Customer Reviews

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

5 star:		(135)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(23)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

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.

Talking with Ruben Bolling (author of the excellent alt-weekly strip Tom The Dancing Bug, probably the only comic strip that brings up issues of evolutionary psychology on a regular basis,) at a funnybook signing, I asked him if he had picked this book up yet. "Nah," he said. "I loved The Language Instinct, but the title to this one turned me off...I mean, does _anyone_ believe in the 'blank slate' anymore?" I said that it did make Pinker seem a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers that were found in the late 50's on some godforsaken island, still fighting WWII.

Pinker does himself credit, though, by anticipating this objection in the very first sentence of his premise, and goes on to effectively demonstrate that, no, this battle isn't quite over yet, as is seen in the oft rabid reaction to such recent books as "A Natural History of Rape" and "The Nurture Assumption." Pinker's main rhetorical flaw in "How The Mind Works" was structure -- he saved the tastiest bits for the latter half, frontloading the book with abstruse information on computational processing and vision research that, while valuable, probably drove away half of his potential audience.

The same phenomenon occurs here, but to a lesser extent -- the first half of the book isn't going to tell Bolling anything he didn't already suspect, but it does a good job of presenting a readable history of the whole "Blank Slate" fallacy. Pinker cuts some corners -- he conflates the Blank Slate with "The Noble Savage," which isn't precisely the same thing, but the thrust is there, and as the book goes on and he draws closer and closer to the controversies of the present, the stakes start to rise in a quite page-turning manner.

It's the second half of the book that's really worth your money, though, in which Pinker nimbly inverts virtually every Social Constructionist theory to demonstrate that what superficially seem like noble and idealistic (if misguided) principles -- that people are "born good" and it's society/parents/the media that ruins them -- are actually far more nihilistic and bleak in their implications than the much more likely thesis: we're incredibly complex animals whose instincts, while able to be subverted or counteracted by our conscious minds, cannot be completely ignored. To me -- an nth generation leftist who nearly ended up a Republican by the end of college, thanks to the truly ludicrous theories being bandied about in the early 90s -- the most valuable thing this book does is provide a basis for maintaining a progressive ideology without having to subscribe to pie-in-the-sky theories about how men and women are precisely identical other than their reproductive organs, violence is entirely a product of a dysfunctional culture, rape could not possibly have an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, and all children who end up doing wrong as adults are the products of shoddy parenting. As Pinker points out over and over, the problem with this sort of conflation of Is and Ought (i.e., nature and morality) is that you wind up painting yourselves into a corner -- if it turns out that, say, rape does have an evolutionary adaptive source, one would be forced to conclude that therefore it's okey-dokey. Better to separate the two and conclude that rape is evil because it's a horrific act of violence that can scar the victim for life, not because it's "unnatural," and to try to figure out how the circumstances that cause it to arise can best be prevented.

Pinker has his flaws, of course -- he can be glib at times, he doesn't always attempt to be even-handed, his cultural references are hit-or-miss (if anything, Public Enemy is an _anti-_gangsta rap group, and Borges and Wallace are certainly examples of modernist/postmodernist writers that don't fail to account for human nature and aren't merely products of stylistic oneupsmanship), and he fails to address the pressing issue of how evolution could possibly have selected for his goofy-ass Geddy Lee mullet. But flaws aside, this is an incredibly valuable work that points to where the Left is going to have to go in the 21st century if it doesn't want to wind up eating its tail as it did at the end of the 20th. As Peter Singer put it in his essential treatise, "A Darwinian Left": "Wood carvers presented with a piece of timber and a request to make wooden bowls from it do not simply begin carving according to a design drawn up before they have seen the wood. Instead they will examine the material with which they are to work, and modify their design in order to suit its grain. Political philosophers and the revolutionaries or reformers who have followed them have all too often worked out their ideal society, or their reforms, and sought to apply them without knowing much about the human beings who must carry out, and live with, their plans. Then, when the plans don't work, they blame traitors within their ranks, or sinister agents of outside forces, for the failure. Instead, those seeking to reshape society must understand the tendencies inherent in human beings, and modify their abstract ideals in order to suit them." Or, as King of Ants E.O. Wilson more succinctly said of Marxism: "Wonderful theory. Wrong species."

