Rating: 
Summary: Predictably misunderstood
Review: This book, Steven Pinker's sixth, is probably his most ambitious work to date. It spans so many different topics that it's inevitable that many professors of social and behavioral psychology will get uptight when Pinker has the audacity to visit their territorial domains. That reality is an unfortunate but predictable outcome. Just look at the previous reader review from 12-26-03 and you will see the point clearly illustrated.
This is a terrific, albeit, imperfect book with a lot of great ideas and a boatload of bad news for many behavioral psychologists who have inundated our popular child rearing culture with all this advice about parenting styles and the ultimate effect on our children's outcomes. Pinker clearly gives evidence to the contrary: that our children become the way they are primarily from their genes (not quite the blank slate, is it?) and from the specific experiences in their lives, not necessarily just THE environment, but from the way the environment has specifically interacted with us. He also dispells the long held notions of the 'Noble Savage' and 'The Ghost in the Machine' (made most famous back in 1982 by Sting and The Police, of all people!).Again, this book is ambitious (perhaps to a fault) and far reaching with intense treatments of our understanding of politics, children, the arts, violence in our society, and gender issues. The most poignant questions Michael Moore asked in 'Bowling For Columbine' are eloquently addressed by Pinker in Chapter 17. With so many subject areas flying around, the author somehow creates a coherent thesis that ties it all together.
This is a great book that has much to teach us and, I believe, will be read for many decades to come. To understand
The Blank Slate is to understand much about human nature and our prevalent, ill-taught misconceptions that we all need to unlearn if we are ever to progress as a society.
Rating: 
Summary: Give Nature a Chance
Review: If our minds are not exclusively malleable by the "right" ideas about race, sex, religion, child-raising, art, and morality, will we ever come around to the "right" way of thinking? And if our behaviors are to a more-than-zero extent predetermined by our genes and our evolutionary heritage, do we thereby lose our soul, our free will, our very individuality? Heady questions for a popular science book by a Harvard psychology professor. But Steven Pinker is out to change minds, and he most definitely doesn't assume ours is just an eager vessel waiting for his wisdom. His dense, chaotic, but still very readable 'The Blank Slate' takes few prisoners, attacking not only the primacy of environmental malleability, but also its corollaries the 'noble savage' ("we're all born pure and good") and the 'ghost in the machine' (or, roughly, the equivalent to the religious soul) for good measure. I'd hesitate to say he runs the table, but if you come away from this reading still convinced of a biological tabula rasa, you certainly have some strong arguments to counter. Pinker is most effective skewering the roots of popular social science, which demonstrably believes in "all nurture" for a variety of largely political reasons. How can we change society, after all, if our brains aren't utterly receptive sponges for expensive, expert-driven, and oh-so-compassionate social policy? (Never mind that the impulse to create a "new man" has strengthened the hand of some less-than-savory social engineers.) Some icons come in for harsh treatment: among many others Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead and even the late Stephen Jay Gould take it on the chin for their slavish adherence to--or in some cases, creation of-- modern doctrines. Stylistically the author reasons best within--rather than across--chapters, first laying out the culprits and the political climate, anticipating the various fears supposedly engendered by his thesis, and finally tackling "hot button" areas such as politics, violence, gender, etc. where blank slate myths have taken the strongest root. His organization appears a bit chaotic--and occasionally, if understandably, defensive--but he's admirably thorough. The only content quibble I'd raise is the conspicuous lack of "race" among his contentious issues--though, to be fair, he bravely tackles discussions of racially-based biological differences judiciously throughout the book. My other criticisms are equally minor compared to Pinker's strength of ideas and style: an occasionally-strained attempt to lay blame on both the political left and right (where his clearest beef is with the left), and some truly painful pop culture references. Nothing against Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes, but are, say, lyrics from The Who appropriate in a serious science book? Overall, Pinker has made a strong case that practically begs for a response, especially from sociology scholars and scientists who've become a little too cozy with political institutions. If any aspect of the "nature vs. nurture" debates sparks your interest, by all means read this book. 'The Blank Slate' clearly shows Pinker's scientific optimism, remains nearly jargon-free, and only betrays some minor rough edges where a better editor would have been welcome.
Rating: 
Summary: Baby jesus
Review: I don't get it. Pinker is a nativist, right? Does that mean he likes to celebrate Christmas? And why does he have to write so many books about it? We all know it's the 25th of December and commemorates Santa Claus' birth. Go do some research Pinker!
