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JANUARY 24, 2003

The Blank Slate: 
The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker
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New York Times
Best Seller 
Review
by Robert J. Richards

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 Book Description
Our conceptions of human nature affect everything aspect of our lives, from child-rearing to politics to morality to the arts. Yet many fear that scientific discoveries about innate patterns of thinking and feeling may be used to justify inequality, to subvert social change, and to dissolve personal responsibility.

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature and instead have embraced three dogmas: The Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), The Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and The Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.

Pinker provides calm in the stormy debate by disentangling the political and moral issues from the scientific ones. He shows that equality, compassion, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about an innately organized psyche. Pinker shows that the new sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, far from being dangerous, are complementing observations about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: irreverent wit, lucid exposition, and startling insight on matters great and small.

About the Author
Steven Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind. His popular and highly praised books include Words and Rules, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. The recipient of several major awards for his teaching and scientific research, Pinker is Peter de Florez professor of psychology in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Publishers Weekly
In his last outing, How the Mind Works, the author of the well-received The Language Instinct made a case for evolutionary psychology or the view that human beings have a hard-wired nature that evolved over time. This book returns to that still-controversial territory in order to shore it up in the public sphere. Drawing on decades of research in the "sciences of human nature," Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology at MIT, attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation. For those who have been following the sciences in question including cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's clear and witty presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to writers from Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh. What might amaze is the persistent, often vitriolic resistance to these findings Pinker presents and systematically takes apart, decrying the hold of the "blank slate" and other orthodoxies on intellectual life. He goes on to tour what science currently claims to know about human nature, including its cognitive, intuitive and emotional faculties, and shows what light this research can shed on such thorny topics as gender inequality, child-rearing and modern art. Pinker's synthesizing of many fields is impressive but uneven, especially when he ventures into moral philosophy and religion; examples like "Even Hitler thought he was carrying out the will of God" violate Pinker's own principle that one should not exploit Nazism "for rhetorical clout." For the most part, however, the book is persuasive and illuminating.

Additional links

Here are additional links ( URL's) regarding Steven Pinker and his book, "The Blank Slate".

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pinker.html

http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/

http://www.bkstore.com/mit/fac/pinker.html

http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/cpnss/darwin/evo/pinker.htm

http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Pinker/

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker/pinker_p1.html

http://www.2think.org/hii/tli.shtml

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/ae/books/reviews/1651022

http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/human_nature_kennair.htm

http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/nation_johnson.htm

http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/washingtonpost_mcginn.htm

http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/la_times_raphael.htm

http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/slate_reviews_file/commentary.html

http://www.wordsmith.org/chat/pinker.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html

http://www.rightgrrl.com/carolyn/pinker.html

http://reason.com/0210/fe.rb.biology.shtml

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge53.html

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/slatedialog.html

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_blank/pinker_blank_print.html

http://www.emcp.com/intro_pc/reading11.htm

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/rose.html

 

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