The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Rating:
Summary: riveting, broad and deep
Review: In his multidisciplinary tour-de-force "The Blank Slate:The Modern Denial of Human Nature" Steven Pinker has presented us with a landmark book. He challenges the three "received" theories, "Ghost in the Machine", "Noble Savage", and "Blank Slate", and with unparalleled clarity of both thinking and writing, examines the gaps and weaknesses of each one.

Without belaboring his points, he presents a defense of the findings of socio-biology and evolutionary psychology that detractors will find extremely difficult to refute. Pinker's approach is even-handed and rational, contrasting sharply with the convoluted, zealous attitudes of "Blank-Slaters" on both the right and left, who would force us to believe that nurture and culture are everything, and inheritable traits do not enter into a person's nature and development.

Common sense tells us that they do. As Pinker sprinkles his erudite work with pop culture examples, so I will use slang to sum up a dismissal of nurture-zealots of political/social theory: "Who ya gonna believe? Your dearly held theories or our 'lying' eyes?"

In my husband's work as a cloud physicist, he has encountered pet theories, encrusted with years and egos, which place obstacles in the path of true, bias-free research. It takes courage and strength to "cut through the crap" to replace it with clear vision and an open, balanced approach. Highest kudoes to Steven Pinker!

Rating:
Summary: Pinker is a Darwin right-winger: A retort from Darwin¿s Left
Review: Evolutionary psychology like politics has its Right and Left.

Both society and human nature raise the question: what is established and natural -- and what can and cannot be changed? In politics, the Right privileges the status quo and the well worn while denying that society can radically reorganize for the better. The Left celebrates our potential to advance, sees the past as oppressor, and liberation in what has yet to be.

Human nature has a similar conflict. The Darwinian Right sees human nature as already created when natural selection made our species. That evolutionary inheritance defines us - we cannot reorganize what is already laid down in the "status quo" of our genes. For the Darwinian Left, our genes are ingredients which get "cooked" by culture - tomorrow that transformation will be different -- and with it human nature.

The Darwinian Right has been looking for a manifesto, and that is what you get with Blank Slate. (For the Darwinian Left check out Stephen J. Gould, my recent book with Dorion Sagan, or his father, Carl -- or read this review's end).

Five stars for quality as manifesto and spin -- but its science merits nil - for Blank Slate distorts science where it does not fit the Right's storyline. Space prevents listing all but one contortion -- its evasion of the implications of neural plasticity.

The visual cortex has evolved for over 100 million years for sight yet in those born blind it processes touch and hearing. Likewise sight processing can be experimentally induced in the somatosensory and auditory cortices. The existence of such ectopic - wrong placed - cognitions refutes the Darwinian Right -- since these specialized cognitions exist in spite of lacking prior evolution. Why require evolution for our higher cognitions when neural plasticity can deliver them without its aid?

Pinker engages in spin by explaining away ad hoc the inconvenient reality of neural plasticity. He makes (page 85) the weak claim that such ectopic cognitions are "doing pretty much the same thing" across senses. He can give away that ground. But Pinker's right-wing Darwinism needs evolution for the "modules" of higher cognition -- if the same "doing pretty much the same thing" applies to syntax and semantics then the Darwinian Right is intellectually dead.

It is dead. The fatal sentence in the book occurs on page 93: "the plasticity discovered in primary sensory cortex [has been seen] as a metaphor for what happens elsewhere in the brain ... it is not a very good metaphor.". Pinker brazenly lies here - he has to -- to save his theory. It is however no metaphor -- as the honest part of Pinker knows full well -- higher cognitions can be ectopic (I pointed this out to him in an exchange, Pinker's reply to which grew into chapter 5: The Slate's Last Stand).

Brain tumors, for example, rarely cause higher cognitive problems since the functions of higher cortex areas they slowly destroy move onto neurons elsewhere. The recovery from brain injury and brain disorders likewise depends upon such flexibility.