Rating: 
Summary: A bid for celebrity, I guess
Review: Steven Pinker, once a good psychologist, has decided to become a guru, I guess. How else to explain this witty, clear, well-written, scientifically awful piece of work--and the speaking tour (not in universities or book stores for free, as academics generally offer, but in peformance venues for big-ticket prices) he has undertaken in its wake? Pinker knows better. If you do not know the psychological, psychiatric, and neurological literatures, you will probably find this book persuasive. If you know the literature, you are apt to shake your head in bewilderment. Bottom line: This book simply does not represent the "state of the art" in studies of the mind's evolution or the development of individuals' minds. And Pinker must know it. His misrepresentations astound me. For instance, he goes on for most of a chapter discussing approvingly Turkheimer's "Three Laws of Behavioral Genetics"--but does not bother to tell you that Turkheimer, an eminent behavioral geneticist, was being sarcastic when he formulated those "laws." Turkheimer's point was that in reality there are no such laws--that, as he says, behavior is "fiendishly difficult" to study and "so much of behavioral genetics has been oversold." "My intention was ironic," Turkheimer said in an interview for an APril, 2003, program of the AAAS. He says that taken literally, those laws "lead you to the wrong conclusions." Pinker uses Turkheimer to do just what Turkheimer was complaining about--overselling behavioral genetics, claiming that behavioral genetics has discovered things that Urkheimer was saying it hasn't. Pinker didn't know what he was doing in turning Turkheimer backwards? I think not. But maybe he was, I guess--maybe he just can't read accurately. Deceptive or obtuse? You decide. At other points, look closely at Pinker's footnotes. Where he tells us, for instance, how consistently genes have been found to determine traits (footnote 2, chapter 19), he cites only three studies--two about IQ and one, from 1968, long before the study of evolutionary psychology even existed, about correlating clinical judgment and psychological testing. That set of citations supports the idea that testing reliably shows genetic determination across the spectrum of behaviors? Of course not. Yes, the idea of the "blank slate" was a myth. Yes, our genes blueprint our bodies. Yes, our minds are our brains. Yes, understanding the mind, and the development of each individual's mind, requires understanding genetics. But Pinker grossly--and surely knowingly--misrepresents his particular take as having an evidentiary base and conclusiveness that just does not match the science. I teach evolutionary psychology in college, and I think I can make a fair claim to know the literature fairly well. The study of the mind's evolution has hardly begun in earnest, and you'd never get a whiff of the huge number of controversies "within" the field from reading Pinker. For instance, there are, in fact, both good evolutionary reasons and lab-derived evidence to suggest that attachment is important--though there is also evidence that traditional notions of attachment were mistaken. Pinker pays attention to the latter, never even lets you know that the former exists, and draws a highly partisan conclusion not shared by a huge number of scientists with reputations at least as good as his *within* the *research* community. This book illustrates what happens when a scientist decides he need not write for scientists, and that he need not accurately portray science for the lay reader, but instead should aim at getting a following. The methods used in this book work for for public persuasion, and they have made Pinker an icon of pop culture. But they do not by that measure gain in probity. Pinker just leaves the intellectual standards of the scientific community behind. Disgraceful.
Rating: 
Summary: dude! stick with what you know...
Review: Pinker attempts to do four things in "The Blank Slate":
1. demolish "the blank slate" concept
2. demolish "the noble savage" concept
3. demolish "the ghost in the machine" concept
4. use statistics according to Disraeli. Strawman-baiting notwithstanding, Pinker makes a good show toward his first two goals. He only deserves partial credit, however, as those ideas have far outlasted their intrinsic value and deserve the burial he gleefully supplies. Unfortunately for Pinker, the same cannot be said of "the ghost in the machine". That it should be conflated with the previous two over-ripe ideas is odd. While the "ghost" has appeared in many dubious incarnations, some of which Pinker uses as foils, "the ghost in the machine" can be reduced to the idea that "there is something about human nature that is beyond our ability to understand (AKA 'science')". Put in those terms, the concept resists sophisticated attempts at dismissal, let alone the light-weight ones Pinker employs. A clause like "we have every reason to believe that" (consciousness [derives from] neural networks in the brain - p.240) really means "we cannot conceive other than that" or "our faith affirms that". Apparently, what should be obvious is not: science is unable to define its own limits. Pinker also gets the proverbial raspberry for playing fast-and-loose with statistics in the final chapters. At least he is honest enough to mitigate his stance with some necessary caveats. He admits that prizing apart genetics and environment can be a tricky business. He admits that the adopting demographic has huge correlation within it. He mentions the crucial differences between "determines/affects" and "variance/outcome" but appears to have trouble interpreting these differences on occasion. He mentions the necessity of systematic influence. He could have mentioned the sample set size problem for twins-reared-apart studies, studies that have shown as much as 25% environmental influence, linearity and independence assumptions, free will as a source of measurement noise, etc. I suppose that the glosses were made in an attempt to make the whole more accessible to the masses, but the end result is that conclusions derive more from the assumptions than from the evidence itself. Finally, Pinker also indulges in the just-so-story-making that true believers have gobbled up throughout history. Passive? Aggressive? Got them both covered. Ethical? Violent? No problem. We can "explain" them both with ease. If a theory can explain any two conflicting phenomena without so much as a flinch, it is non-falsifiable and hence non-scientific.
