeed, the author's purpose seems to be to twist his arguments to where he can rant against some of his pet peeves in philosophy, society, and science, often by rehashing hackneyed stereotypes and tired arguments. (Do we really need to see another insulting mischaracterization of post-modernism? Does it strengthen his thesis?) Pinker seems determined to position himself as a public intellectual, as evidenced by his radio and television appearances, but that doesn't mean he has to stoop so low to do it. The book is valuable in that it demonstrates that an impressive pedigree and an exhaustive bibliography may make for good reading, but don't necessarily make for good scholarship.

After spending some weeks moving through Pinker's work, I can say he has rehabilitated the notion that there is a human nature, that homo sapiens is a species with some basic patterns of perception and response. The idea that the human race can be molded beyond its species-capacity meets with damaging evidence to the contrary. We are very adaptable but we are not blanks slates. A good reminder to "know your species and know yourself".
Highly recommended

Steven Pinker's book is an extended attack against Rousseau's "blank slate" [never defined or explained] and in favor of "human nature" [never defined or described]. It is disappointingly not a study of the biological basis of human nature, which I and perhaps other unwary readers may have been lead to expect. Instead, Mr. Pinker uses the standard debater's trick of erecting straw men by focusing on the most extreme of statements purportedly supporting what he considers its antithesis: "the blank slate", and then easily jousting against them via witty observations. He then feels free to insinuate that this some how refutes those who have admired Mr. Rousseau.

I suggest that those of us disappointed by the lack of fairness or of the limited reach of his arguments [eg, somehow he never sees the need to discuss David Hume, who may have had something to say about human nature] and who do wish a more profound investigation of "human nature" continue to seek it out in the traditional domains of the humanities, where we continue to receive satisfaction and increased understanding in great works of literature which, astonishingly enough in this electronic age, continue to be produced today.

In this book, Pinker - nowadays a popular science writer - writes about two ideas that have permeated the Western world from the Enlightenment until today. The "Blank Slate" was championed by Locke who assumed that man is born with his potential ready to be entirely shaped by experience; according to a simplistic version of this hypothesis, appropriate 'nurture' can mold his character, personality and social success according to his educators' desires. The 'Noble Savage' idea piggybacks on Rousseau. It assumes that there is a nobility inherent in being uncorrupted by civilization. Pinker is critical of both, but never quite points out that he criticizing the most banal, lazy & bastardized interpretations of Rousseau and Locke. Few if any credible contemporary scientists believe the simplistic version of BS/NS hypotheses presented by Pinker who feeds us in his book the classical straw man fallacy. Was is it essential to devote 600 pages to the claim that genes are important for brain development and human behavior?

The chapters resemble collated yet disjointed compendia rather than sustained and original thought. It took Darwin or de Saussure decades to think things through; some celebrity writers, however, prefer to act as latter day cultural hunter-gatherers foraging for ideas that agree with their preconceived notions. Pinker is one of them and this book is one of those compendia.

In my view, the book is riddled with revisionisms, disinformations and half-truths as well as omissions of uncomfortable facts, which I attribute to disorganization and lack of time as well as a weird politicization. Pinker ignores contradictory anthropological/linguistic research (such as Everett's seminal work on the Piraha or Geertz' work on the Balinese). His ideas about violence are particularly simplistic; how about, say, the Inuit or the Javanese where violence is typically directed inward yet bursts outwards in irrational (and extremely rare) acts of violence and revenge? I was irritated by what I perceived as political agenda which smacks of neoconservatism, an anti-intellectual movement based on greed, zionism and militaristic expansionism. There are countless paragraphs attacking what P. and his friends at The National Review perceive as perfidies of neomarxism and left-wing academia. Even the Chagnon controversy is couched in stark left vs. right wing terms. Worse, there are approving citations of sociobiologists like Watson and Skinner whose ideas have done incalculable damage to education and child-rearing.

Imo, Pinker represents a scientific incarnation of Faux News. The man's idea of balance is to contrast nutty views held by proponents of Intelligent Design to first class work by SJ Gould, S Rose and Dick Lewontin. He seems to believe that a fictional Gould-Rose-Lewontin cabal - consisting of the top evolutionary biologists and population geneticists of the XXth century - tried to inflict left wing bias onto the unsuspecting public unlike, for example Dawkins whose rather primitive neodarwinism is cited approvingly. Crazy, I know - but there's Pinker for ya.

I loved the common sense approach, but it did not capture my immagination.

Maybe this is a sign of really good science, but not what I want in a book I read for fun.

I think perhaps he was too clear in his supporting arguments. They are so perfectly stated, and so obviously right, that there were no discoveries for me to make on my own.

I do not believe that humans are a blank slate; we are a combination of both nature & nurture. What makes us human is the fact that nurture plays a MUCH bigger role in who we become than it does in any other animal. My objection to this book is that a wealthy white man promotes the fiction that in countries where women are treated like farm animals and restricted to the home, they are less likely to be raped. Pinker is completely ignorant of the fact that most women are raped in their own homes by their own male family members. In countries where women are barred from pubic life they are at GREATEST risk of being raped by their own husbands, in-laws, fathers, & brothers. They have no voice and no recourse. This level of ignorance is inexcusable from a professor. He clearly does not care enough about female human beings to do even minimal research into their lives. He is basically another white male using "nature" to defend his own power and privilege.

Pinker brings to bear two thousand years of Talmudic disputation technique in a ludicrously convoluted attempt to trick the Progressive elite into abandoning the intellectual rationale for its will to power. They haven't even troubled to disparage his effort with mockery. They've simply ignored him.

