I contend that there are two Steven Pinkers. Pinker 1 is an eloquent, witty, and insightful writer on the issues of cognitive psychology and linguistics who has the rare talent of making his subjects accessible and appealing to academic and lay audiences. Pinker 2 retains the writing ability, but instead uses it for pushing his pet theories, usually political in nature (cf. his most recent Better Angels of Our Nature). This book comes straight from the pen of Pinker 2.

There are really two main components of the book: Lengthy rants against his ideological opponents and an extended argument in favor of a watered-down hereditarian view of human nature. Pinker rightly notes that "nature vs. nurture" is a false dichotomy and then goes about ascribing enormous amounts of deterministic power to genes. He relies on a number of controversial and dubious sources as well as his own misinterpretations of some research, such as Bouchard's infamous twin studies.

Lacking actual examples of those who hold this "blank slate" view, Pinker dredges up some long dead academics to serve as a scarecrow. He rails against J.B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, even though his intellectual hero Noam Chomsky rebutted Skinner and behaviorism in general in the 1960s. Next he'll be telling us Lamarck was wrong about evolution! He also engages in some tired Margaret Mead-bashing typical of sociobiology/evolutionary psychology partisans by citing Derek Freeman's "debunking" of Mead. Pinker missed the memo that Freeman's work was subsequently discredited (see Paul Shankman's The Trashing of Margaret Mead).

Pinker astutely points out that proponents of environmental or cultural determinism do not associate these theories with the horrors of communism (Lysenko famously denounced genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience"), but they do associate biological theories with eugenics and Nazism. However, in general, Pinker unleashes a firestorm on a field of straw men. Some of his more contemporary "blank slaters" are so-called "gender feminists," whatever those are. (Everyone except Christina Hoff Sommers?) Demonstrating that he's willing to slurp up just about any "finding" in pop evolutionary psychology, he offers an extended defense of Thornhill and Palmer's A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. The defense parrots the authors' framing of the controversy, with Thornhill and Palmer as the hard-headed, rational scientists telling the cold hard truths versus the hordes of fluffy-headed, irrational, emotional, and "politically correct" feminists. Any mention of the scathing reviews the book met in the scientific press (see Cheryl Brown Travis's edited volume Evolution, Gender, and Rape) is omitted or given cursory treatment. Pinker uses pop evo psych in a number of other places as a means to club over the head the bogeywoman of gender feminism. This generally seems to involve projecting modern gender roles and stereotypes back into pre-history based on rank speculation. Simon Blackburn put it best: "Meet the Flintstones." (See, e.g., Cordelia Fine, Lise Eliot or Rebecca M. Jordan-Young for critical overviews of current sex-difference research.)

I could go on about the technical shortcomings in this book, but Blackburn and H. Allen Orr have already done a much better job of it in their reviews than I could:
http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/revi...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archi...

Pinker attempts to posture as a defender of science against the demons of unreason, but he is simply defending his own views and pet theories about science. He is pushing stealth hereditarianism under the banner of consilience, to borrow E.O. Wilson's term. "The blank slate" thus becomes an epithet to write off anyone who wants to say, "Hold on a moment, it's much more complicated than that!"

For those looking to get into evolutionary psychology: Skip this and pick up Laland and Brown's Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour for a scholarly overview of fields studying evolution and human behavior and Buller's Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature for a critical view of evolutionary psychology.

For those looking to read Pinker: Skip this and pick up something by Pinker 1, like The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language or The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

Every so often in life you read a book that significantly influences the way you think. The Blank Slate, for me, is one of those rare books. My understanding of human nature, gender, politics, violence, learning, and, most significantly, my view on child-raising will all be affected by this book from here on. In fact, I would go so far as to say that The Blank Slate will be as significant and influence on the second third of my life as Atlas Shrugged was on the first third. I find it somewhat interesting that both books were written by anti-Marxist atheists, though I must grant that Pinker is vastly less emotional about it than Rand.

The book itself is long and deep and very articulate. I enjoyed the reading of it, but would never call it a light read. It contains ideas that will challenge your world view, no matter what you currently believe.

I first heard of Steven Pinker through TED (www.ted.com), where Pinker has given two talks in the last few years. For the twenty minute version of his thoughts, listen to his TED talk on violence. If you want the ninety minute version of The Blank Slate, Google "Pinker MIT Blank Slate" and listen to the talk he gave at MIT as part of his book tour. Or, of course, you could read the book yourself...

