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Summary: Nobody believes in the blank slate any more
Review: Although The Blank Slate is beautifully written, it is an exercise in polemics rather than a balanced discussion. Pinker presents other points of view only in caricature, apparently with the goal of persuading the reader, not informing him. That the mind is a "blank slate" is defended by no modern scientist, least of all the behaviorists, for whom innate reinforcers are the mainspring of learning. But whatever our innate predispositions, the contributions of culture are hardly superficial. In the face of the most unambiguous biological imperatives, monks embrace celibacy, anorexic girls starve themselves, angry fathers murder their families, and young men in their sexual prime blow themselves up in Tel Aviv and New York. Evidently the slate can be overwritten. It is just such considerations, not a denial of human nature, that underlie the idealistic concern with the effects of individual experience. This book is an op-ed piece, not a thoughtful discussion of a complex topic.
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Summary: The Ring of Truth!
Review: As in any branch of science, there's always much left to be discovered and understood, but this is a wonderful exposition of what we presently know, think we know and suspect about the nature and development of the human mind. The writing is erudite, elegant and engaging.Dr. Pinker very appropriately airs out some of the most disgraceful conduct ever seen in ivied halls, and calls attention to the curious and unnatural alliance of intellectual facists of the left with superstitious fundamentalists of the right. Anyone committed to free and objective scientific inquiry will be greatly pleased with this book. Those afraid of such inquiry, or who deny the possibility of it, will despise it.
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Summary: A great and level-headed synthesis...
Review: ...of all we know about the so-called nurture/nature debate and its moral and political ramifications. I especially enjoy Pinker's summary and analysis of the scientific squabbles that have arisen since the publication of "Sociobiology." Both Left and Right are given the huge knocks that they deserve. And in the end, he's neither mean-spirited nor bitter. Pinker has a power of mind--and a style of writing--that leaves one speechless.
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Summary: Philosophical and rhetorical, but not scientific...
Review: This book has good assumptions, but it lacks scientific data. Many arguments employ observations that are inconclusive at best in their "cause-effect" nature. For example, the reference about gay men having smaller nucleus in the anterior hypothalamus, is still much a debatable conjecture. Many examples in the book are just too suspicious to be taken seriously. Overall, this book is too poorly researched, and its reasoning too puerile, for any mature readers to stay engaged.
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Summary: Incomplete!
Review: For the material covered, the book is OK but overall it's rather incomplete. This incompleteness leads of course to some error and distortion that needs to be cleared up. To help potential readers fill in some of the gaps left behind by this text, I strongly suggest the audio version of the book with the strange title: "The Power Of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. Why the audio of Tolle's book? Listening to the author express his thoughts always brings in something that you just don't get when you read the text yourself. Plus, you'll have a record of a person that may become a genuine "avatar of the 21st century." For lesser lights like Pinker, his book will be enough.
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Summary: attacking a straw man is never difficult
Review: Had this book been written thirty years ago, it would have really been a major contribution. The claim that human nature is not a blank slate is now so widely accepted that Pinker has nothing new to say and this book largely restates the thesis of his last book, How the Mind Works. In fact, aside from the humanities, academic research has now gone so far in the direction of emphasizing the importance of genes that an environmental correction might be necessary now. I was very disappointed in how stale the book seems.
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Summary: Because we're all relatives, it's not all relative
Review: 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.
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Summary: A Treatise On Human Nature for Our Times
Review: 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.
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Summary: A voice of reason
Review: If you accept reason and evidence, you will find this book to be fascinating. If you are one of those who try to prevent the teaching of evolution in school or believe in the supernatural, you will probably try to have this book banned.
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Summary: Genes plus enviroment are NOT the only factors!
Review: Basically this book says the idea that only "genes and the enviroment determine behaviour" is not backed up by the evidence. As the twin experiments demonstrate, "personality" is also needed. Another up coming book that indicates the same thing is "The Mind and The Brain" by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley. In this text one is exposed to the power of "mental force." Also, David Hodgson's "The Mind Matters" describes the impact on the Law when the mind is based upon outdated and erroneous concepts from classical physics Earth shattering for materialists but not for all of the rest of us.
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