If Pinker ever followed through on even one of his own arguments, he would arrive at the moral necessity of abandoning his comfortable office, title, and pension in the Progressive academy, and begin to live by a set of actual principles.

Pinker constructs an elaborate and well-thought out argument, and his overall thesis is one whose outlines I largely agree with--that as biological creatures, humans are influenced by biology in many ways, often so subtly that we are unaware of it. Humans are animals, after all, and subject to the same instinctual drives and influences as other animals are; it's only human arrogance that would ever lead us to think otherwise. His assertion that humans are inherently *both* peaceable, kind, and generous *and* violent, savage and cruel, is one that I also agree with; see my point above about humans being animals.

However, I have doubts about the validity of some of the information Pinker presents here. One reviewer called Pinker a "polymath;" another and less favorable way to state that might be to say "jack of all trades, master of none." Pinker presents scores upon scores of statistics, facts, factoids and examples to buttress his claims, and at first glance it does all appear to be very impressive. However, on closer inspection, I found that claims pertaining to fields of which I had knowledge were all somewhat dubious. For example, his contrast on page 45 of common chimps and bonobos, in which he characterizes common chimps as "among the most aggressive mammals known to zoology" and bonobos as "among the most peaceful," "in common chimps, males dominate the females while among bonobos the females have the upper hand, common chimps have sex for procreation, bonobos for recreation" is a gross oversimplification of the differences between these two species, to the point of caricature if not outright distortion. His attribution of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs to the superior technology of the Spaniards is a popular Western fantasy that has been strongly challenged in recent years. In particular one very persuasive alternate explanation that has been put forth argues that the defeat of the Aztecs was largely a Native American phenomenon: the Aztecs had succeeded in angering a very large proportion of the surrounding civilizations, so that when Cortes showed up, he served as a rallying point for large numbers of these disaffected peoples. These nations were willing to contribute large numbers of troops to fight alongside him, and it was largely thanks to these indigenous troops that Cortes was able to succeed. Certainly it can be argued that this is a more persuasive hypothesis than that a small band of Europeans, in unfamiliar territory with limited supplies and ammuntion, were able to all on their own throw down one of the largest empires of the New World, no matter *what* technological advantages they may have possessed. Pinker also does not often cite the primary literature; a large number of his factoids are drawn from books. This is a problem, as often the peer review process for books is not as stringent as that applied to articles published in journals.

In addition, I found Pinker's analysis of sexual assault to be severely flawed. While I agree with Pinker that the concept that "rape is not about sex, it is about power" has in some circles ascended to the status of dogma and is a concept that deserves some thorough scrutiny (the idea that all sexual assault everywhere across all cultures is only about one thing?), again, he doesn't seem to have a good understanding of the cultural and social dynamics surrounding sex roles and sexual assault. For example, he argues that feminists assert that "fear of rape has to be pounded into women by ... social influence." This is a distortion of an assertion by feminist thinkers that fear of rape--in particular, fear of "stranger rape," the least common form of rape--is often deployed as a tactic to limit women's behavior, freedom, and freedom of choice. For example, traditional societies that place heavy restrictions on women's dress, appearance and behavior often claim they are doing so in order to "protect" them.

His assertion that countries with far more rigid gender roles demonstrate far fewer rates of rape overlooks the fact that societies with rigid gender roles and norms will often very severely penalize rape victims who come forward. Therefore the seemingly low rate of sexual assault in these societies cannot *by any means* be taken at face value. Furthermore, many incidents which are considered rape in modern Western society are often not so considered in more traditional societies (or indeed, in our own, until very recently). So for example in the case of marital rape, though the woman knows she did not consent to sex, and though she experiences great distress over the event, she will not consider it rape because according to the norms of her society she does not have the right to refuse sex with her husband, so therefore she "cannot" be raped by him. This also affects rape statistics. Finally, in seeking to demonstrate that rape is about sex, he overlooks many situations where it is *also* about power. For example, he asserts that rapists tend to be males with marginal status in society. Perhaps many of them are, but how about those who are not? For example, the captain of industry who is accustomed to getting his way in every situation and will not take no for an answer from his lowly secretary?

Pinker does do a very good job laying out the history behind the "blank slate" approach and explaining some of the ideological reasons why people are so committed to this position--and he does indicate that this position is often adopted for irreproachable moral reasons; his main issue is that this adoption often leads to distortions of the evidence being presented as fact. He is plain about how and why he thinks the ideological use of bioloical data is wrongheaded and harmful. His reasoning is often well-thought-out and comprehensive, based on the information he presents. However, in his drive to bring the "nature" side into prominence, I feel he overly rejects the influence of culture. As previously stated, I also have qualms about the accuracy of much of the information he tosses in; based on the matters of which I have knowledge, Pinker does not always adequately grasp the nuances of the examples he's using. However whether you agree or disagree with him, there's plenty of food for thought here. The bottom line is, as an anthropologist, Pinker's a great biologist. If he grasped the culture better, this would be a five-star book.

My main complaint is that it is another misguided attack on the concept of the "Nobel Savage". While I understand it is fashionable to do so in hopes of appearing appropriately "skeptical" and "realistic", it is, in fact, neither; and I suggest such claims are both naive and anthropocentric.

A "realistic" analysis has to begin with a very basic principle of biology: "Every organism is optimally expressed within the original environment that shaped it". If you want to get an idea of what is an "optimally expressed" giraffe, for example, you don't look at the animal within a zoo environment ---rather you analyze its behavior within the original "wild environment" of that animal (its Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness ---E.E.A.).