A brilliant argument for an evolved biological human nature. Pinker uses evidence from ethnology, evolutionary psychology, and sociobiology to make a surprisingly convincing claim that the nature vs nurture puzzle has finally been solved . His thesis addresses three common assumptions about human nature and then renders each one scientifically and historically bankrupt. The 'blank slate' is the assumption that there is no inborn human nature; all humans are the product of nurture/environment. The 'noble savage' assumption contends that each child is born perfect only to be corrupted by society. The 'ghost in the machine' assumption purports a free will characteristic of a mind or soul separate from our biological self. Pinker presents a cornucopia of evidence for a new point of view on psychology, child rearing, societal organization and even happiness.

I have read very few books that have so successfully questioned my assumptions and changed my point of view.

"Once again a Pinker book changed my world view."

The book really opened my eyes about how we learn and become who we are. I had previously just accepted the various interpretations of the the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and the blank slate. Pinker demolishes and demonstrates why those interpretations are misleading, and you will realize why Pinker is called one of the only linguists who can write in prose.

Any,well educated person will confirm that there is no debate anymore about "nature-nurture" question, it's off the table for a long time ago. We are all aware of the traces of the past in our "past carriers" and in the unforeseeable degree of influence of present on our life. Who, and what we are is the summary of the past of our ancestors and our individual and collective present. But, happens in science, that solving an enigma may lead the leading edge of humanity to impenetrable taboos. There are not so many of such taboos, but these few are sufficient to complicate our present. Being reluctant to address these taboos will lead us in unpredictable situations making the future of humankind extremely uncertain.
Professor Pinker's book is an exceptional artifact. As I said it's easy to read, it's easy to comprehend, but very complicated to "swallow". One of the books I'd assign as an obligatory textbook in every person's educational phase.

'Man will become better when you show him what he is like.' - Anthon Chekov

Won't he??? ...

Maybe, the arguments in this book can't be put any more eloquently than the quote of Anton Chekov.
...

The book was both fun and terrible to encounter how supposed "liberals" experience the cognitive dissonance by having their assumptions and dogmas challenged.

The author goes over controversies , a number of hot buttons, hot zones, Chernobyls, third rails, and so on -- including the arts ( I disagree with him particularly), cloning, crime, free will, education, evolution, gender differences, God, homosexuality, infanticide, inequality, Marxism, morality, Nazism, parenting, politics, race, rape, religion, resource depletion, social engineering, technological risk and war.

The sciences of human nature - behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science went/ are going (increasingly in the years to come) to upset various dogmas, careers, and deeply-held political belief systems.

But, we have a choice about that. The choice is whether certain facts about humans, or topics, are to be considered taboos, forbidden knowledge, where we shouldn't go there because no good can come from it, or whether we should explore them honestly.

We should remember that the versions of "is" do not automatically translate into "ought". To acknowledge human nature is not despairing but an incentive to embrace our common humanity.


Maybe, wisdom consists in appreciating the preciousness and finiteness of our own existence, of being cognizant of what makes people everywhere tick, and therefore enhancing happiness and minimizing suffering optimally; of being alert to limitations and flaws in our own judgments and decisions and passions, and thereby doing our best to circumvent them...

Steven Pinker takes on the old nature/nurture question, and does an excellent job of it. Are we the products of our genes or our upbringing? Pinker tells you in the first few pages what the new consensus is: both, but genes are probably more important.

He has some wonderful stories to back up the general points. Here's one that particularly appealed to me. During the 60s and 70s, you often heard that boys and girls are indoctrinated from an early age so as to conform to conventional gender roles. Without that conditioning, girls would e.g. be as likely to want to play with toy guns, or boys with dolls. It was just a theory, but it was one that many people believed.

So, says Pinker, how could we investigate the question scientifically? It's difficult. What you'd like to do, if you had the chance, would be to take a few dozen boys, castrate them at birth, surgically transform them into girls, and then raise them like other girls without ever telling them what you'd done. At various points in their development, you could compare them with a control group of biologically normal girls, and see if there were any significant differences.

Needless to say, no one would ever permit such an appallingly wicked experiment. Except that it's actually happened. Every year, it turns out that a small number of male infants do have to be castrated and turned into girls, most often as a result of botched circumcision operations. Historically, they've usually not been told what happened, since this was deemed to be in their best interests.

