Rating: 
Summary: Undeniably Intelligent and Thought-Provoking
Review: I am glad that I picked up this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in the nature v. nurture debate. Pinker is undeniably brilliant, and his explorations of the debate are thought-provoking and stimulating. Pinker sets out to debunk three popular notions: the Blank Slate (that people are born blank and their identities are forged by their environment), the Noble Savage (people are born inherently good and are corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (that some metaphysical soul directs individuals). Pinker capably challenges all three, but levels most of his attacks against the first two traditionally liberal doctrines rather than the latter conservative one.Which brings me to a problem with this book: Pinker mentions actual studies involving brain damage and twin similarities, but his arguments extend well beyond those supported purely in empirical evidence. Pinker delves into politics, gender, and the humanities, all the while claiming that his somewhat conservative-skewed slant is supported by hard science. Pinker's claim that all of his views on these matters are supported by science is dubious. For example, at one point he attacks liberal scholars who suggest that modern man has difficulty seeing through the bombardment of media images he is exposed to. Instead, Pinker claims such fears are misplaced because man is endowed with an innate common sense. However, man's mental capacities evolved in a far different environment than today's media, and it's difficult to see how Pinker refutes the ideas of the liberal scholars. Pinker repeatedly levels vitriolic attacks against these "liberal" scholars, especially those in sociology who emphasize the importance of culture. As an inatist psychologist would, he argues that men are individuals first and members of society second, and that society and culture are formed by individual men. True in the abstract, but difficult to reconcile with the fact that we are born into a world with a preexisting culture and society. One who attempts to exercise control over the culture they are born into will find their influence extremely limited. This book is an insightful exploration of modern biological and philosophical issues on what it means to be human. But by no means should it be accepted as the final word on the subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Hereditarianism without tears
Review: This is a remarkable book which makes human sociobiology and a fair chunk of differential psychology accessible - though ignoring race differences. Steven Pinker, who came to hereditarianism from psycholinguistics via hearing how a friend's children differed from each other (since siblings have only 50% of their genetic variations in common), here puts the boot firmly and indeed gleefully into all social environmentalism - whether that of psychology's behaviourists, anthropology's cultural relativists, biology's modern interactionists or philosophy's constructivists. Accepting the twin and adoption studies of the past three decades, Pinker regards genes as of great importance for psychology, along with micro-environmental factors that make siblings different from each other. What now takes an explanatory back seat is the macro-environment, especially such factors beloved of Marxite sociologists as 'social class' and 'deprivation.' Nor is all this fine expository work the sum of Pinker's task. Seeing that such opponents of simple genetic explanations as the late Stephen Jay Gould turned to celebrating complexity (in the case of the arch-materialist Gould, even to saying science posed no challenge to 'free will' and kindred religious thinking), Pinker marches into battle not only against The Blank Slate and The Noble Savage but against The Ghost in the Machine. Finally, wishing to convince leftists that hereditarianism need pose no threat to liberal or even socialist aspirations, Pinker maintains that his hereditarianism is compatible with enlightened optimism about the human condition - by which he does not mean to urge eugenics. Undoubtedly the first of these three exercises is a brilliant success. Here, as elsewhere, Pinker is splendidly informed and entertaining - the last writer like him was Hans Eysenck (e.g. The Inequality of Man, sadly unmentioned by Pinker). High spots of Pinker's hereditarianism are the complete lack of psychological similarity between unrelated children who grow up together and the staggering rates of male-on-male violence that obtain among the primitive peoples so long held up by risible social anthropologists in attempted reproof of Western civilization. Nor does Pinker spare the corrupt and vicious social scientists and leftists who have moved heaven and earth to suppress talk of genes on campus and even to ensure that hereditarians seldom achieve mainstream publication or academic promotion. The only important weakness here is Pinker's failure to explain how genetic and environmental differences sometimes correlate (covary - e.g. musical children are often born into musical environments) and sometimes multiply (interact) and how these effects can be distinguished. In particular, Pinker's failure to cite such convincing examples of interaction as the strong tendency of criminals to have both bad genes and bad environments means that he does not carry as much conviction as he might when complaining (correctly) that Gould and fellow travellers grossly exaggerated the frequency and importance of naturally occurring G x E interactions. Pinker's Chapter 17, documenting