Now it is naive and anthropocentric to imagine that the human animal is somehow different from every other organism existing on the planet. As such, to obtain the optimal expression of the human animal, we must follow the same procedure. One cannot look to our expression within the modern "zoo" in which we have now "contained" ourselves. Instead, one must look to the "human wild environment" to gain this deeper understanding. The E.E.A. of the human animal is defined by the hunter-gatherer nomadic extended families of Paleolithic times. Thus, based the above foundational biological principle, that particular human expression within the E.E.A. must reasonably be defined as the "optimal hunter-gatherer" ---which is a simple rephrasing of the more popular term, the "Nobel Savage".

Even outside this analysis, it is readily apparent that all of us, presently, are "wilted flowers" in comparison to human animals who optimally "blossomed" within the environment that spawned them. These original humans experienced the best developmental trajectory imaginable. Every child grew up within an environment keyed to satisfying the very hard-wired needs that that same environment originally designed.

Like any animal growing up in a zoo (well-designed or not) the experience of a child growing up in the modern "human zoo" simply can't compare to the secure base of a non-dysfunctional extended nomadic family that prides itself on ending a child's tears usually within a few seconds (see chapter 8, "The Natural Child", within THE PALEOLITHIC PRESCRIPTION by Melvin Konner, et.al.). And Pinker would somehow ignore that such a relatively "ideal" childhood developmnetal environment just might have an especially positive effect on the adult humans thereby produced? Again, such a view, I maintain, is representative of a naive faith in our current "normality". My cynicism is, contrariwise, that the modern human is so far removed from what is the optimal human expression that it is now almost hopeless to somehow find our way back. It's very much as would happen if all the wild tigers were killed and we had to derive what is the optimal expression of that animal, artificially, from a survey of various zoos. Could we ever re-create the original tiger in all its splendor outside the wild? And, in turn, can we ever re-create the original optimal human expression, in all its splendor, outside the wild environment of the original savage --- The Nobel Savage?

Dale G., Clinical Evolutionary Psychologist

I have read the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works and loved them both. I was expecting more of the same well researched, tightly argued, and engagingly written insights into our species.
Frankly, it wasn't there. He frequently diverges into facile and trite philosophy, and makes many of the errors he rails against in the first few chapters. For example, when reviewing Stephen Jay-Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man" he claims the book was written to debunk any theory of innate talent, not a theory that either follows from or is proposed by Gould who focuses more on the denial of the reification of the intellect.
Puts the wrong words in others mouths, and pulls the wrong ones out of his own.

Hated this book, it was boring to the ultimate throw away, my class felt the same way. I can't get rid of it but I don't throw away books, it is not alright, if someone wants to read it and form their own opinion I will be happy to send it to you.

Although The Blank Slate is beautifully written, it is an exercise in polemics rather than a balanced discussion. Pinker presents other points of view only in caricature, apparently with the goal of persuading the reader, not informing him. That the mind is a "blank slate" is defended by no modern scientist, least of all the behaviorists, for whom innate reinforcers are the mainspring of learning. But whatever our innate predispositions, the contributions of culture are hardly superficial. In the face of the most unambiguous biological imperatives, monks embrace celibacy, anorexic girls starve themselves, angry fathers murder their families, and young men in their sexual prime blow themselves up in Tel Aviv and New York. Evidently the slate can be overwritten. It is just such considerations, not a denial of human nature, that underlie the idealistic concern with the effects of individual experience. This book is an op-ed piece, not a thoughtful discussion of a complex topic.

Get a text book on Social Psychology at Half Price Books. It will cost you less and you'll learn more about human nature and with less 'world according to Pinker-isms'. Better still, text books are filled with the collective wisdom of hundreds of psychologists, and not just this particular one. Pinker's world-view is put in context with others in the field, some who agree, others who do not. It's a much better way to approach the field of psychology than to listen to one man's personal advocacy.

Also beware of Pinker's fans, they are like a cult. If you read the book, don't write a review about it unless you enjoy being trolled by the book police. They will ask you questions, so that they can attack you for any response you give. Avoid these reviews and just pick up a text book instead. Costs less, and you'll learn more.

OK trolls, third time... I suppose you can attack me now, again, again.

Pinker's book is an exercise in polemics and his claims are based on very little scientific research and certainly none that Pinker himself has done.
The sub-title is "The Modern Denial of Human Nature," but Pinker cites many so-called blank slate advocates (e.g., John Locke and John B. Watson) who are anything but modern. The most modern straw person Pinker creates is B. F. Skinner whom he likens to Stalin and Mao. That is an interesting, but unfortunate, comparison because others certainly did not see Skinner in that light. For example, among other awards, Skinner was given Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Society in 1972 and the International Award of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation for Mental Retardation in 1971 for his contributions to improving the lives of so many.
Any even cursory reading of Watson or Skinner shows they frequently acknowledged the importance of what Pinker calls human nature. As others have pointed out, Pinker has created a caricature of those he claims are advocates of the blank slate.
Not only does Pinker misrepresent the views of others and quote them out context, but his own claims are way out of proportion to the evidence. The evolutionary psychology of which he is so enamored has been seriously criticized by psychologists and biologists alike, most of whom have moved beyond the simplistic nature-nurture debate to ask different and ultimately more important questions about the respective roles of evolution and learning on behavior.
Pinker's book may be good literature, but for those who are looking for a different and scientific approach to this topic, The Blank Slate is not it.