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.

Sociobiology is a controversial, yet important and growing field of scientific exploration. No other field of science elicits as much condemnation from academics and intellectuals, yet no other scientific endeavor has ever cast as much light on the truth about the evolution of human nature. The reason for the distain shown by academic intellectuals is sociobiology's crushing refutation of the concept known as the "blank slate" theory of human nature, which has become the cornerstone of postmodernist ideals of political correctness. The entire edifice of the postmodern human engineering project carried on at many universities and in the popular media is based upon the concept that "everything is political", and that the attribute we call "human nature" is nothing more than cultural propaganda instilled into children by their parents and reinforced throughout their lives by a rigid, chauvinistic propaganda machine that has become known as "Western Civilization". Evidence is fast mounting that human nature is anything but nonexistent, sociobiology is the area of science where this evidence is researched and proven, and Steven Pinker has done a good job of organizing and, with some reservations, elucidating the evidence. In short, boys and girls are no more identical above the neck than they are below, and every personal psychological attribute is nearly as genetically heritable as every physical attribute. This book proves to my satisfaction that human nature is a factor in the human condition, and that the blank slate theory of personality is a politically correct joke.

This is a long book, a bit tedious in places, but well written, interesting and even humorous overall. The inference that genetic influences are the all-important factor in life outcome is, I think, patently false and contradicted by experience and common sense. The best possible proof of this is contained in a short, fascinating book written by Theodore Dalrymple called "Life at the bottom", which I would strongly recommend as a reality-check by which to measure some of the tenants of sociobiology presented in Pinker's book. This is especially useful when evaluating chapter 19 on the debate about nature/nurture as it concerns children. Dalrymple's book is a collection of anecdotes gleaned from the experiences of a physician who has spent his life ministering to the British underclass. He does not discredit sociobiology, a subject which is never mentioned in his book. He illuminates the subject in the light of harsh reality.

In spite of its deficiencies, however, sociobiology goes a long way toward explaining how genetic tendencies coalesce into the characteristics known as "human nature". It also casts light upon the reasons that 20th century attempts to engineer utopian societies culminated in failure (and in the case of Marxist projects, the deaths of as many as a hundred million people). Sociobiology is, however explicitly silent upon the subject of how best to contain these human impulses in order to establish and maintain an orderly, yet progressive and free civilization. The "fact" of Human Nature presents us with a slew of "natural" behaviors. On the other hand, just because a behavior may be natural does not necessarily mean that its uninhibited expression is appropriate for the maintenance of an orderly civilization and a happy life.

While evidence from sociobiology seems to refute some of the cherished beliefs of modern conservatism as well as liberalism, the case against liberalism is much stronger. Pinker works very hard to establish his credentials as a modern liberal throughout the book, and in some areas I believe that his desire to be seen as a liberal has colored the conclusions he draws from his evidence. This is definitely a worthwhile book. Take the evidence seriously, but be wary when navigating the shoals of the author's opinions.

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.

In his latest, and by far his most ambitious, work, Steven Pinker speaks in a wide-ranging, lively but dispassionate voice of sweet reason. It 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 want 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. (Nor 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, less carefully examined, which he calls The Ghost in the Machine - 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 them 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 basis for 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, and the violence chapter offers some very 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 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.

Steven Pinker is a prominent member of a new cohort of science populizers with genuine scientific credentials (which includes, in the area of brain studies, such authors as Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett). His latest book is by far his most political therefore his most important. As it turns out, the data show that we have much in common as members of the human species, and the news is not all bad.

In the Blank Slate, Pinker directly addresses the major ideological impediments which prevent the widespread adoption of an enlightened, scientifically valid view of humanity. People have opposed the idea of human nature, Pinker argues, due to the adherence to three ideas: the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine.