Bottom line: I learned precious little about human nature from this book. Plenty about the foibles of academia, the politics of science, and the inertia of dogma -- but I was already familiar with all those topics. Recognizing this weakness in his book, Pinker defers, in closing, to the real experts on human nature: poets and novelists. Wanna learn about human nature? Read Tolstoy, Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Dostoevsky...
Rating:
Summary: Pinker is a great science writer
Review: With his typical lucidity of prose and clarity of thinking, Pinker reignites the nature/nurture debate. He defends the nature position so well that it is hard to be unconvinced by him.
Rating:
Summary: Steven Pinker's 'The Blank Slate' Précis
Review: Steven Pinker's book, "The Blank Slate," refutes a dominant social scientific paradigm of the Twentieth Century, the Standard Social Science Model. He particularly criticizes three prevalent themes, which have shaped this model: the Blank Slate idea, the idea of the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine idea as problematic or wrong. The idea of the Blank Slate, attributable to Locke, holds "that the mind has no innate traits" (... book description); the mind is therefore shaped exclusively by experience. The Noble Savage idea, deriving from Dryden and Rousseau, holds "that people are born good and corrupted by society" (Amazon.com book description). The idea of the Ghost in the Machine - "each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology" (...book description) - and usually attributable to Descartes, argues against the concept that humans are "just other hunks of matter in the biological world" (3) and that we can change that which we don't like about ourselves. Pinker's "The Blank Slate" marks the ascendancy of a biological view over a social one, and its significance lies in its brain-centered analysis of human behavior. Pinker argues that cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology bridge the divide between biology and culture, thus radically rewriting those aspects of the concepts of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine. Cognitive science continues to show in ever-increasing complexity how the mind "can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback," (31) how "the mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything," (34) how "an infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs," (36) how "universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures," (37) and how "the mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts." (39) By drawing on brain research, cognitive science therefore significantly redresses the Blank Slate idea. Neuroscience, the study of how cognition and emotion are implemented in the brain shows how our emotional lives, in conjunction with the way we think, are all seated in the brain's activity, an amazing thought for many people (41). Phineas Gage, who lost part of his brain in a railway accident, lived with perception, memory, language, and motor functions intact, but with a completely changed-for-the-worse personality (42). Scientists such as Gazzaniga and Sperry have shown that when the corpus callosum is cut, the brain's two cerebral hemispheres "can exercise free will without the other one's advice or consent" (43). Thus cognitive neuroscience is washing away not just the idea of the Noble Savage but also the concept of the Ghost in the Machine. Studies of identical twins separated at birth, reared apart and reunited years later show remarkably broad-based similarities, thus calling into question the Blank Slate hypothesis as well (47). Evolutionary Psychology researches the adaptive design or purpose of the mind as it was engineered in ancestral environments. It examines the way natural selection simulated engineering processes to examine the ways in which how well something works played a causal role in the way it originated (52). Evolutionary Psychology thus explains the reasons why the 'tabula rasa' isn't blank. The significance of Pinker's book lies in his positing that the Blank Slate is an empirical hypothesis about the way the brain functions, which has to be evaluated on the grounds of whether or not it is true (421). Cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolution are more and more showing that the Blank Slate idea is not true (421). The brain's incredible complexity, its amazing ability to mentally represent real and hypothetical worlds, and its powerful combinatorial computational ability all show that the brain has numerous innate traits (424) and that not all choices it makes are free from Darwinian evolutionary processes.
Rating:
Summary: Everyone, not just science junkies, should read this!