I have read the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works and loved them both. I was expecting more of the same well researched, tightly argued, and engagingly written insights into our species.
Frankly, it wasn't there. He frequently diverges into facile and trite philosophy, and makes many of the errors he rails against in the first few chapters. For example, when reviewing Stephen Jay-Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man" he claims the book was written to debunk any theory of innate talent, not a theory that either follows from or is proposed by Gould who focuses more on the denial of the reification of the intellect.
Puts the wrong words in others mouths, and pulls the wrong ones out of his own.

Hated this book, it was boring to the ultimate throw away, my class felt the same way. I can't get rid of it but I don't throw away books, it is not alright, if someone wants to read it and form their own opinion I will be happy to send it to you.

Although The Blank Slate is beautifully written, it is an exercise in polemics rather than a balanced discussion. Pinker presents other points of view only in caricature, apparently with the goal of persuading the reader, not informing him. That the mind is a "blank slate" is defended by no modern scientist, least of all the behaviorists, for whom innate reinforcers are the mainspring of learning. But whatever our innate predispositions, the contributions of culture are hardly superficial. In the face of the most unambiguous biological imperatives, monks embrace celibacy, anorexic girls starve themselves, angry fathers murder their families, and young men in their sexual prime blow themselves up in Tel Aviv and New York. Evidently the slate can be overwritten. It is just such considerations, not a denial of human nature, that underlie the idealistic concern with the effects of individual experience. This book is an op-ed piece, not a thoughtful discussion of a complex topic.

Get a text book on Social Psychology at Half Price Books. It will cost you less and you'll learn more about human nature and with less 'world according to Pinker-isms'. Better still, text books are filled with the collective wisdom of hundreds of psychologists, and not just this particular one. Pinker's world-view is put in context with others in the field, some who agree, others who do not. It's a much better way to approach the field of psychology than to listen to one man's personal advocacy.

Also beware of Pinker's fans, they are like a cult. If you read the book, don't write a review about it unless you enjoy being trolled by the book police. They will ask you questions, so that they can attack you for any response you give. Avoid these reviews and just pick up a text book instead. Costs less, and you'll learn more.

OK trolls, third time... I suppose you can attack me now, again, again.

Pinker's book is an exercise in polemics and his claims are based on very little scientific research and certainly none that Pinker himself has done.
The sub-title is "The Modern Denial of Human Nature," but Pinker cites many so-called blank slate advocates (e.g., John Locke and John B. Watson) who are anything but modern. The most modern straw person Pinker creates is B. F. Skinner whom he likens to Stalin and Mao. That is an interesting, but unfortunate, comparison because others certainly did not see Skinner in that light. For example, among other awards, Skinner was given Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Society in 1972 and the International Award of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation for Mental Retardation in 1971 for his contributions to improving the lives of so many.
Any even cursory reading of Watson or Skinner shows they frequently acknowledged the importance of what Pinker calls human nature. As others have pointed out, Pinker has created a caricature of those he claims are advocates of the blank slate.
Not only does Pinker misrepresent the views of others and quote them out context, but his own claims are way out of proportion to the evidence. The evolutionary psychology of which he is so enamored has been seriously criticized by psychologists and biologists alike, most of whom have moved beyond the simplistic nature-nurture debate to ask different and ultimately more important questions about the respective roles of evolution and learning on behavior.
Pinker's book may be good literature, but for those who are looking for a different and scientific approach to this topic, The Blank Slate is not it.

The book started okay in describing many illogical assumptions on human nature. But it goes on to argue reason with reason and ultimately makes no point of any value. So long as we do not relate back to the stone age, what harm is there to assume the best from the simplest of us? It is one long (very long) academic essay that can be appreciated more for its research than for any original insight.

Before I read Pinker's book I thought science could say something definite about the world. And I am sure that Pinker himself shares this view. But in his writing he constantly deviates from this ideal. I have a whole page of quotations like "is likely to", "suggests that", "might have", "almost certainly not", "probably", "hints", "appear to have", "could turn up".
On this all but firm ground he erects a building that is said to be (more or less) definite: human nature. Who can believe that with all those uncertainties for starters?
I don't agree with the idea of the Blank Slate, which the book is set up to dispute, but neither do I find anything to hold on to in the idea of a human nature. I think both ideas are sprung from a wish to manipulate (more or less) with nature and human beings. They are called "explanations" but are in fact ways of belittling and alienating people.
Shakespeare is much more true to "human nature" when he lets Hamlet hold out the flute to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (as a symbol of himself or mankind) asking them to play on it. They can't of course. Noone can. But Pinker and other "scientists" think they can.
It is very strange, in fact unbelievable, that evolution or whatever created us, has mainstream American politics as a goal. But that is what Pinker arrives at when he puts his own words in the mouth of evolution (who never talked to anyone, by the way).
In his view of gender, male behaviour, childrearing, art etc he sounds like a crossbreed of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. And it seems he is not even aware of how utterly American his thoughts are! He sees a lot of traits and ideas that thrive only in the US as part of human nature!
To put it bluntly: I have never come across a more imperialistic book than this.

Pinker is good at taking someone else's ideas and repackaging them with decent writing. That wouldn't bother me as to show me, the layman, a broad catalogue to explore. Yet when Pinker draws his conclusions they are idiotic. He defends the pseudoscience of 'The Bell Curve' and concludes: it is true but we shouldn't treat people like it is. He continues with ratios between race/intelligence as being inevitable since he advocates that race correlates with IQ scores. According to Pinker wealth falls where it needs to, as wealth correlates with intelligence and thus race. Trash.

This book describes a conflict in academia about the character of human nature. As neuroscience limns out an inborn human nature with variations between individuals, some thinkers have protested that, in the service of political equality, we must believe that all people are born with innocent, equal potential, that all babies are a "blank slate."