innate human aggression and competitiveness, is perhaps the best in a fine book, even if race can be mentioned only as a "radioactive" topic best left alone (except when mentioning -- with placatory intent -- his own Jewish origins). In contrast, Pinker is at his weakest when trying to exorcize the Ghost from the Machine. Clearly, Gould made his own peace with God and the soul so as to have more friends in his self-chosen Stalinist battle with 'genetic determinism', eugenicism and 'Nazism.' Yet is it really necessary for Pinker to adopt a pretty thoroughgoing materialism by way of reply, only leaving "neurodevelopmental roulette" as a source of human freedom? Strangely, Pinker is aware that we need to be able to attribute responsibility for actions to people if we are to continue with societies in which praise and punishment are conspicuous features. Yet he doesn't see that human intelligence provides the main basis on which we attribute responsibility - we notoriously refrain from executing or even imprisoning inviduals of low mental age. When we find Pinker writing that "thinking is a physical process" (p. 103) we realize that he is not displaying a level of sophistication likely to solve the mind-body problem; and Gould's latter-day sympathy for religion even begins to look comprehensible if it is considered, first, that religion is a great protector of any society's spinal cord, its social hierarchy; and, second, that what our own high culture precisely lacks is a serious commitment to the importance of the levels of intelligence that created it. What of Pinker's attempt at sustained optimism that nothing much need change in the current liberal-democratic consensus if the champions of social factors give up and buy into hereditarianism? Undoubtedly this is the most ingenious strand in the book. Pinker wants, for example, to continue with 'equity feminism' (granting equal rights and opportunities) while opposing the dogmatisms of 'gender feminism' or 'difference feminism' (the doctrines that women are equal or superior to men). Like many other psychologists, Pinker would like to think we can just deal with people 'as individuals' and be sex-blind (and age-blind, class-blind and colour-blind). But the problem is that one *cannot* choose blindness. Frankly, the fact that a child is a girl *is* one reason for not encouraging her to aspire to be a maths professor - just as good a reason as some recent mediocre score in a maths test for her from her primary school. As the Black Reverend Jesse Jackson admitted, on a Washington street at night, hearing footsteps behind one, it is a relief to look round and find the steps do not belong to a Black. A Black mother who finds her newborn son is half-White should not be quite so enthusiastic to head the boy towards a career in basketball. Facts *do* have to be mentioned and, once mentioned, are bound to have constraining effects on human ambitions and conduct. Pinker himself believes that "different cultures don't come from different kinds of genes" (p. 60), but this patently unlikely and anyhow unsubstantiated pretence will not stop most of his readers acting on the hereditarianism to which he has inspired them.
Rating:
Summary: The best psychology book this psychologist has ever read
Review: I got my Ph.D. in 1986, and I read a lot because I mostly do research, and The Blank Slate is definitely the best psychology book I've ever read. It is about the ultimate psychological topic: human nature -- what nearly everybody is interested in. In the process of summarizing what we know about ourselves, Pinker takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey across a number of topics that, through his fascinating ability to make connections, all come back to the issue of human nature. Pinker is truly a Renaissance man -- he possesses an astonishing range of knowledge in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and, ranging beyond the social sciences, philosophy, history, art, and poetry. And he USES these areas of expertise to weave is single, integrated, but huge and diverse tapestry. Pinker exposes the fascist fatuities of far-left wing scientists, demolishes Post-modernism, including much of the recent art on display in museums, supports the American constitution, and ends with a poem by Emily Dickenson that sums everything up. My favorite part of the book was a sophisticated, detailed demonstration of the reasons to believe that the human mind, contrary to the post-modernists who currently rule the humanities departments of universities, can and does learn truths about the world outside the mind. Pinker punctures relativism and supports our hope to achieve understanding and wisdom. I'm buying this book for all the thinking people with whom I'm friends. This book describes and explains more of the human reality than any book on Amazon.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Pinker: Case of Pleonasticitis
Review: Author conducts anthropological fieldwork from his office @MIT. Nice work if you get it. If MIT has standards for accepting students, it apparently has none for hiring faculty. The standard tabloid best-seller: pleonasm & hyperbole. The luxury of a metaphorical existence: "without some [italicized in book] innate mechanism for mental computation, there would be no way to learn the parts of a culture that do have to be learned." Rambling on about feedback, information loops, & computation without citing cybernetics or Norbert Weiner means some serious superficiality, dude. No blank slate? Vapor betw. these covers proves otherwise. Rest up, Mr. Pinker.
