Rating: 
Summary: endnotes and careful reading
Review: Several reviews of the Blank Slate on this site have accused it of lacking a scientific foundation. I'm sure that if someone brazenly declared to me that the Apollo missions were a hoax perpetrated by shadowy government officials taking orders from Hitler's brain and that I'd be a fool not to see it, I would be similarly shocked and uncomprehending. Pinker's endnotes are copious, and his style, while certainly combative--try defending any version of the innatist position at a university, and you'll better understand who he's inevitably addressing--doesn't imply that every concept presented is as relatively unalterable as photosynthesis. This is a work intended for a general audience that has no narrowly-defined thesis to prove. Rather, he's dealing primarily in probabilities--with a host of particular certainties to inform his probabilistic thinking. He's saying that his own position on evolution, genetics, thinking and behavior seems quite likely to him, but what the particular CITED research eliminates completely is the notion that the mind is a blank slate. As he says at the beginning of How the Mind Works, even if everything he suspects is true turns out to be false, it is still preferable to the claptrap that has passed for thought on human nature since Rousseau.Another reviewer seems to think that Pinker rejects the notion that the brain can undergo changes after maturity. I wish I had a copy of the Blank Slate here, but I know this to be wrong. Environmental effects and neuroplasticity must be a part of anyone's version of neural activity, including Pinker's. I think he would simply refuse the notion that meaningful, global changes could occur during or after development through some sort of therapy or indoctrination. One is extremely unlikely to turn a math nerd into a rock star, or a super-conscientious conflict resolver into a beer-and-chips football fan with a limited emotional range. In some circles, this notion IS revolutionary enough to justify the ink and paper necessary to defend it. I think that the crusade that one can easily infer from Pinker's work tends to push people towards a too-defensive position. "I knew that--I can't believe he thinks I didn't know that. Who denies human nature anymore? Who does he think he is?" He knows that somebody out there knew that...many really do still deny it and others take bizarre hybrid positions that change according to who's listening, and very few have read the research...I don't know who he thinks he is, but probably no more than an expert on language learnability and a passionate observer/practitioner of neurology and evolutionary psychology.
Rating:
Summary: Another great Book from Pinker
Review: Here we have, once again, a powerful summary of all the research and arguments, that is difficult to put down. Several years ago I read Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and could not put it down. Since then I have read "The Language Instinct" and "Words and Rules". To know more about the mind, and more background for this book, read "How the Mind Works" to see more specific details of just one area and how Pinker's mind works, read the other two. Everyday you can read stories in newspapers claiming all sorts of research and studies claiming that culture determines how we act and growup...read this and you will see how much we believe without any evidence or argument. How seldom we see arguments backed up with the detail here. I imagine it is possible that some of his conclusions are incorrect, yet don't accept anything unless it is backed up as well as Pinker does it. As a side note: The book describes Liberals and Conservatives as "Tragic" and "Utopian", where I might call them Conservative and Radical...somewhere between the 70's and 90's Republicans and Democrats have switched...Ronald Reagan was Radical/Utopian pushing for large untested change, as is George Bush...Bill Clinton was Conservative/Tragic promoting incremental change as are most Democrats today...as Pinker says the founding fathers were Tragic, building checks and balances, not expecting to be able to change human nature.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disturbing Premise
Review: Perhaps this book is just a bit behind the coming crest of a wave of open discussion on the nature-nurture dialogue....then again, maybe this is just a sideshow to the debate on the ethos of genetic manipulation. It's hard to tell. From one standpoint Pinker argues that we have failed to adequately address the relationship between the genetics of personality and environmental effects on character development. That sounds like an argument that has needed to be made for quite some time....perhaps this is the coming crest of the wave. Then again, he is persuasive in his argument that we need to begin to focus on a balance between environmental forces and genetic predisposition. This requires hard change from entrenched paradigms that many fear to challenge. I'm not sure there are enough with the commitment to make this happen, but one thing that seems certain is that books like this are at least opening the door to the discourse necessary to make it possible.
Rating:
Summary: Scientists versus moralizers
Review: A marvelous review of the findings of those who base their view of humanity on testing hypotheses against data. Even better it is a marvelous debunking of all the sanctimonious snobs on the left and the right who tell us how we ought to think. It is so refreshing to think about how to improve our lives and society based on how people actually behave rather than how they ought to behave.
Rating:
Summary: Accurate and timely
Review: I am baffled by those people who have said that this book is scientifically inaccurate as well as those who have said that the nature/nurture argument is dead. As an academic biologist, I know firsthand that many of my students believe strongly that all of our behavior is determined by culture, and getting them to see that there are genetic dimorphisms in behavior as well as anatomy is a difficult task. The text is not flawless, but it is quite accurate from a scientific standpoint, and its small errors in no way jeopardize its larger conclusions.
Rating:
Summary: A Long-Overdue Book
Review: This book is a masterful work encompassing science, philosophy, and ideology. It's clearly written and easy to understand. You never find yourself wondering what point the author is trying to make. Mr. Pinker does an excellent job of debunking the blank-slate theory that claims, in the face of mountains of scientific evidence (and common sense), that there is no such thing as human nature and that people are therefore malleable empty receptacles, passively waiting for "culture" or "the environment" to tell them how to behave. (As if culture itself wasn't a human creation!) Yes, Virginia, human behavior IS attributable to biological factors, to a very significant extent, although obviously not in any total or complete sense. Environment and free will also affect our behavior. But no, Virginia, recognizing the fact that biology helps to shape our behavior doesn't make you a Nazi. This examination of the lock-step, closed-minded thinking of the blank-slate partisans is one of the book's most important features, found mainly in the first few chapters. The author documents how a great many scientists and anthropologists, perhaps the majority, believe so passionately in the Blank Slate and Noble Savage dogmas that they haughtily dismiss all of the evidence to the contrary, no matter how voluminous and convincing. They also use McCarthyist smear tactics to vilify and denounce anyone who dares to disagree. In doing so, they really disqualify themselves from being called scientists, because a scientist's first duties are to be objective and to keep an open mind. Isn't it funny that we are often asked to believe that genetics research "creates a climate" conducive to Nazism (as the author points out), but that we are NEVER asked to believe that all the simple-minded talk about how "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer" creates a climate that induces people to rob and steal?
Rating:
Summary: Because we're all relatives, it's not all relative
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: All the evidence contradicts this book!
Review: After getting this book, I was a little confused by a previous review about it. However, that review pointed to another recently released text "The Mind And The Brain", after reading that book, all I can say is that Pinker is overstating his case.
Pinker and his followers may believe in a "user illusion" but the evidence cited in "The Mind And The Brain" says there is a thing like "mental force" more akin to "spiritual force" that gives one the ability for free will/free won't. People who argue against this "spiritual" notion usually assume the truth of an outdated and fatally flawed set of beliefs called classical physics. In that closed system, free will can't exist and is considered an illusion. However, in modern (Quantum) physics this is not the case as "The Mind And The Brain" explains. I suppose the real illusion is classical physics. Don't fall for Pinker's tricks, the real treat is that the "ghost" is back in the "machine" ... just in time for Halloween.
Rating:
Summary: Not unflawed, but Pinker may save the Left from itself.
Review: 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."
Rating: 
Summary: The Blank Slate is Blank
Review: 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.
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