The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

As described by some of the best reviews, this book is as much or more about the tides of toxic political and social ideology we're all wading through, as it is about human biology or human behavioral development. That said there's enough detail here on the subject of classic twin studies, heritability, and related topics to provide the proper grounding for Pinker's main argument: which is that the idea of a blank slate — at this point in our scientific journey as humans — has literally no legs to stand on. Those pushing the blank slate narrative basically missed the memo: nature vs. nurture is a settled match and nurture (mostly) got its butt kicked. Pinker sets the stage from there to give the reader some useful perspective on how to approach some of these woke tides we're facing.* Quick Diversion *For the uninitiated, if you follow the largely settled science of "nature or nurture", it can really lead us to only one place: the answer is "yes, but far more nature than nurture." Of course environment and the manner in which a person is raised can directly affect their psyche and other aspects, but it doesn't and could never build a person out of nothingness. Nor does it create an impact anywhere near as profound as our genes. Based on what we know now, who we are — our personality traits, innate strengths and weaknesses — is about 65% genetic, another 20% a function of human developmental biology (i.e. given the same sperm and egg, all sorts of things happen within the human body during that 9 months which make it impossible for those two cells to develop the same way twice — how you developed in the womb, was and only ever could be, a one-time event (!)All those trillions of cellular operations that began you and continued outside the womb until roughly age 24 — simultaneously encoded and guided by our DNA and RNA, and also subject to a defined-range-of-randomness that occurs inside all organisms — had a direct impact on the specifics of your brain's wiring and by extension your way of perceiving and thinking, and on your behavior. Had your mother's womb been a little warmer, a little cooler, repleat with a diffierent combination of chemical nutrients on different days (and on and on), that same sperm and egg could've developed into a somewhat different person than who you are today. Maybe a bit more assertive, or a bit less risk-taking. Slightly rounder face, maybe slightly bigger ears. You get the idea.This is why the sterotypical depiction in the media and hollywood about human cloning — or even cloning of pets — is misguided. Even if you take your dog Sir Bark-a-lot's exact DNA and clone him, you may end up with a dog that looks virtually the same but instead of barking a lot, the conditions of his development might yield a quieter dog with digestive sensitivities — enter Sir Barf-a-lot. You "forever pup" people looking to clone your best friend have been warned. *grin*The rest of who and what we are can logically be attributed to "nurture" — our families, environmental advantages or disadvantages, and the like. But in the end it wasn't much of a contest once we started understanding human genetics and neuroscience at a deeper level.* End Diversion *Back to the book: Pinker could've filled the whole book with evidentiary content related to biology and environment, overloadig us with stats and sound-bites, but that's not what the book is about. Pinker is a brilliant mind who pulls no punches when it comes to the zealotry of the blank slaters, but he does it in a way that is thoughtful and measured — something pretty rare these days (especially in the media). For this reason alone you should read the book to get some perspective that you are unlikely to get elsewhere.Ultimately Pinker wants us to do two things we should all be able to do, but often fail to do — hold two related but somewhat competing thoughts in our brains at the same time:1)Hold in your mind the settled science that we are who we are, largely because of our genes and the molecular processes at work in the human body during embryonic and early years development, with a modest amount accounted for by human experience afterward... and...2) the idea that it is not necessary to take the woke approach, that you don't have to get to "a better here, by going there" (i.e. believing there are 8 billion blank slates defining mankind as a hopeless cause that needs to be reigned in by a system of vigilant do-gooders and policy-makers). We can simply say who we are as a society is definitely flawed, and act on it. There is injustice and cruelty and war afoot; we can and must speak out against them (as the woke will do), but we don't need twist settled biological science into a pretzel and add a helping of righteous indignation to do it.Buy the book. You'll learn a lot and maybe can even glean a few ideas how to get the well-meaning wokesters in your clan to settle down a bit. : )