Studies on these unfortunate children show that they nearly always feel deeply conflicted, and quite different from other girls. They have all sorts of impulses which they feel are bizarre and wrong, and which can sometimes lead them to suicidal despair. In some cases, they have later been informed that they are actually male, and their reaction has typically been one of relief. They weren't weird after all. They were just male without knowing it.

Well, if you thought that story was interesting, he's got dozens more that are nearly as good. I loved this book.

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This is the book that convinced me that there's a lot more evidence supporting the "nature" side of the "nature vs nurture" debate that has been going on since humans started thinking seriously about the topic. Steven Pinker writes very clearly and explains concepts that a layman like me can understand. Highly researched and well produced. Excellent book.

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A decisive book on the question of human malleability.

كتاب طويل و محيط، ينتقد فيه الكاتب نظرية اللوحة الفارغة (التي تقول أن الإنسان يولد من غير اي استعدادات سلوكية و أن تصرفه ما هو إلا نتيجة تكييف مجتمعي) التي تعتمد عليها ما بعد الحداثة
(post modernism)

الترجمة سيئة للأسف
لعلي أعود للكتاب بعد صدور طبعة منقحة كما وعد الناشر

I can't finish this. The first third or so of the book is interesting and important, mostly because of the discussion about cognitive neuroscience. I think it's extremely important that any educated person in the modern or future world get a solid basic understanding of what we know (and don't know) about how the human brain works. Obviously that will govern our whole understanding of psychology, sociology, and human life in general. Anyone who wants his or her worldview to actually reflect reality has to take that into account.

It's quite important to note, as the author does, that a great deal of contemporary thought by people who are more or less avowedly atheistic and materialistic nevertheless attributes or implies quite unphysical abilities for the human mind.

That said, the book sidesteps the actual issue of the soul and consciousness. A couple of times the issue seems to appear as a murky blob beneath the surface, but it's dismissed with typical reductionist verbiage like "consciousness is actually an illusion that several brain circuits work very hard to maintain." Descartes was tragically wrong about a number of things, but the point stands and will forever stand that if my consciousness is an "illusion," there is still a me to be deluded.

In reality, the scornful statement "ghost in the machine" is useful to a certain point. Obviously, all our thoughts and emotions and other qualia or mental phenomena or whatever you want to call them have physical manifestations in the brain. There is not a "big" ghost that handles most cognitive functions in supernatural space and then hands the greatly digested results to the menial physical system for, say, motor control. Without the appropriate parts of the brain, we can't think or feel in the ways proper to those parts. However, that only constitutes a "proof" of the nonexistence of the soul if you're a reductionist in a hurry to sweep the remaining details under the rug and move on. There is still all the room in the universe for a soul, not only as an epiphenomenon that maps physical brain states onto our conscious qualia, but as an entity that can exert influence back on the body at certain neural (or other) breakpoints, at least at a fine enough scale that we can't measure them, and likely enough at an even finer scale where quantum physics assures us that we can never measure them. This "small ghost" is by no means disproven, and whether or not it's a more satisfying explanation of human existence is, at least at this point, more a matter of taste than anything else.

The discussion of evolutionary psychology is somewhat interesting for its actual content, some of which could be quite valid. It's more illuminating in the sense that it allows me to see the modern biologist's worship of evolution as deity in action. Rather half-cocked, unlikely-sounding theories can be passed off as clearly established fact if they invoke the Divine Name of Evolution. Psychology as a whole is probably in a state roughly corresponding to geology in the mid 20th century, where workable paradigms are out there and starting to win the fight against the unworkable paradigms. Evolutionary psychology sounds more like the half-baked world of 19th century geology, with solid pieces of observation and reasoning cemented together with a mixture of vagueness and absurd cocksurety.

The book then ambles off into a series of ruminations by our fairly insufferable author, who is about 1/20 the social and political critic he thinks he is, where he makes either astoundingly obvious or blatantly inept statements and claims about human life in general and where he sees ramifications of the biology of the brain in these situations. I spent most of last month avoiding the audiobook and I'm finally giving it up as bad business.

I would recommend finding another book to introduce oneself to cognitive neuroscience. I will be looking for one and welcome suggestions.