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Summary: Blank Slate is erased
Comment: Stephen Pinker does an admirable job debunking the myth of the blank slate in this tome. Yes, what
he says should be common sense by now. No, it is not.

There are many places in the
book where Pinker's values and background become evident. However, these are a small price to pay
for a great book.

So, what does Pinker do that's so great?

1) He takes
his opponents seriously and mounts his case slowly, step by step, taking the reader along with
him.
2) He illustrates that having a blank slate view of human nature is not morally righteous
at all. (important for all those disposed to the moralistic fallacy)
3) He does not talk down
to the reader. Contrary to another reviewer, this book is not overly simplistic. There are points
here and there where debate is possible, but overall it is highly accurate.

When you
are done with this book, you should have no doubt that genetics and evolution were and are very
important in human life. Natural selection is the only theory which can explain human behavior-
period.

On the more controversial side, Pinker devotes many pages explicating Judith
Rich Harris' theory about child development. Her views are very contentious, but provocative. Her
basic argument is that children are MORE influenced by peer group socialization than the parenting
style they lived under. Harris reached this conclusion after studying the behavioral genetic
evidence. In behavioral genetics, it is known that all measured traits are heritable. Further, after
subtracting genetic influence, unshared environment accounts for most of the left over variation-
not shared environment. This is perplexing to most because it suggests that most environmental
influences on personality come from WITHIN families not BETWEEN them. In short, two adopted siblings
are no more alike than two strangers on the street, even though they share the same environment.
Wheras, two twins seperated at birth are no more different than two twins who grow up in the same
household.
Pinker largely accepts Harris' theory, with slight reservations. D.C. Rowe
presented a similar theory years earlier as well. The controversy still rages. It is a bit premature
to pick sides. Pinker seems to, but he does tell the reader that Harris' theory is the minority
view.

In the end, this book can be read with pleasure by anyone. It is especially
usefull to cite as a reference when having vapid debates with soiciologists. Most of Pinker's
statements should be truisms. Unfortunately, they are not; Fortunately, he took the time to
synthesize the insurmountable evidence against blank-slaters!

Customer Rating:

Summary: Weak
Comment: A friend lend me this book after a discussion. I am not impressed.

In "The Blank
Slate", Pinker attacks the concept, giving the book its title, that we are born without any
behavioral predispositions, and "The Noble Savage", that pure humans were all complete, moral
beings. Although I agree with him that both of these are wrong, I think he is clearly attacking
straw-men here. I don't know anybody who has given the topic any serious thought who would think
that way. Pinker gives some examples of opposition to the idea that human behavior has a biological
basis, but I think these trends are more fringe than he makes them seem. You will always get a
segment of society opposed to any politically relevant scientific insight - look at evolution. There
is no serious intellectual discussion anymore that behavior has partially a genetic basis. />
But the main problem is that Pinker is at most half-educated when it comes to some of the
subjects he writes about. He makes statements which are either plainly wrong or so overly simplistic
that they are meaningless. He takes the fact that the cortical folds are relatively conserved across
humans as an argument that our behavior is genetically imprinted. But really any type of "Blank
Slate" hypothesis would still be consistent with a constant large-scale brain anatomy. />Another striking example (also noted by another reviewer) is his claim that "Bonobos are some of
the most peaceful mammals known, chimpanzees some of the most aggressive. Chimps have sex for
procreation, bonobos for recreation". First of all, that is simply not true - there are highly
interesting, but certainly gradual differences between these apes, but none of them that radical. No
chimp can match a lion in terms of aggression (both as a predator and as a practitioner of
infanticide). Sexuality equally has a social role in chimps (and of course a reproductive role in
bonobos).
Second, it is just not a scientific statement - I am not aware of any zoologist
making a ranking of the most aggressive or peaceful animals, and these qualities can probably not be
expressed in scalar values (and thus ranked) anyway. Pinker sounds like somebody who has talked at a
party to someone who had read a book about chimps. The book is filled with such
over-generalizations, exaggerations and mistakes. Especially neuroscience (my own field) is not
Pinker's strength!