Review: Wow! About two years ago, I read Pinker's 'The Language Instinct.' Barely a year had passed before I read his 'How the Mind Works' and 'Words and Rules.' Each, of course, was amazing, erudite, well-researched and completely entertaining. I didn't think it possible but Pinker has gracefully outdone himself. Not only entertaining, this book is one that HAD to be written and I'm sure glad Steven Pinker thought the same! The title, 'The Blank Slate' is one of three commonplace theories that Pinker sees as contributing to the misdirection of politics, society and science in general. In brief, the belief that we are all interchangeable tabula rasas (the blank slate), that we are born with only good instincts only to be corrupted by society (the noble savage) and the existence of 'higher' spirit or soul in each human body (the ghost in the machine.) It's not hard to see why the blank slate is a bogus theory. Humans, as products, of biology have innate urges and are in a sense, genetically INCLINED towrds certain behavior. Why is the blank slate dangerous? Belief that crime can be 'unlearned' through rehabilitation, that 'reality' is simply a synonym for 'conditioned belief' that can be reframed at will, and that there is no thing as measured intellegence- all of these beliefs lead to socially disasterous consequences. It should be said that the authors goal is not shock us, stir up unnecessary contraversy or get off on offending his readers. This is not an anti-PC book; in fact, Pinker is admirably calm and well-reasoned. He discusses sciences relations to social policy, but doesn't preach about or disclose his political leanings. He talks about feminism but where he comes out against 'gender feminism,' he has nothing but praise for feminisms goals of parity and equality. To be sure, he lets us know that evolutionary science has tended to point towards the right by showing us that marxist and postmodernist interprestations of 'social reality' to be untrue. On the other hand, though, Pinker shows us that sciences insistence that while biology doesn't explain everything, it factors in to more than we think, alienates the right-wingers and backs certain left-leaning theories. In this way, science, and hence Pinker's book, is apolitical. In close, I have to affirm an observation below. At first glance, a commentary on the problem in the arts and humanities by scientist, Pinker seems not only a far stretch, but snooty. After reading the book in full though, I can easily say that it is not only the best chapter of the book, it ranks amongst the best discourses on the 'humanities slump' that I've ever read, easily beating out most by humanities professors. This book deserves every piece of it's 5 stars and then some!!!
Rating:
Summary: Breathtakingly Silly
Review: I've long been critical of sociobiology and its allied disciplines. But everyone from The Nation to the National Review was exclaiming gleefully that The Blank Slate is the best possible argument in their favor. So I decided to pick it up and make sure the arguments I've made still stand. They do. A thorough exposition of all the problems with this book is beyond the scope of this review. Pinker cherry picks those pieces of evidence that might seem to support his views and ignores the the vast amount of that which contradicts it. His distortion of the current state of anthropological knowledge is particularly severe. And of course, he tops it all off with the obligatory strawman attacks on Richard Lewontin and company. The sheer intellectual arrogance of this man is amazing.
Rating:
Summary: The Blank Fate - will the truth set you free?
Review: This is a deep and wide book about human nature, why you are you and I am me. The premise of the Blank Slate, that our nature is infinitely plastic and entirely formed by environmental factors, is refuted in this book. Instead, the author proposes a somewhat flexible genetic template modified by the environment, within definite, but not fully understood parameters. In the past, biological determinism has been tainted by fatalistic views on our inherent goodness or evil and accountability for our behaviour. The concept of free will, its influence on our behaviour and moral codes is a highly political and emotive topic so buckle up tight for the ride.
He spends many pages covering this aspect of human science, showing how and why, clearly unsubstantiated theories like the Blank Slate, the Ghost in the Machine, the Noble Savage, have endured, and in becoming part of folklore had an ongoing impact upon the education, political and economic systems of the West. Pinker slaughters many sacred cows, but this is no bloodbath. Dismembering religious, scientific and political bigotry in the search for knowledge, it is a crisp, rational attack. A banquet of disciplines get skewered - psychology, religion, evolution, politics, philosophy, all of which offer conflicting explanations for human nature. Racism, sexism et al, are discussed in search of the ultimate 'ism' - truth. These are controversial topics, so you're sure to disagree with some. But the logic is compelling and you will be hard pressed to justify an opposing view. A person with a razor sharp intellect, Pinker keeps the book clear, logical and jargon free, however it is not a trivial read. The breadth of topic and logic is quite staggering, making it a significant journey of 430 pages, yet few words are wasted, each page offering something of relevance. Accessible to the lay reader this book will also serve well as an academic text, so thorough is its approach and content. Predictably, the author takes a moral stance, defining morality itself as an external and independent entity, in spite of citing numerous examples of moral relativity that societies' exhibit. I found this at odds with the objective science in the book. Although Pinker does not introduce any single mind wrenching concept in his book, as Richard Dawkins does in "The Selfish Gene", the perspective is so clear and comprehensive, if you are looking for a single book on nature vs nurture, you will not do better than this.
|