We would have been well-served if Pinker had written a 150-page tour-de-force debunking the blank slate theory, but Pinker wrote a 434-page diatribe filled with premature declarations. While he writes delightfully when pointing out the absurdities to which "the modern denial of human nature" has led us, he is way out of line, and often simply ignorant, in his treatments of profound ideas from other fields. From ultra-simplistic, shallow dismissals of what religion and modern philosophy have to say about human nature to his spotty summary of 'what science knows about human nature', he fails in his encyclopedic sweep for lack of homework.

To give one striking example of the limitations of his vision, 'maternal instinct' does not appear in the index, no, not even under "parenting," nor in any significant way on the radar, of his book. Although a very prolonged and intense investment in offspring defines humanity apart from most other species, nine months of gestation, enormous biochemical changes, four years of nursing, and many more of constant care, per child, are apparently not central to the emotional hardware of humanity, or even to altruism, which, Pinker describes as a cognitive, learned process.

The supple writing, even occasional beauty, of Pinker's style, as well as sympathy for his basic argument, might hold you for a while, but the overstatements and generalizations should provoke you to, regretfully, toss this tome.

I found Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate extremely disappointing. I was expecting an informative, well-researched account of the mind's innate cognitive structures. Unfortunately, Pinker's book was prolix, polemical, and superficial, offering few original ideas and very little in-depth discussion of the empirical research he summarizes.

Pinker opens his discussion of the Blank Slate with a quotation from Locke asking us to imagine that the mind begins as "white paper void of all characters, without any ideas" - paper that receives impressions through experience. Pinker goes on to cite a variety of thinkers (philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, among others) who seem to endorse a similar view. In the course of his discussion of the Blank Slate, Pinker is content to rely on metaphors - tabula rasas and silly putty - in order to characterize the view of the mind he intends to rebut. This is unfortunate, since there are at least three different theses that might be endorsed by the "Blank Slatist":
1) People have no innate tendencies towards one behavior over another.
2) People have no innate mechanisms or modules that perform cognitive functions.
3) Prior to experience, people have no concepts, beliefs, or knowledge.
It may well be the case that all three theses are false, but it is important to recognize that they are distinct. The majority of Pinker's arguments are against 1) and 2); none of the evidence he summarizes in his book directly discredits 3). Because Pinker fails to carefully distinguish the theses that compose the Blank Slate paradigm, all of his subsequent arguments leave open the possibility of adhering to the minimal Blank Slate view expressed by 3).

The best part of Pinker's book is the summary of evidence that strongly indicates the existence of innate mental structures and behavioral tendencies. (Even here, his arguments could have benefited from a more focused presentation.) One would expect that after Pinker had established that the Blank Slate view is false, the next step would be to offer a detailed theory of the architecture of the human mind (i.e. a comprehensive account of the various modules that provide the basis for human cognitive abilities, and a description of how they interact). After all, the details of the mind's cognitive architecture are a matter of great controversy in contemporary cognitive science. However, Pinker does no such thing. Instead, he immediately moves on to a lengthy description of the vitriolic reactions that the sciences of human nature have provoked, and goes on to diagnose the various fears that motivate the contemporary denial of human nature. This section (nearly a hundred pages in all) will come as a bore to those readers who never had any particular allegiance to the Blank Slate paradigm, and never found the prospect of a human nature particularly scary.

The rest of the book is devoted to showing how the sciences of human nature can shed light on the "roots" of human suffering, the sources of moral commitments, the origins of violence, the differences between genders, and the surprisingly limited role of parental influence in children's development. While Pinker mentions a number of interesting findings in the course of these chapters, he rarely provides a detailed description and analysis of the supporting research. Instead, he typically offers a cursory summary of the "discoveries" of others, cites an article in a journal, and moves on. In the majority of cases, the superficial nature of his discussion makes it impossible for the reader to assess whether the experiments he cites actually support his conclusions. To offer one particularly glaring example of this tendency, it is worthwhile turning to Pinker's discussion of bias. Pinker writes: "Contrary to a common accusation, teachers' impressions of their individual pupils are not contaminated by their stereotypes of race, gender, or socioeconomic status. The teachers' impressions accurately reflect the pupil's performance as measured by objective tests." (p.204) The curious reader will want to know how this generalization about all teachers could possibly be established; she/he will also want to query exactly how "objective" these tests were, and whether teachers sometimes classify students according to stereotypes whose applicability is not correlated with performance on scholastic tests. However, none of these questions are answered; Pinker simply inserts a footnote referencing a paper by Jussim and Eccles and moves on.

The penultimate chapter - "The Arts" - is perhaps the best example of Pinker's tendency towards generalization and superficiality. In this chapter, Pinker claims that the reason the humanities have declined in popularity is that the arts of modernism and postmodernism deny the truth about human nature. This is an astonishing claim; Pinker provides no evidence that figures as disparate as Picasso, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stavinsky were all committed to the Blank Slate. (Indeed, Pinker seems blissfully unaware of the fact that certain modernist classics - e.g. Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" - can be read as meditations on the innate human tendency towards violence, and hence appear to contradict the Blank Slate.) Pinker goes on to castigate the majority of twentieth century scholars and critics in the humanities for similarly buying into the Blank Slate: "The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature." (416) One would expect that any serious scholar willing to make such a sweeping claim would feel compelled to support this assertion by offering a detailed discussion of the "dominant theories of elite art and criticism," and go on to demonstrate that each of these theories is committed to a denial of human nature. But no such luck; Pinker provides a handful of quotations (some of which have nothing to do with human nature), and appears to think this is sufficient evidence to establish his point.