But most importantly, functional imaging now shows that syntax and semantics activate the visual cortex of the blind. This discovery of language-in-the-visual cortex pulls the ground away from Pinker and the Darwinian Right. Pinker has to lie. If language cognitions can take up residence in the visual cortex, then evolution did not pack our brain with evolved higher cognition modules, full stop.

Pinker, the Darwinian Right-winger is also guilty of 'criminal' irresponsibility. Dr. Anton Wernig fought the established idea that the broken spine could not learn to rewire itself through neural plasticity to let paralytics walk. That established idea stopped a generation relearning to walk - but its claim about spinal fixity was wrong: given intensive exercise, spinal neurons can pick up new walking skills. Pinker's lie will makes it harder for researchers to get funding for innovative therapies to aid the brain injured if that exploits what according to him is mere "metaphor". This bestseller thus could condemn you to avoidable cognitive impairment in old age since key therapies (thanks to the Darwinian Right) will now go unexplored. That is a crime against us all.

So what is the alternative to Pinker -- the Darwinian Left?

The brain as palimpsest. Evolution might write, but culture can scrape and wash that writing off like an ancient scribe and write human nature anew.

Evolution as the provider to the brain of a set of programming language procedures out of which culture can program complex, novel and exciting cognitions.

The brain as rewireable with new symbol based cognitions that reuse earlier evolved ape ones.

Evolution as the provider of a neural "combustion engine" upon which culture is fitted like a varied chassis (car, light-aircraft, boat, machine tool, electrical power generator) that gets powered into widely different human natures - the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, the Neolithic farmer, the Monk, the Aztec, the Mandarin, Bach, the mathematician, the bureaucrat, the Manhattan intellectual ...

Culture not as something dumb but smart picking out evolved traits so we get extended in new ways. Think here of architecture - evolution made us biped, thus architecture designs stairs - if we had the bodies of chimps, buildings would have climbing frames instead. Culture similarly fits itself around and extends the potentials of our evolved brains.

Human evolution that as Carl Sagan in Dragons of Eden observed shifted the propagation of information from genes to cultural transmission: "We have made a kind of bargain with nature: our children will be difficult to raise, but their capacity for new learning will greatly enhance the chances of survival of the human species"

Human evolution as evolution that divorced human nature from genes by selecting genes to aid the mind to get shaped extragenetically by culture.

The Darwinian Left is a fascinating story to read -- but for that you will have to look elsewhere than this book.

Rating:
Summary: Pinker's best to date -- pushing the science into philosophy
Review: Steven Pinker, who has previously plumbed the depths of the language's wellspring within our genetic and neurological makeup, returns with a far-reaching book that surveys in depth and detail the present understanding of the infrastructure of the human brain, and the implications that that structure has for our lives, loves, and morals. "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" takes us step-by-step through the possible explanations for human behavior: the blank slate - humans come without operating instructions and are wet clay waiting for the environment to impress upon them; the ghost in the machine - the existence of a supernatural specimen separate and apart from our physiologies that controls our choices and desires; the noble savage - we are born innocent, pure, and true, and it is human society that corrupts us; or that of Pinker's sociobiology / evolutionary psychology cohort -humans come wired with genetic predispositions, structures, and cognitive artifacts that inform our learning, behavior, and, ultimately, our morals.

At some length, and with great equanimity, Pinker follows the implications of each of these theories and their consequences for the structuring of our moral and civic order.

To take one: the ghost in the machine, most commonly proffered in religious explanations, Pinker understands that this autonomous soul appears to be an agent for good - for if the soul follows God's directives, how can it go awry? But yet, he asks, what if there is a God that commands us to be selfish and cruel, rather than generous and kind? "This thought experiment is not just a logical brainteaser of the kind beloved by thirteen-year-old atheists, such as why God cares how we behave if he can see the future and already knows. The history of religion knows that God has commanded people to do all manner of selfish and cruel acts: massacre Midianites and abduct their women, stone prostitutes, execute homosexuals, burn witches, slay heretics and infidels, throw Protestant out of windows, withhold medicine from dying children, shoot up abortion clinics, hunt down Salman Rushdie, blow themselves up in marketplaces, and crash airplanes into skyscrapers." His clean and fresh new reasoning brings into a new light many of the nostrums believed to be healthy, moral, and idealistic.