After presenting empirical and philosophical arguments against this trio of ideas, Pinker turns to directly addressing the fears accompany the denial of human nature. Specifically, people fear that human nature bolsters the acceptance of inequality (and hence injustice) and prevents progress and perfectability of people and society. Pinker counters that such fears are founded upon an exaggerated and overly simplistic view of the manner in which our genes influence our thoughts and actions. Such influences always remain beneath our consciousness and volition; they are one of the ultimate causes of our behavior, but never the sole cause or the immediate cause. This relates to another major fear: the fear of biological determinism, the absence of free will. Pinker also discusses the fear of nihilism, the fear that once our actions and preferences are understood to be rooted in biology, our lives will loose meaning and morality. Again, Pinker shows that such fears are founded upon misunderstanding and oversimplification, as well as the confusion between ultimate casues and mechanism, on the one hand, and the immediate and proximate causes on the other.

In general, many progressives on the political Left have embraced the Blank Slate and the Noble Savage to provide the foundation for ideologies of cultural transformation and reform, in the service of redressing injustices and inequalities. Unfortunately, as Pinker demonstrates, the evidence (as well as our own common sense experiences) indicates that we are neither Blank Slates or Noble Savages. The sum total of our inherited tendencies, our human nature, is neither wicked or noble. Nonetheless, there is the fear, found on both the political Left and Right, that embracing human nature also means normalizing and sanctioning the unseamly side of ourselves. But, as Pinker argues, "natural" is an empirical judgement; "good" is a moral one.

Some critics have argued that no one really believes in the Blank Slate any more, and that Pinker is fighting "straw men." I think, however, that Pinker does a good job of showing that Blank Slate positions are often the implicit default in matters of public discussion and policy making; Blank Slate ideas continue to misguide efforts, even when the Blank Slate is not intentionally invoked.

The third notion which Pinker disputes, the Ghost in the Machine, is far more important to people committed to the political Right, because the Ghost is frequently equated with the immaterial spiritual soul. The major implication of modern neuroscience has been that the workings of the human mind can be adequately explained by the workings of the human brain, as Pinker has shown in more detail in his previous book, How the Mind Works. The more we learn about brain function, the more it has taken over the job description previously assigned to the soul or to the Ghost. The Ghost remains in the mind of many as the only possible foundation for Free Will, and hence meaning and morality. Free will and an inherited human nature are not necessarily contradictory, however, as long as one avoids a simplistic biological determinism in which genes directly control our actions and opinions.

In place of all these fears, Pinker constructs an empirically-supported view of our human nature, addressing in turn 1) the reliabilty and veracity of our perception and our understanding of the world; 2) the sources of interpersonal conflict as well as the sources of a realistic (non-supernatural) morality; 3) the hot-buton topics of race, gender, violence, and child rearing. This is were some of the real meat, the empirical data, is to be found; and this is where Pinker makes good on his claims that accepting the idea of human nature is neither dangerously reactionary or bebasing.

An acquaintance of mine wondered just who this book was intended for, since it appeared to be written above the level of your average person. So be it: Science can be popularized by good writing and clear thinking, but it cannot be greatly simplified without significant loss of coherence and cogency. The book is intended for us: for whoever has the motivation to pick it up or to read this review. If you've read this far, do yourself a favor and read Pinker's book. It's not only fascinating and well-argued; it's important.

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.

As far as I'm concerned, the most important book in the last five years (I'm a practicing evolutionary psychologist, so I care about these things more than most people). Pinker is brilliant, a great communicator, and obviously truly enthusiastic about ev psych. He believes that ev psych theory can help us see the truth about human nature and the innate structure of the brain. And his enthusiasm is not that of some dogmatic close-minded partisan, it's that of a scientist who has applied ev psych theories, seen their effectiveness, and actually acquired objective knowledge as a result of this process.

The book concentrates less on reviwing ev psych research (for that, see his 1997 book How the Mind Works), and more on analyzing why so many social scientists and people in general continue to be so frightened by the prospect that natural selection might affect neural tissue in the same way it that it affects every other kind of organismal tissue. Many people loathe the idea that there is a human nature, that behavior is the product of a brain that evolved by natural selection. Why are people so scared? Read this excellent book and find out.