Pinker's book also contains a number of inaccuracies. I will offer just one example. On page 150, Pinker defines the naturalistic fallacy as "the belief that what happens in nature is good", and attributes the initial diagnosis of this fallacy to G.E. Moore. Moore's actual use of the term "the naturalistic fallacy" was very different: Moore defined the naturalistic fallacy as any attempt to define the term "good" in terms of naturalistic properties. (It is also worth noting that a number of contemporary moral philosophers disagree with Moore on this point, insisting that such attempts do not involve any fallacious reasoning. Needless to say, Pinker fails to engage with this debate.)

One final criticism of the book is that it is chockfull of excerpts from songs, poems, novels, advertisements, and cartoons. While Pinker's intention is doubtless to render his book engaging and accessible, I personally found this element of his presentation highly irksome. In the course of the last chapter alone (a mere 24 pages), Pinker includes a poem by Emily Dickinson, an excerpt from a Vonnegut story, an excerpt from Orwell, a two-page excerpt Twain, and a page-long excerpt from Singer. One suspects that if Pinker cut all of the unnecessary pop culture references out of his book, as well as all the repetitive polemic against the nefarious Blank Slatists, the volume would easily be a hundred pages shorter.

I will conclude by noting that the book has a few strengths. First, Pinker convincingly demonstrates that a number of contemporary anthropologists and biologists endorse at least certain aspects of the Blank Slate paradigm. Second, Pinker successfully rebuts the major tenets of this paradigm (theses 1 and 2). Third, Pinker presents compelling arguments against certain connectionist models of the mind (p.79-82). However, these few merits pale in comparison to the book's manifold flaws. Anyone looking for a serious and sophisticated theory of human nature will do best to look elsewhere.

I firmly believe in the role of genetics in the evolution human nature so I would normally be receptive to Pinker's reasoning. But his continued ad hominem attacks on so called "radical scientists" such as Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Rose seemed misplaced, even petty. I have read both "Wonderful Life" by Gould as well as "Lifelines" by Rose and quite frankly, I found them to be far more scholarly and informative than this rambling diatribe by Pinker. In this book as well as in Pinker's "How the Mind Works," you begin to wonder not "Where's the beef" but rather, "Where's the science?"

Steven Pinker upsets me tremendously, both for his style and for the implicit presupposition of his over-arching argument.

Pinker's the Blank Slate, like all of his writing, is characterized by an artless simplicity that, to a learned reader, is almost embarrassing. Pinker comes across in this book to the unlearned as a very learned man. He seems to have read everything and thought about every idea. He seems to see how it all hangs together and how the world makes perfect sense when seen in the "big picture". Best of all, Pinker is able to explain it all to his readers using only a modest vocabulary and really simple sentences. The world seems so clear, and ideas previously considered hard seem so easy after reading Pinker.

But that is precisely where Pinker becomes embarrassing, to himself, to those he attempts to vindicate and justify, and to his supporters. My mind is not a particularly widely cast net, but there are a couple of points of knowledge and understanding at which my mind goes deep, much deeper than Pinker's. And it is when I see Pinker talk about topics and ideas which I understand better than he does that I realize what he is up to and the kind of academic charade he is engaged in. In one case in point, on page 291, Pinker puts forward an argument that there is an innate or self-evident connection between, on the one hand, judicial activism and what in the late 20th century/ early 21st century we conceive as liberal social justice and other the other hand between judicial restraint and conservative politics. Well... this happens to be one area where I like to think I know a lot more than Pinker. Pinker is simply wrong, dreadfully wrong. Historically, there is no clear link between alleged political agendas of the Supreme Court justices and ideas about proper judicial behavior. To argue Pinker's position is simply to ignore the whole history of the Supreme Court in this country, the Lochner era, the legacy of O. W. Holmes, not to mention the role of courts in any other country of the world at any other time in history. There are other areas as well where Pinker clearly misunderstands the subject matter which he is discussing. I don't think he understands Durkheim, for example, and he definitely misunderstands Rousseau (I almost wonder if he actually read these authors, or if he just hired some eager-to-please grad student to do the research for him and right a five page summary for him). But, if he has such a poor grasp of the areas of knowledge that I know about and understand, what does that say of his grasp of areas of knowledge that I don't know much about? Can I trust him as a teacher or a guide through the wilderness of knowledge? No, I cannot.

This would be bad enough, but what disturbs me most about Pinker is not his shallow analysis and constant name dropping. It is the implicit moral, ethical, and political argument that motivates and permeates his entire book (and other books). If you tease out what his ideas and arguments mean for us, as people and citizens, it becomes apparent how radically conservative, even reactionary, Pinker's agenda is, in defense of the status quo of contemporary society. Pinker's argument is a strong defense of the world as it is, because, in the end, the world is as it is because human beings are as they are, and any effort to change the world is doomed to fail unless it takes account of and accomodates the fact that there are some things in human beings that cannot be changed because they are the product of 1 million years of hard-wiring in our genes. I find such a message quite unattractive. If it were not so obvious what the logical error of such a project is, I might even be inclined to choose ignorance over knowledge, if knowing how the world is meant accepting Pinker's ideas. Fortunately, I don't have to make that decision. It is obvious to me, and hope it becomes obvious to others when they read Pinker, that the entire project of cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is a circular pseudoscience that presupposes certain ideas that themselves are only true if the conclusions of cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology are true.

In his life, academia has been good to Pinker. Pinker has come as close as an academic can come to being a rock star and stay in academia. For humanity's sake, I hope posterity has a very different plan for Pinker.