For Pinker, the genetic influences on our behavior are ever-present, though he is at pains to repeat that genes are influencers, not determinants. And it is these influences and tendencies that he calls on to explore subjects as wide-ranging as feminism, art, child-rearing, punishment, sexual attraction, and status symbols.

For one, the variability in citizens' reactions to varying levels of punishment are in part determined genetically, so that, as Pinker notes, one lash of a wet noodle may deter me, while it takes ten to deter you. Which brings an interesting light to the efficiency of justice debate - what if there is not a single set of punishments appropriate to all citizens? Should punishments be calibrated to genetic thresholds?

Pinker ties human behavior into the species-propagating necessities of cooperators: "In a social, language-using, reasoning organism, [punishment] can also deter similar acts by other organisms who learn of the contingencies and control their behavior so as not to incur the penalties." And he follows through and takes on to the implications for our species, our times, and ourselves.

There are unconvincing elements in Pinker's argument that do not undercut his overall achievement, but do establish areas for future inquiry:

Gifting, sweet nothings, and shows of romantic love have been selected for in our breeding (those of our ancestors who behaved this way thrived, and produced us; their contemporaries did not). Pinker here distinguishes ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) and proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). And he asserts that the fact that something has an ultimate causation (ostentatious displays to attract a mate to pass on genes to the next generation) shouldn't deter us from enjoying its proximate causation (she thinks you're cute). Nonetheless, one feels a bit deflated knowing that our suitor's genes put her up to it. Similarly, he fails to make anything but the negative case for free will, asserting that determinism is impossible to calculate, or that there are "random" variables for which we can not control.

And in discussing the morality of sexism, he asserts that even IF there was a genetic basis for discrimination in one direction or the other, we as a democracy have asserted that we value people as individuals and wouldn't tolerate that level of discrimination. Which begs the question, what in our human nature presupposes that democracy is the correct form of government, or that its functioning is in tune with human nature? Pinker the Philosopher is not as expert and thorough in his field as Pinker the Scientist.

Pinker undoubtedly presents a discomfiting challenge to post-modernists, despite which, there is nothing inherently "right-wing" about this work. It skewers fashionable thinking of all flavors. To cite just one example, he points out that, the "heritability of intelligence ought to galvanize the left into a greater commitment to Rawlsian social justice."

As a writer, Pinker is hip, informed, and inclined to use Dilbert cartoons or Who lyrics when it illuminates his point. Despite these common touches, he thankfully does not veer off into the cloying or over-familiar. In this large and busy book, Pinker packs in one-sentence summaries of papers that leave one yearning for a heavier author's hand in the footnotes - he is sparse, too sparse, in his citational tangents!

Thankfully, this will not be Pinker's magnum opus. Too many of the questions he raises and explores are out to the jury pending additional evidence. But by pointing the searchlight in the deep dark jungle, he has illuminated a path for fellow scientists, philosophers and citizens to explore in search of the roots of our morality.

Rating:
Summary: Erudite, worldly, fascinating, and an education
Review: This is, as is the case with everything I have read from Steven Pinker, a tour de force of erudition and gracile expression filled with a super-charged energy and a diabolic dry wit that delights those who agree with him, confounds and makes jealous those who disagree, and informs those whose tabulae are relatively rasae. In a sense Pinker is the Richard Feynman of the social sciences, a man universally recognized as brilliant, exceedingly articulate (and not shy about demonstrating same), a kind polyglot/polymath who loves the center of the stage. Here he takes the podium in a grand hall and begins with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the empiricists Locke and Hume, the vitalist Descartes, the romantic Rousseau, the political philosophers Mill and Hobbes, etc., and leads us step by step to the absurdities of the present day postmodernist left.

