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Summary: A GREAT BOOK...
Review: ...and my favorite thus far by Mr Pinker. what is so cool and appreciated is that he writes about heavy topics that a layperson (like me) can understand and enjoy. required reading for all.
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Summary: Pinker and Parenthood Open the Mind
Review: This is an excellent book. I read it as my first child turned 3 when his personality began to bloom. Lo and behold he was a lot like me and his mum! So my mind well an truly open to Pinker's argument. I spent months afterwards peeling back the onion the on the implications for me alone!
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Summary: No Mo Po Mo
Review: No Mo Po Mo = No More Postmodernism.Steven Pinker has joined the "No Mo Po Mo" group by writing this book. Good for him! If you want to understand human nature, or (a much lesser goal) -- if you wanna understand a little bit more about human nature, you would do well to read J.R.R. Tolkien. Of course, the PoMo crowd cannot stand Tolkien, and froths at the mouth when he is mentioned. BUT (somehow) the greatest poet of the 20th century (W. H. Auden) loved Tolkien. How it will turn out remains to be seen! HIWATORTBS, all! :-) Jimmy
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Summary: Good BUT Please No New Secular Religions
Review: Let me start by saying that my political orientation is left-wing. That said, it is in my opinion very important that the Left read books like this one seriously. Pinkner is right to point out that much of the Left has had a knee-jerk, stupid, reaction to genetics. It is odd that the Left which once championed science has turned its back on one of the most important fields in that domain. It is important that the Left understand that there is such a thing as human nature, a human nature that is flexible but not infinitely malleable. When we think of developing a better world we must take that human nature into account; otherwise that human nature, repressed and muffled by ideologues, will assert itself in the most horrible way. One need only point to certain of the failed attempts in the Soviet bloc as evidence of this. The author makes a good point in saying that if social engineering were true, then what would prevent engineering a human race that submits to oppression and exploitation. Indeed it is our nature to resist enslavement. It is curious that some sectors of postmodernism, principally those who base their thinking on Deleuze and Spinoza, discuss at length the role of the body, however, they often resort to speculative thinking and I doubt many of them have taken the time to investigate genetics. Although Pinkner does labor to point out that culture plays a role in shaping who were are, at certain parts of the book I felt him slipping into reductionism. This was particularly true in the chapter on art, where he explains aesthetics from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. It occurs to me that evolutionary psychology does have something to say on this matter, but it would be a great mistake to reduce a complex human phenomenon to "the truths" of evolutionary psychology. Didnt we have enough of that in the 20th Century with Freud, Jung, Marx, etc? Many different schools of thought represent some aspect of the truth, but when we narrow our vision by looking exclusively through one prism, we usually finish by locking the world into a procrustean bed.
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Summary: Provocative but off-base on the arts
Review: I was very intrigued by the opening chapters of this book, which are thought-provoking and interesting. Where I sign out is when Pinker talks about morality, religion, and in particular, the arts. An awful lot goes wrong the this last arena: Pinker radically distorts the aims and intents of the writers and painters belonging to both Modernism and Postmodernism. I can't think of anyone who would BETTER defend Pinker's argument of the brain being like a random set of neural switches than Gertrude Stein. And doesn't Modigliani embrace and expand our notion of the beautiful (that was certainly what he wanted to do)? Moreover, Pinker attacks the very philosophers who would shore up his contention that there is no "ghost in the machine." Michel Foucault in particular actively refuted the existence of an "essential" self. Yet, here he is villified in a way that seems at once ignorant and unfair. Finally, Pinker's argument that the arts are connected to human beings' competition for status doesn't do credit to the ways in which creativity plays into cognition (see Stephen Jay Gould on this) and -- more relevant to Pinker's own area -- how creative acts signify a kind of super communication, when normal communication fails (see Hans Georg Gadamer and many others on this). The problem is, as both Carl Sagan and Gould, in more sophisticated ways, have articulated: human beings seem to be at once both heavily genetically determined and at the same time MORE than this, because of our complexity, and because of the ever-increasingly complicated impacts of culture, and technology. And by the way: NOT all emotional concepts are translatable into every language. Take French. There is no word for "to like" in the French language. The equivalent is roughly a modification of the word "to love" (aimer), and this disjunction (and the many others that come up in the process of translation) does suggest that cultures may operate differently in understanding and expressing certain "universal" emotions.
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Summary: An explosion of stars for this as for all of Pinker¿s books.
Review: I can't say I can read Pinker but only study him. I felt punch-drunk after ingesting The Blank Slate. It was like taking an intellectual super roller coaster ride hanging upside down. Wonderful. John Locke, the fool who had come up with the idea of the blank slate, is finally dead.
Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?
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Summary: Approach with caution
Review: I am revising my review of this book downwards, after investigating the allegations about Pinker's misrepresentations of Turkheimer. This book makes a good case against the noble savage, the ghost in the machine, and the blank slate -- but, frankly, I have known these ideas were rubbish for a long, long time. What strikes me as dubious is Pinker's refusal to stop thinking of the brain as a computer, and his dubious claims for the "achievements" of "cognitive science," which are practically zip unless you kidnap language research and call it cognitive science.
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Summary: Human nature is American?