I have been an avid reader of Steven Pinker's books but found this one non-scientific, political garbage. Instead of concentrating on the science, he seems to dedicate his efforts to bashing scientists who don't share his (and his friends) opinions. Highly dissappointing.

I tried really hard to like this book. It's just such a problematic read. Probably good timing, in the sense, that this publication came out early 21st century. Stephen Pinker should not worry too much, because in the last 3yrs since The Blank Slate has been out; there has been a huge backlash against intellectualism, postmodernist art, philosophy, feminism, left politics. A backlash that has filtered down through governments, business, society, culture, people - if this backlash was due to our genes redirecting our culture to a more realistic view of human nature, well this remains to be seen. But Pinker, who sees the influence of culture a drag on the environmental condition of humanity - hence denying human nature it's true course. He should be happy at the course that has been run in society

So again, a book with good timing.

So can we blame everything on our genes now? That state of the world? That annoying person on the bus etc etc. Since environment/culture, according to Pinker, has little impact on anything - particular children. In fact, the poor, shouldn't be too restless due to their environment - it's their genes; screaming out. Even if they shift to wealthy environments, they still could be defective (genes), which means defective personality.

What a simplistic fine line to walk, and it's been walked before, many times in history. But now the human genome project has been completed - simplistic views may have a little extra detail now. "The Blank Slate...", attempts to create some more detail. But remove Pinkers personal rambling and opinion, especially chapter on The Arts - and you still get simplicity

There are contradictions and paradoxes in this book, and a lot of them.

The Chapter on Gender, will be overlooked by most, and possibly acknowledged in our current political/social climates. But no doubt, I see the Evolutionary Psychology theory on the sexes torn apart again and some point in the future. But for now, Pinker's opinion on rape, is questionable.

Trying to still justify rape as a hopeless 'males attempt at impregnating a women' (to spread his genes). Citing examples of rape that occurs with the apes, where the victims biology is rarely damaged, or injured. Terrible over generalization. Since in some cases, rape among humans, can end in murder, and mutilation of genitalia. Pinker notes a small percentage of women physiologically do get killed or mutilated. But what of psychological implications (of the majority who are not killed), and possible infanticide/and or neglect of the rapists child? Not to mention the final choice, Abortion. A quite bizarre notion, that a rapist times a women ovulation via raping a women in her peak reproductive years (young) - then hope he can impregnate her with his sperm. If it all goes to plan. Which is a plan to reproduce(?), forcefully. Surely the expectations, that his genes will pass on (forcefully) will be slim. In our modern medically and technological advanced society, the rapists child would most likely be terminated. So a rapist attempt to reproduce is futile and pointless. No matter what the environment. Rape for sexual reproduction is an absurd argument.

Also, mentioned in the 'The Blank Slate...' is violence in society. Pinker says the Swiss and Israel countries are some on the most heavily armed countries on the planet, yet their domestic violent rate is very low - something to do with genes. Look, Israel is possibly the most environmentally dangerous place on the planet, the random acts of violence may be heavily due to cultural repression of a minority, the Palestinians. It's also a country that is constantly ready for war.. For example suicide bombing (young healthy males, in some cases females) attacks against Israel, which make NO evolutionary/ gene sense, is an act done with cultural ceremony, and reasoning. Whether right or wrong. But the Palestinians have 'waring' genes, right? As for the Swiss? What is the statistical justification to compare Switzerland against Israel, as far as internal violence?

You punish, undermine, and deliberately impoverish a country or people - you are going to have a problem. Where people are happy with money, asset wealth, and health; violence is rare.

He also claims, that the reasons for failure, and the notion of Utopia type sociality is impossible due to human nature. As I mentioned early in the review before, not a new argument/or philosophy. In some cases true, but a full range of theoretical and philosophical, scientific discussion can be opened up here. But the the new sciences on Human Nature (or evolution psychology) point out that the of failing to understand gene orientated behaviors has lead to oppression. Or, in many chapters in this book, Pinker asserts totalitarian regimes have exploited the Blank Slate, to model a society, and control human behaviors.

There is a paradox here.
If the new sciences of human nature, or evolution psychology, point out that primal, and evolutionary urges inevitable control our actions - how can it be restrained? In conclusion in the chapter on Violence, Pinker notes, "human nature is the problem, human nature is the solution". So how do we fix it? What government, or social political environment will work.? Pinker doesn't answer this, but 'opens up the discussion' on human nature. But if you think about it we would will need a restrictive, and enforcing government to ensure that our destructive 'urges' are kept in check. Pinker attacks constantly the left and the so called 'radical scientists', and moralists. The truth of the matter is, no matter how you look at it - Pinker's idea's, and the evolution psychology model assessment of humanity is a dangerous idea. The only other model that would work well, and effectively is a fascist style gene based democracy. Based on early detection, and assessment of human life. A forced direction of encouraging gene based talents, attributes, and watching for defective and faulty units. This type of society wold also have capitalist style free market, although Pinker's dappling into economic theory goes wonky, when he contradicts evolutionary psychology gene selection attributes. By assuming that individuals should be able to individualize their income, not be overly taxed, and not be forced to pay superannuation. I agree, people should have power over their personal wealth. But, can we trust the 'sympathetic' genes (do they exist?) as oppose to the selfish genes, to spread out the desire to help the poor, destitute and unlucky Also assuming that majority of people have genes that allow them to be financially smart. Is that possible? Everyone has a smart 'money' gene? Or just a sellect few in society.