Of course Locke and Hume and Mill and Hobbes are not to blame for the absurdities. (I'm not so sure about Rousseau and Descartes). Their ideas were state of the art for their time and have been, shall we say, uniquely interpreted for today's postmodern agenda, an agenda that Pinker sees as denying humans human nature. The idea that the mind of the newborn is a tabula rasa, or a blank slate, was discredited long before Pinker's fingers ever graced a keyboard, and the sad but beautiful delusion of the Noble Savage, like that of the Garden of Eden, has likewise been set aside by twentieth century science; however the Ghost in the Machine, the vitalist revision of the doctrine of the homunculus is stubbornly flitting about deep inside the layers of our ideas, and Pinker is determined to peel away the layers and arrive at the center where there is nothing at all.

The ghost in the machine, like the phantom of the opera, haunts our imagination, but unlike the denizen beneath the Paris opera house, the ghost does not exist at all. Rather like Freud's id, the ghost is a construct of culture, employed to explain the mysteries and to separate us spiritually from the animals of the forest. The ghost is an expression of Descartes's dualism in which there is the plane of the material world on the one hand and the plane of the spiritual on the other. And we (it is concluded) are not merely material but suffused with a spark of the divine, and so we are simultaneously material and spiritual. As the Police phrased it, "We are spirits in the material world." One is also reminded of the idea from the East in which the Atman of our soul is a drop of water in the ocean of Brahman.

As a religious idea this works very well--at least to my discernment. However as a basis for a scientific understanding of the human being, which Pinker insists upon, it is no explanation at all. Indeed, it is something like (as a naive religion might say about what holds up the world) another turtle standing upon a turtle standing upon a turtle until it's "turtles all the way down." Or, since one might demand to know what is inside the homunculus, it's like an infinite Russian doll, little men to the very center of the mathematical point.

So Pinker is delightfully (I must say) guiding us to a scientific understanding of the contemporary world unencumbered by ghosts and pre-formed little men. He is especially anxious that we understand that there is more to the human mind than what society might etch on it, and that heredity counts in larger amounts than the politically correct culture would allow.

I could--and would I had the space--go on. But read the book. Pinker is at once a purveyor of intellectual delights, an entertainer for those who have graduated from the pop culture, an enlightened infomercial, and a scholar of unusual depth and breath who can write like the wind.

However, I have always been the sort of student who graded the professor's exam just to keep him on his toes, and so allow me this one little guidance. On page 37 Professor Pinker demonstrates (from Chomsky) why the number of sentences that one may utter is theoretically infinite, and goes on to say that "...if the number of sentences is infinite, the number of possible thoughts and intentions is infinite too..." But it is especially when we are dealing with the infinite (which is a kind of ghost in the formulas itself) that we must emphasize that we are speaking theoretically. The sentences we may utter are infinite if, and only if, we had an infinite amount of time to speak them. As a practical matter (and to be rigorous about the meaning of the word "infinite") there are actually an indefinite number of sentences that humans can actually utter and therefore an indefinite number of "thoughts and intentions" that we may realize. (Boy, do I wish Amazon supported italics, but you may be assured that the word "indefinite" is being emphasized in the last sentence.)

It may seem a pedantic point of limited utility to differentiate between "infinite" and "indefinite"; however it goes right to the heart of Pinker's argument. If he will not allow a spiritual entity morphed as a humonculus or a ghost to haunt about the human brain, I don't think he can allow the purely abstract notion of the infinite to further his case. We are finite creatures living a finite existence. It is only in religion that we become infinite.

Bottom line: Yes, Pinker could say as much in fewer words (the book is 509 pages long), but so could Shakespeare. Would we be the better for it? A little meandering, a bit of a stroll in the lush greenery instead of a beeline to the nearest conclusion is Pinker's style.