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Summary: Science and Humanity
Review: This is a hugely enlightening and liberating book. Enlightening in that lucidly explains the recent insights to human nature brought about by a scientific methodology unafraid of behavioral genetics. Liberating in that it effortlessly overthrows generations of nonsense propagated by the theologians, psychologists ignorant of genetics or the scientific method, and the quacks who confuse introspective speculation with data. Pinker is, with this book, an unequalled conduit of the scientific findings on human nature to the general public, and is entertaining to boot. He easily communicates the meaning of unfamiliar concepts in a way that the reader comes away sure that he has not only learned something new, but something actually useful. His interpretative skills are clarified by many illustrative examples and sometimes outrageous and deliciously iconoclastic truths. I especially appreciated his "naming names" when he destroys the official dogmas of the politically correct establishment. Not for him the passive voice of the cowardly academics, yearning for tenure. If an establishment figure spouts nonsense, Pinker is ready and willing to jump on with both feet. Refreshing. I loved how he denounces the politically motivated "Science for the People" types such as Gould, Lewontin, Kamin and Rose as insufficiently hard headed in their choice between a false morality and a scientific truth. And his destruction of the behaviorist school of psychology is a blast. And psychoanalysis is, of course, beneath his contempt. Perhaps the most interesting (to me) part of the book had to do with the theories and practices of child rearing, in which he persuasively proves that what most of us "know" is wrong. Why the quality of research communicated so prodigiously by the media is so low is a mystery worth contemplating. Wishful thinking run amok? This is an important book that goes a long way toward extinguishing outmoded and unsupported beliefs about what the human beast is really all about, and will serve for a long time to help us all to become less encumbered by the baggage of the past and willing to improve the future.
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Summary: Perspective from a Novice on the subject of Psychology
Review: If you have ever wondered what the impact of thousands of years of evolution has brought to our cosmopolitan table this book provides some interesting insights. The real catch to this book lies in the final chapters offering perspectives on the effect of gene theory on gender, violence, art, and child rearing (an especially excellent chapter). They provided a perspective on humanity which is not typically discussed, but (in my own estimation)often pondered. The explainations on why the "blank slate" and "ghost in the machine" theories, and why they are (and tend to stay) so firmly entrenched in our collective psyche tend to meander a bit further than they should into the intrinsics of academia. Overll though this book appealed to the realist in me hence the 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: The best of its kind that I have come across.
Review: This book is a must read for any young student. I say this because if you are a young student, anywhere in the western world, you will no doubt be soon indoctrinated into a worldview that is based primarily on the very ideas that this book refutes with a mountain of scientific evidence. It just might save you from a great deal of anguish, lost time and wasted money.