Review: Before I read Pinker's book I thought science could say something definite about the world. And I am sure that Pinker himself shares this view. But in his writing he constantly deviates from this ideal. I have a whole page of quotations like "is likely to", "suggests that", "might have", "almost certainly not", "probably", "hints", "appear to have", "could turn up".
On this all but firm ground he erects a building that is said to be (more or less) definite: human nature. Who can believe that with all those uncertainties for starters?
I don't agree with the idea of the Blank Slate, which the book is set up to dispute, but neither do I find anything to hold on to in the idea of a human nature. I think both ideas are sprung from a wish to manipulate (more or less) with nature and human beings. They are called "explanations" but are in fact ways of belittling and alienating people.
Shakespeare is much more true to "human nature" when he lets Hamlet hold out the flute to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (as a symbol of himself or mankind) asking them to play on it. They can't of course. Noone can. But Pinker and other "scientists" think they can.
It is very strange, in fact unbelievable, that evolution or whatever created us, has mainstream American politics as a goal. But that is what Pinker arrives at when he puts his own words in the mouth of evolution (who never talked to anyone, by the way).
In his view of gender, male behaviour, childrearing, art etc he sounds like a crossbreed of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. And it seems he is not even aware of how utterly American his thoughts are! He sees a lot of traits and ideas that thrive only in the US as part of human nature!
To put it bluntly: I have never come across a more imperialistic book than this.
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Summary: Disappointed Former Fan
Review: I have read the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works and loved them both. I was expecting more of the same well researched, tightly argued, and engagingly written insights into our species. Frankly, it wasn't there. He frequently diverges into facile and trite philosophy, and makes many of the errors he rails against in the first few chapters. For example, when reviewing Stephen Jay-Gould's book "The Mismeasure of Man" he claims the book was written to debunk any theory of innate talent, not a theory that either follows from or is proposed by Gould who focuses more on the denial of the reification of the intellect. Puts the wrong words in others mouths, and pulls the wrong ones out of his own.
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Summary: A timely tonic for our timid times
Review: If there is a wittier and more engaging polymath than Prof. Pinker out there writing on psychological issues, I don't know who it is. In this book Pinker summarizes and presents evidence from many lines of research: cognitive psychology, neuroscience, behavior genetics, and evolutionary psychology, to show that humans have a basic, in-born nature. In American society's quest for perfect political correctness, however, this idea fell into disrepute among various intellectual circles in the last few decades, including feminists, minority advocates, and the post-modernist left. This is interesting, because in the past, this was simply called "human nature," and no-one with any education or common sense believed otherwise. At one point, back in the early years of the last century, the leading American psychologist, William MacDougal, as well as most behavioral scientists at the time, believed all behavior was due to instincts. While it is equally obvious that much of human behavior is due to learning and enculturation, there is no doubt that inborn or nativist influences are important as well. That this is no longer accepted as true just goes to show you how far the Hegelian dialectical pendulum can swing in the interest of spin rather than real science. This is doubly ironic considering that American scientists have done most of the important research and won most of the Nobel prizes in neurophysiology (which is my field), which, if anything, supports an even more nativist position than the cognitivist view. To give the spin doctors an example of this, I cite the phenomenon of the orgasm. Does anybody really believe that this is a learned rather than an inborn behavior? For one thing, we know what brain area this occurs in, which is in the somatosensory area of the thalamus, the large structure just below the cerebral cortex. If I remember correctly, it's in a center with the tongue-twister name of the nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis (I'm not certain about that anymore, but in any case, it's in one of the thalamic somatosensory areas). Anyway, the other interesting thing I learned is that some epileptics develop seizure focuses in this area. This means their orgasms go on for the length of the seizure, which is often several minutes. Especially the women patients say this is much more pleasurable than anything they could get before. Considering these people's orgasms last 10 times longer and are probably 10-100 times as intense as a normal person's due to the abnormally high neural activity level in the brain, that's not hard to believe, especially since these people basically lose interest in every other aspect of their lives, their friends, family, job, and so on, and basically have to be hospitalized. They just sit there, yearning, hoping, for that next seizure (which has no convulsions associated with it, so it's very different from the usual syndrome). Well, I didn't mean to dwell in so much detail on the neurobiology, but when one finds cases such as these, one is reminded that humans are the product of both nature and nurture. To mention just one more example, there are patients who, because of a microstroke, can no longer use conjunctions or articles in their speech, but are otherwise unaffected. And there are those who can name the purpose for an object such as a cup, but can't give the name anymore, or who can give the name, but can't say what it's for, as a result of a stroke in the language and association area of the temporal cortex. This demonstrates that the brain areas for the definition or function of an object versus just the naming or vocabulary storage function, are separate and distinct areas in the brain. After reading example after example of this sort of phenomenon in your studies, you very quickly get the idea that if it's not in the brain, it's not anywhere. And the brain is just the outcome of the genetics. So for a much more balanced view on this subject than the simplistic, pop-cultural pabalum that gets passed off as authentic science these days, I highly recommend Pinker's very well written and informative book. Even if you're of the other ideological persuasion, it'll give you something to think about and give you a better background with which to think about and discuss these important issues than the pop psychology discussions and politically motivated spins that are all too prevalent these days.
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