Rating:
Summary: Magniloquent In The Extreme
Review: Being new to the cognitive sciences I chose to read Pinker's book after seeing him on TV, and being entertained by his engaging topic, as well as his comfortable style of communicating. The book's content is highly thought provoking, and covers a lot of ground regarding human nature. Unfortunately Pinker's style of writing is too magniloquent, making the book a difficult read. Pinker should have made the book eminently more readable so that it could have appealed to a broader audience. His style of writing is complex and I fear the core teachings will be missed by the majority of readers. Peter Drucker once said that an academics job is not the acquisition of knowledge itself, but the dispensing of this knowledge in such a manner that humanity at large gets to benefit therefrom. In this regard I think Pinker has achieved only slight success. But as he put it, academics are obsessed with intellect therefore it is highly probabilistic that this obsession would manifest itself in a book, in this writing style. Too bad. Nevertheless at the price the book is worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Must read!
Review: This is an mazing book which changes the way you treat everyday life and are forced to rethink what you take for granted - children, parents, the sexes etc. I particularly liked Part V ( and would highly recommend that to anyone familiar with EP concepts and not wanting to read the whole book) in which Pinker takes on especially challenging topics and issues and argues them very methodically and emphatically.

Rating:
Summary: Profound, Challenging but Sometimes Fearful of Itself
Review: This is a well-written, exhaustive exposition of a controversial question, that is, the influence of human nature and genes on behavior. It is also a scientific history, a revelation as to the dramatic impact of Leftist politics in what is supposed to be a scientific debate.

In fact, it debunks and deconstructs the Leftist lies that permeate our college campuses and mainstream media. It raises a host of controversial questions on a number of hot button issues. From raising children to racial and sexual preferences, from socialism versus capitalism to the causes and solutions to violence, the professor's argument dramatically undermines the premises behind the Left's conventional catechism, that is, the answer to our problems is to create a "perfect" culture or society.

The credibility of the work is reinforced since the author himself has an unimpeachable liberal bias. He does not make his claim as to the larger influence of the brain's "hardware" over culture's "software" because he is predisposed to do so, but rather because he is a scientist who is committed to the truth based upon the evidence. As should be expected, most of his critics appear to be doctrinaire leftists who simplify his answers and accuse him of the kind of "spinning" that they themselves seem to practice in order to adhere to their more radical, unsubstantiated beliefs.

The best part of Pinker's work is its compelling, logic-driven analysis. For example, one cannot presume there is discrimination against women in the workforce if their distribution in various fields reflects genetic predispositions over which culture has little control. Unfortunately, most Leftists would not even consider the question since to even raise it would be considered "politically incorrect" or "sexist." Professor Pinker not only poses the question fearlessly, he answers it courageously and contrarily to the current, cherished, feminist mantra that men and women are genetically neutral.

The worst part of his work is that sometimes the MIT professor's scientific exposition of subtle evolutionary, psychological and/or scientific concepts leaves one blinking between the lines guesstimating as to the true details of the scientific debate. But the general import of what the evidence proves is always clear and is reinforced by frequent intermediate summaries.

In the end, the good Professor does weasel a bit. Time and again he proves the basis for the Left's Utopian and Egalitarian dreams is ephemereal. Yet time and again he instantly provides his own handy interpretation of why the liberal solution to inequality, for example affirmative action, is always the right one. This bias is mitigated by the author's open admission that this is one of his purposes in writing the book, to form a sounder premise for liberal political policies.