So, a rather sloppily argued book falsifying some opinions which had
been falsified a long time ago. I am not sure what this is supposed to achieve? It might be that I
am not the target audience for this book, but it is not the type of reading material I want to
better myself as an intellectual. This is clearly not an original contribution to any scholarly
debate, and not a well researched popular science book likely to convince anyone still believing
that biology has nothing to do with human behavior either.

It is a great art to write
science books interesting to the expert but understandable to the layman, readable and without
jargon, but not dumbed down. Writers like E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins have mastered this art,
Steven Pinker has not.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A must read for anyone interested in human nature
Comment: I am a big fan of Steven Pinker, and this, in my opinion, is his master work. Beautifully written
(as always), it is sweeping in its scope. It demolishes the idea that humans are infinitely
malleable and have no fixed nature.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A Discussion on Human Nature
Comment: Pinker argues in favor of evolutionary psychology in this book rather than a blank slate view of
human nature (i.e., a view that claims that the mind is formed purely by sensory input with no
innate characteristics). Although the arguments in the book mainly focus on the blank slate theory
of the mind, Pinker also argues against both the noble savage and the ghost in the machine views;
the first view claims that humans are corrupted by civilization (such that the pre-civilization
communities lived in a sort of utopian setting) while the second view claims that human thought is
controlled by something outside the mind (e.g., a soul). Pinker cites a number of studies in this
book to support his thesis that the mind is not a blank slate but that it has some characteristics
that cannot be explained by environment alone (many of the studies involve identical and fraternal
twins where identical twins have identical DNA but fraternal twins have distinct DNA) and argues
that human nature is heavily influenced by the evolutionary process from which the human species
arose.

This is the first Pinker book that I have read and I found it very
thought-provoking. Pinker is a gifted writer and made what I thought were compelling arguments
against both strictly environmental and, to a lesser extent, strictly nativist theories of the mind
(i.e., the views that human minds are influenced either entirely by nurture or entirely by nature).
It took me a little while to get into this book simply because the idea that our minds are silly
putty never has held much appeal for me; thus, I had little motivation to read arguments against a
viewpoint that I did not subscribe to in the first place. However, Pinker brought up many familiar
views in areas like children, violence and politics and tied these views back to underlying,
fundamental assumptions of human nature to illustrate how the various theories of the mind have
influenced many popular views in ways that are not always apparent, even to those who hold these
views.

Pinker argues that our social views and attitudes, especially the most
important ones involving ethical values, should not be made dependent on what may turn out to be a
faulty view of human nature. For example, Pinker argues that a concern for human rights is important
because a society full of inequality, abuse and torment is one that the majority of humanity would
not desire to live in; the fact that we have the ability to empathize with our fellow humans and, in
some sense, "feel their pain" creates an even greater moral imperative to work towards a reduction
of suffering. Conversely, Pinker states: "It is a bad idea to say that discrimination is wrong only
because the traits of all people are indistinguishable. It is a bad idea to say that violence and
exploitation are wrong only because people are not naturally inclined to them. It is a bad idea to
say that people are responsible for their actions only because the causes of those actions are
mysterious. And it is a bad idea to say that our motives are meaningful in a personal sense only
because they are inexplicable in a biological sense." I am inclined to agree with these sentiments
and I would recommend this book to others who are interested in a discussion on human nature with an
evolutionary bent.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Good ideas but a little tough to digest
Comment: This book has some solid ideas, but they get lost in the wording. If the author wasn't trying so
hard to use his SAT vocabulary, then I'm sure the book would've been at least a bit more fluent. It
seems to be targeted towards a very academic background, and makes references to advanced topics in
several areas of scientific research. All in all, an interesting read if you have the necessary
background and the time to decrypt it. For me, that wasn't possible.

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