Pinker mentions how people give large amounts to charities and disaster relief. Problem here is they can be selective, and sometimes done with a group mentality (conformist based), or not done at all. Whether genes have much to do with financial and economic structures is very disputable - since economics is a highly complex aspect of modern human culture.

Man this is a Crazy book. So much more, but I don't get paid to review.

Is this book worth arguing over? Probably not at this point, as both sides of the nature/nurture debate seem exhausted from 20yrs of this debate. It seems now both sides are gently digging in for the next round. And I suspect, there is going to be a 'heating up' again of the arguments.

I agree with what Louis Menand said in at the end of his review of The Blank Slate... in The New Yorker "Our genes, unfortunately, are even stupider than we are".

Our genes are stupid. Let's not over credit them too much.

A book which can be very interesting when it is discussing the science of the issue, but unfortunately spends most of its time discussing how lame people who believe in the blank slate are.

It is possible that I misread the title of this book because I thought it would be an interesting dicussion of the nurture/nature debate. Its primary focus is how miguided, evil and creepy the nurture people are. Did you know some of them are very bad? How shocking is that!

Would not recommend this to anyone, but if you are really into hippie bashing this might get your juices flowing.

Pathetic. The first book I read in several years which went to a trash bin. In the beginning while the author was fighting with Locke, "gender feminists" etc. it was bearable, but his ideas on parenting and arts which he did not even bother to support with any proofs beyond "many studies showed etc." are just trash. I would give just one example of the "argumentation" Pinker uses:
In the Chapter 19 "Children" he states as a "Law" that "effects of shared environment are small", with the following "important proviso":
"The studies exclude cases of criminal neglect...nor can they say anything about the differences between cultures-about what makes a child middle-class America a opposed to ... a Tibetan monk or even an urban street gang".
Basically -let's reduce any differences in "shared environments" to zero and after that let's "prove" that "effects of shared environments are small". So the book went to trash bin - unfortunately, after several hours I have spent on it already...

Is Pinker afraid of equality (at least at birth), the concept of "good enough," an indeterminate world and really living life fully?

(I am responding to his themes in this book that people object to his worldview because of "the fear of inequality," "the fear of imperfectability," "the fear of determinism," and "the fear of nihilism".)

Whenever I run across these militant, aggressive atheists like Pinker and Dawkins who appear to have difficulty with women (they never seem to have women peer scientists working with them or reviewing them and they are often much-married), I can't help but wonder where all that aggression comes from. If you don't believe in God (which I don't), why is it not enough just to state your belief, with support if you wish? The preoccupation with intellectual control that these men seem to need for some reason, and their self-righteousness, are really not all that different from those who seek to make a Higher Power in their image (e.g, men who have faith in "God") and then try to live the fantasy of creationism. Are they really any different from Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Joel Osteen, William Bennett et al?

A great antidote to this book is any of Alice Miller's books; her most famous was "The Drama of the Gifted Child" but she wrote subsequent books where she dissected the worldviews of Hitler, Nietzsche, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein. She was a master at illustrating how early subjective experience can get translated into later hard-wired worldview particularly when that early subjective experience was static and/or has not been discussed in interaction with others and/or emotionally processed, thus becoming hard-wired conditioning.

Pinker is also quite bereft in information about the effect of nurturing fathers - and the deficits and traumas caused by not having one. Historian & psychologist Lloyd de Mause's "Why Males Are More Violent" is an interesting illustration of the role different types of male parenting play in psychological development, for good or bad in terms of human history. Child psychologist Kyle Pruett in "Fatherneed" discusses this from the child's perspective. Psychotherapist Terence Real's "I Don't Want To Talk About It" is a personal account of the aggressive psychology that can result from bad daddery. And educator John Badalament's "The Modern Dad's Dilemma" is a how-to book for dads wanting to do well by their children.

Recent work by evolutionary biologists illustrating the very long development of human beings outside the womb (22 years or so until full growth in both sexes) compared to 9 months in the womb, and other evidence on the hormonal changes that fathers who live with their children experience, suggest that we would never have evolved from primates without nurturing fathers around; it may only be because paternity could not be proven (or disproven) that the conflicted and melodramatic issues around male parenting arose in the culture, religion, etc. - and with which "evolutionary psychology" has become preoccupied. Unfortunately the Drama Kings still seem to be getting too much attention and credit, but the times they are achanging . . . .

The world is rapidly changing to one where women have economic and political autonomy on widespread basis such as they've never had before - and what they do economically is becoming recognized as valuable to mating and child-rearing. Paternity can now be proven - and disproven. I suspect many of Pinker's and David Buss' theories are helpful to call out the socio-political-economic system of patriarchy (where men control the resources, excluding women, and compete for the resources and the women as sex and service objects), but they are only history - and just a brief history. Institutionalized patriarchy did not really get constructed until about 2000 or 3000 years ago when the "law of the blood" of Greece & Rome, where the maternal link with the child was given weight, was subjugated into a presumption of patrilineal descent through control and subjugation of women, pantheism of both sexes shifting to male monotheism, the man's family name being given to children and the woman's family name disappearing, etc.

If we are truly seeking the best genes in our mating choices, then having women "do" and compete in the marketplace will make their genetic nature much more evident. And correlation (and likely causation) of good (i.e. nurturing and relational) dads with success of offspring is rapidly being made evident as well. We shall see then what is hard-wired in our psychology and what is not, eh?

Even though this book was published a few years back, it is very relevant in 2018. It helps to understand why people view things so differently as soon as human nature is brought into debates. Hopefully people will stop treating well-studied and well-founded scientific truths as though they are "taboo" or unspeakable just because they fear the consequences of admitting that we are not all born innocent and equal.