Whether one agrees with all of the professor's politcal solutions, "The Blank Slate" must be considered a landmark in reorienting the debate over nature vesrus nurture. In one mainstream volume he skewers the Leftist tripe taught to students in universities today. From history to anthropology, from psychology to political science, from sociology to neuroscience, he argues convincingly that our problems are mainly in our universal genes and that the competitive culture of democratic capitalism is best suited to make us better individuals than any socialist or fascist utopia. In short, his work is a scientific cry for individual freedom and liberty, the cornerstones of traditional American values.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing Really New
Review: This book consists of concepts that have already been formulatd such as Carl Jung's denial of infants having a "blank mind" o a "tabula rasa" or a blank slab wen they are born. This was said before 1950 wy is Pinker credititng himself with this discovery? There is some useful an interesting information in this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Non-Argument with Straw Men
Review: Steven Pinker has written a book that I think we could have well done without. While I agree with him that a person's genetic makeup is highly important and that the extreme blank slate idea (that humans are born without a human nature and can be "written on" like a blank slate) is obviously flawed, I cannot follow the equally extreme idea that we are in essence only what our genes make us. As several people have pointed out in recent research the expression of a gene is primarily a dialog between genome and environment. Is there any reputable scientist today who believes in the absolute Blank Slate? John Locke (the originator of the idea) died in 1704 and the major 20th Century proponent of blank slate ideology, B. F. Skinner, had his own students eventually turn away from such ideas. The "Nature-Nurture" argument is to a large degree spurious because you cannot separate even unborn babies from their environment. It seems like Pinker is having an argument with Locke and Skinner and it is not surprising that he wins this argument. Unfortunately he takes the reverse (Nature) argument to the same sort of extreme. Obviously he will sell a lot of books because his views are in sync with the current political climate. This does not, however, make it science.

In recent times I have seen several books from both Right and Left (and for all I know, middle) of the political spectrum that are purported to "tell it like it is, or should be." These include ideas that we can improve on nature's "mistake" by genetically engineering carnivores to eat grass, that the universe is really simple and can be broken down into a few lines of computer code, and that humans lived contemporaneously with not only dinosaurs, but even Permian reptiles. Many of these books are thick (how one writes such diatribes is beyond me) and full more of the author's ego than of any solid empirical evidence. Pinker has now, unfortunately, added to the glut and despite his obvious gifts (he is a respected expert on linguistics), he has only produced more confusion. Straw men are easy adversaries!

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, but still thought-provoking
Review: I quite enjoyed Pinker's The Language Instinct. In it, Pinker introduces the idea that those who oppose the concept of a universal human nature on political grounds have gotten it backwards. While they argue that human possibility is limitless and that the very idea of a universal human nature is fascist and ethnocentric, Pinker counters that a completely malleable human nature (a blank slate) is a dictator's wet dream, that an understanding of our shared human nature instead places limits on how much we can be forced to change, and rather than being ethnocentric highlights our commonalities. The Blank Slate is an expansion of this view.

I came to this book as a sympathetic reader, but I feel that Pinker did not successfully defend his point of view. The biggest flaw is that he never quite solves the chicken-or-the-egg problem of human nature and human ethical belief. He argues that the human mind and therefore moral sentiment are evolutionarily conditioned. But if both violent conflict *and* an abhorrence of violence are innate features of the human mind, there doesn't seem to be any *ethical* reason for preferring the condemnation of violence to the use of violence. This problem is not fatal, but does need to be confronted. Instead, Pinker baldly asserts that just because our moral sentiment is an accident of evolution we are still justified in condemning certain other evolutionarily conditioned human behaviors. He amusingly but self-defeatingly quotes Katharine Hepburn from The African Queen as saying "Nature ... is what we are put in this world to rise above."

One way that he tries to get himself out of this mess is by introducing Peter Singer's concept of the Expanding Circle and Robert Wright's concept of evolutionary "progress" as a nonzerosum game. That is, civilization advances as our moral sentiment, based largely on in-group / out-group distinctions, recognizes a larger and larger in-group; and game theory combined with evolutionary theory suggests that culture will move towards greater and greater degrees of complexity, cooperation, and interdependence due to nonzerosum outcomes for all involved. While, again, I am sympathetic to this line of attack, Pinker has been stumping for a fairly orthodox version of Darwinian theory, and therefore needs to make clear that Wright's speculation is nowhere close to being accepted theory, and perhaps spend more time shoring it up himself.

While disappointing (and more polemical) compared to Pinker's other books, Blank Slate is nonetheless written in his usual engaging and witty style, with his typical wide breadth of reference and facility for making the arcane accessible. To sum up, a competent work, but it tries too hard to be a Big Statement, and fails.