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Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature Paperback – August 26, 2003

by Steven Pinker (Author)

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A brilliant inquiry into the origins of human nature from the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now.

"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read..also highly persuasive." --Time

Now updated with a new afterword

One of the world's leading experts on language and the mind explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.

Editorial Reviews

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"An extremely good book-clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating." (The Washington Post)

"Pinker makes his main argument persuasively and with great verve...ought to be read by anybody who feels they hav had enough of the nature-nurture rows." (The Economist)

"Stylish...what a superb thinker and writer he is." (Richard Dawkins, TLS)

"Required reading...an unanswerable case for accepting that man can be, as he is, both wired and free." (Frederick Raphael, Los Angeles Times)

About the Author

Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature, is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books, he has been named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World Today and Foreign Policy's 100 Global Thinkers.

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Marcos

Amazing and very well researched, will re-shape the context of many things in your every day life

July 9, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I picked up this book since Richard Dawkins talked about his work with Mr Pinker on his chapter of evolution. Like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker doesn't shy away from controversy, and just like Dawkins he's extremely well educated in his subjects in the smallest of details.

He lights up a giant science blowtorch to both the left and the right's notions regarding human nature.

As a parent of two children I was particularly interested in his parenting section, where the argument of "nature VS nurture" is torched. Explanations for how a parent does and doesn't shape their kids are unique, basically he's saying that parents are less significant than the rest of the environment (country, region, city/town) and what the culture that environment provides. While this might appear a "it takes a village" leftist argument, in reality it's just a common sense argument that I see every day as a person who left home to move to a different part of the world and after meeting a girl there; watch as my children grow up here and how different they are from me as a child and are more like other children here. Yet at the same time his use of adoption studies and separated twin studies are at once fascinating and also hard to argue against as he explains how much of us is in the genes and not in that environment.

On crime and IQ he dispels moral notions and poses new ones as he explains our newfound ability to determine a person's pre-disposition to violent or peaceful conflict resolution via brain scans, which he admits should have been expected after the extraordinary 19th century case of Phineas Gage surviving a traumatic brain injury and his behavior change predicted it.

He also tackles race, gender, and many other hot issues.

41 people found this helpful

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Would highly recommend to anyone that isn't skeptical of behavioral science

May 12, 2017

One of the most interesting books I've ever read. Is at a decent reading level (I would guess grade 12+), but an interesting read for anyone. It is a little all over the place in the first few chapters, but picks up after that and is extremely insightful. Has completely changed how I perceive the world. Would highly recommend to anyone that isn't skeptical of behavioral science.

22 people found this helpful

Brett Williams

Gould, his troika, and followers deserve credit for the monster they helped create on the Right

November 7, 2018

This book is about science and politics. Pinker took on the project this book represents after colleagues told him that little boys are aggressive because they’re socialized to be, teenagers get the idea to compete for appearance thanks to spelling bee awards, and men think sex is desirable because society tells them it is. In other words, humans are born a blank slate, only nurture, not nature, will make them what they are. “This is the mentality of a cult,” writes Pinker, “in which fantastical beliefs are flaunted as proof of one’s piety. This mentality cannot exist with an esteem for truth… [and is] responsible for unfortunate trends… [like] a stated contempt among many scholars for the concepts of truth, logic, and evidence, and the inevitable reaction [of] politically incorrect shock jocks who revel in anti-intellectualism and bigotry, emboldened by the knowledge that the intellectual establishment has forfeited claims of credibility…” Amen to that!

Pinker shows the cult fearful of findings from cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary physiology. Why? Because they make the errant assumption that pre-wired humans are incapable of being made moral and humane. Their interpretation of statistics was as certainty, not probability. Hence, what we’re now so familiar with from the Right were long before practiced by the Left. Scientific findings were not only denied and vilified, but scientists who dare desecrate the creed were attacked with smear campaigns, character assassination, and words put in their mouth only to pronounce how wrong they were. Even the likes of paleontologist Steven J. Gould (stunned me), geneticist Richard Lewontin (naturally), and the neuroscientist Steven Rose (daft) were dupes for the movement. This troika and the campus snowflakes they inspired labeled E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Robert Trivers as genocidal bigots, racists, practitioners of eugenics, Nazis (yawn), and Right-wing prophets of patriarchy (more yawn). All because Wilson et. al. found biology responsible for much of human behavior. (Was this really a surprise?) While Pinker’s focus is social “science” doctrine, not the shock jocks he refers to (Rush Limbaugh etc.), as one reads this book it becomes apparent there’s no difference between the two, other than what they proclaim as sacrosanct and blasphemy.

After a history of the blank slate starting with John Locke, followed by the Great Schism and what the cult is trying to protect, Pinker dives into measurement, data, and reason. The identical twin studies were so pronounced and ironclad, I had to reread them, then check references to believe these clones (which is what twins are) could be so identical in their behavior. That is, twins separated at birth, shipped off to different countries, class structures, learning environments, never to know the other or their common parents, found decades later to have the same behaviors in a myriad of the most nuanced and peculiar ways. Biology matters.

So it is, with the purifying flames of science separated from politically correct programs of pseudo-morality, Pinker burns just about every quasi-religious Postmodernist liberal dogma in the blank slate arena you can name—with the exception of gender-fluidity, not yet concocted. I hope one day he’ll do the same to Creationists and global warming deniers on the Right. What a thrill, and a shame to find even biologists themselves got caught up in the PC creed of our times. It also clarified for me what almost cannot be done in physics and chemistry (except for transparent liars like Ivar Giaever). Biology, several steps up from the closest thing we’ve got to certainty in the foundations of reality, allows for some fiddle-faddle and hoodwink, so long as the promoter has a notable name like Gould. Limbaugh and Creationists love this. Gould, the troika, and their followers deserve their share of credit for the monster they helped create on the Right as a response to this kind of nonsense.

2 people found this helpful

Haim

Science vs Superstition

January 22, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Important scientific corrective to the current politically correct insanity. And, Pinker's writing is clear and approachable, and sometimes even humorous.

5 people found this helpful

Sid Smolen

Fascinating and Illuminating (if a bit verbose)

September 1, 2018

Mr. Pinker is an exceptional thinker, able to correlate detailed knowledge to reach broad and well supported conclusions. I admire anyone who's work is assailed by each of the far ends of the political spectrum. He is a fine writer, clear and entertaining. To me, his only shortcomings are an occasional tendency to use too many words and a tendency to be overly (although justifiably) proud of his work.

One person found this helpful

Jon Anderson

A very worthwhile read

May 20, 2014

This took me a while to get into but by the middle part of the book I was quite focused and enjoying it. My most valuable takeaway has been how science research has given support to what is legitimate in philosophies of human nature on the left AND the right. And what's wrong in those philosophies is where we spend most of our time being defensive and non-productive. Good science wins!

9 people found this helpful

Zack

This book is very relevant in 2018

October 19, 2018

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.

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