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Summary: Pinker's reprise - A reply to the Left-wing Darwinist Retort
Review: This is an excellent book. It argues in the preponderance of evidence style. This style might occasionally seem a bit overconfident but it is an overconfidence borne, I believe, of both frustration and disbelief. The frustration and amazement stems from the persistence and pervasiveness of the blank slate in spite of its occasionally obvious insufficiency. Try envisioning yourself getting into an argument over the proposition that standing in the rain will get you wet and you begin to understand the tone of the book. The jury is in and it is clear that the preponderance of evidence falls in favor of human nature as nature (not as nurture). An earlier reviewer (July 10, 2003) attempts to redact infinite malleability in part on the basis of neuroplasticity. The fact that the visual cortex can, under extreme circumstances, take over auditory and tactile function isn't particularly damning to Pinker's thesis. Adaptation to the environment, especially in a pre-modern setting, requires physiological plasticity. Yet it seems clear that undoing that which was written into our genes by nature's crude and inefficient brush over hundreds of thousands of years may well require such a level of effort that it is effectively unattainable. Are we really willing to require blindness en masse for the rather nominal benefit of having sound and touch processed by the formerly sight specific region of the brain? While I agree that plasticity does allow for some level of non-explicitly genetic manipulation of our bodies (obvious to anyone who has lifted weights) I suspect that attempting to 'overwrite the palimpset' written over hundreds of thousands of years might (and has) instead end up destroying the document entirely. The leftist darwinist will not find refuge in the sort of extreme environmental manipulation necessary to bring about the kind of change previously requiring such relatively effortless gestures as revolution and/or re-education. Let's not replace nature's bludgeon with culture's bludgeon. Instead, why not manipulate the source directly? Alas, the ghost in the machine is almost reflexively opposed to manipulating our genes DIRECTLY. The human nature as predisposition-to-nurture is really just a sophisticated rehash of the ghost in the machine. Fortunately the cacophony of contradiction and incoherence so ably described by Pinker applies almost as well to this incarnation. For example, how can one consistently argue that correcting one of nature's defects (cancer for instance) is good while making available ways to prevent such a disease in the first place by directly manipulating our own DNA is bad? If intelligence is so valuable in an information age, why shouldn't we be able to purchase 'stronger' brains for our children in the womb?
Rating:
Summary: Short review for a long book
Review: After spending some weeks moving through Pinker's work, I can say he has rehabilitated the notion that there is a human nature, that homo sapiens is a species with some basic patterns of perception and response. The idea that the human race can be molded beyond its species-capacity meets with damaging evidence to the contrary. We are very adaptable but we are not blanks slates. A good reminder to "know your species and know yourself".
Highly recommended
Rating:
Summary: Smart, sassy, funny and readable science
Review: Stephen Pinker is a chaired professor of cognitive neuroscience at Massachussets Institute of Technology. He's a serious scientist first, a popular author second. Pinker's fundamental position is predictable, if you've read his other books. The human mind didn't just happen -- it evolved. It has been evolving for 100,000 to 500,000 years -- depending on which orgnanisms you wnat to call human -- and shares many more features with older apes, and mammals in general. There's a very large bibliography, mostly citing high-quality scientific research published in the last ten or fiftteen years. Pinker backs up everything he has to say. He is not publishing new findings. He's summarizing current knowledge. "The Blank Slate" is a synonym for what other authors have called the "Standard Social Science Model." According to the blank slate model, all we are, all do, all we think and feel arises from experience that has occurred since birth (plus maybe a little in the uterus). This is ridiculous on its face, because so much research in behavioral genetics has repudiated it. But the problem goes deeper. We don't just inherit certain personality traits or physical features. We inherit human-ness itself. As usual, Pinker gives short shrift to individual variation. He's interested in "human universals." He's referring to a rapdily growing list of characteristics that are found in (almost) every human culture for which there is an ethnographic record. Most anthropologists are horrified by this kind of thinking. They were outraged twenty years ago when Paul Ekman carefully confirmed Darwin's observation that human facial expressions of emotion are the same all over the world. Now, that's just one of hundreds of well-documented human universals. Anthropologists and other social scientists are troubled because they are married to the "blank slate model." They seem incapable of thinking outside of that box. Pinker shreds the box and sets it on fire. In many cases, they also have academic turf to defend. I have a doctoral degree in psychology. Scientific psychology is stuck in a dreadful swamp of theoretical confusion, contradictory findings, and low quality science. It's stuck because the "blank slate" model just doesn't work. It doesn't "fit the data" about what people are really like, and what human history really has been. Psychologists have trouble understanding that human history didn't begin 150 years ago in Vienna, or 5,000 years ago when the pyramids were built. That was just the last 1 to five percent of human history. P>Pinker writes so clearly and concisely that his prose seems to sparkle on the page, and he knows lots of great jokes and funny stories, which he puts to good use to emphasize and clarify his position.
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