Note that this is more of a commentary than a review - this book needs it! Pinker's other books were more fun to read, because they were about cognitive science and linguistics. This book is very verbose and seems self-indulgent at times, but he gets his points about culture very clearly. Pinker tries to inform social sciences in this book, rightfully so, but he often seems to break out into tangents. I feel the book could be divided into many different parts given the scope of ideas he wanted to deal with, and some parts could have been removed without any loss to his argument. Many of the things he may mention may seem trivial to the informed reader, but they were novel when the book was written.The central idea of his book is about the three main ideas present in the History of Western Philosophy and ingrained in public and academic consciousness: The Noble Savage (`we are born noble, but corrupted by society') , The Blank Slate (`tabula rasa' - we are born without any innate mechanisms and the blank is filled by experience) and The Ghost in the Machine (`we are guided by a spirit and our thoughts are not a product of our nervous system').Pinker wants to use evolutionary theory as a base for the idea of innateness and advocates for a paradigm shift away from thinking of humans as only learning through experience. We are made witness to a beautiful demolition of the concept of political correctness or the phenomenon of moral outrage based on faulty logic when it comes to evolutionary psychology. This is based on moral self-gratification and an ill-informed fear of the post-Nazi phobia of commentary regarding genetic bases of behaviour. No one likes biological determinism, some parts can be scary, but you can't afford to close your eyes to statistical results that show that intelligence and some positive traits are hereditary. He points out this hypocrisy beautifully, and I'll quote it again in it's elegant form "I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are OBSESSED with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another". Following into the normal traps of academic life, Pinker's avoidance of the silly liberal bias of academics that equality is natural is avoided ("political equality is a moral stance, not an empirical hypothesis").Pinker writes about nature from his natural habitat of linguistics and Chomsky's idea of language "growth" as opposed to "learning." The mind is reduced to its prewired computational functions. The Ifaluk tribe has an emotion called 'song' ("state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction") analogous to the Western emotion of 'anger'. Pinker feels that language is based on observable behaviour, but both emotions may arise from the same brain functions endowed by our evolutionary history. He puts it very aptly, "Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures".The book itself provides an introduction to evolutionary psychology, in fact, that is mainly what the book is about. You'll hear about all the normal controversial topics: the nature of altruism, aggression, child rearing and game theory. Some of his arguments are strong, others are very weak. For example, his claim that the idea of the Blank Slate is not feasible because "if our minds were malleable they would be easily manipulated by our rivals, who would mould or condition us into serving their needs rather than our own. A malleable mind would quickly be selected out". This is a hard claim to verify through empirical evidence, and it seems more like a convenient narrative than scientific fact.The real juice of the book comes when he discusses the behavioural roots of human conformity and imitation. He explains conformity as the information taken from others can help survival. Moreover, normative motives allow people to assimilate into a society by settling on a `cooperative equilibria' (money, public goods etc.) that allow for group survival.His ideas on culture are interesting to say the least: culture seems abstract and to transcend biology (not literally, thats ridiculous). He gives the perfect instance, take the sentence "English has a larger vocabulary than Japanese" could be true even if no individual English speaker has a larger vocabulary then a single Japanese speaker. "English language was shaped by broad historical events that did not take place inside a single head... at the same time, none of these forces can be understood without taking into account the thought processes of flesh-and-blood people". This is the perfect one-line justification for why psychology and biology have the license to comment about culture, breaking into the exclusive hold of the humanities. Yes, scientific analysis of culture may be nerdy and back-fitted, but science aims to fund truths, not necessarily ones that are interesting from every angle.His moral discussions are also brilliant: since our behaviours arise from our primitive hunter-gatherer roots, what does that mean for us in our modern society: "So if we are put in this world to rise above nature, how do we do it?" This is where his ideas of proximate (causes of real-time behaviour e.g. hunger, lust) and ultimate cause (the adaptive rationale that led to the proximate cause to evolve - hunger for nutrition, lust for reproduction) come in.A good third of the book that talks about genes and evolutionary psychology is better captured in a more straightforward and less verbose style by Gary Marcus in ` The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought ' that I reviewed earlier. It seems that in every book Pinker repeats the same basic ideas about language, making a lot of his books almost sound the same (quantification, compositionality and recursion in language). Worse, Pinker talks about perception and categories although the topics could have been removed from the book entirely.At this point, following the 'Know Thyself' chapter is precisely where the book should have finished or at least been separated into another book: the next part of the book is more about economics, ethics, public policy - something that can be endlessly commented on from this angle. My assertion is not that Pinker went off-topic; it's just that his commentary is lengthy. For instance - a good book on biology will talk a bit about the ethics of genetic engineering, but it will NOT dedicate half of it to it - that falls into a separate field of bioethics that should be dealt with independently.With regards to ethical commentary, if you have to read one example, read his example on the folly of the `naturalistic' defence of rape - because it gives the best example of how evolutionary history does not give us a moral framework to act in our modern environments - the view that rape would help us reproduce, so wouldn't that make it right to simply go in line with our primitive impulses since they helped us survive earlier. He does what every person must do in this field, and that is clear up the logic and the possible implications of everything he is saying - which he does!In terms of economics and politics, I would say that his most interesting idea is the one taken from Singer and the `expanding circle of moral consciousness' where we have started to empathise with more and more circles that go beyond our family and tribe all the way to larger entities including the whole of humanity. He has a curious answer to this phenomenon, coming from its has roots in the basic principle of survival: "you can't kill someone and trade with them too". However, when he reaches the point about politics and economics, it gets boring - and you can really tell that its not his field. He quotes the classics of political thought, only to claim that political science is 300 years outdated as it has gone without incorporating the new ideas about human nature from evolutionary psychology. However, I don't really think this view is justified, evolutionary psychology mainly gives a narrative, not novel observations. So, when the ancients Greeks were commenting about human behaviour - their commentary is just as applicable now - simply adding psychology and biology jargon might give it a scientific narrative, but will not invalidate the originality of their timeless observations. The way the reader reacts to the book will depend on how tolerant he is of repetition, what he already knows (thus how novel the ideas seem) and how straightforward he wants his reads to be. I like Pinker, but there is some magic missing from some of his writings. I will admit two things: I was about to put the book down twice before I forced myself to finish it, and it's not a book that I will be inclined to read again.(Apologies for dealing with the irony of reading a long review that includes criticisms about how long a book was - and my habit of quoting. I can't resist repeating a few beautifully written sentences.)

Excellent and in depth position related to human psyche, cognition,development and interaction among each other and the world. It should be required at College level.

I'm absolutely fascinated by the topic of human nature and genetic science. Particularly because I feel we've been getting the answers so dangerously wrong over the last 50+ years due to ideology, bias, and wishful thinking by all fields of social scientists. There are things we believe to be true just because we want them to be true. And if we don't have a competent grasp on the facts - then we are trying to solve big problems with very well-intentioned but dangerously wrong solutions. I feel there are incredible salient points within this book's pages, but I find myself skimming to find them. Pinker, to me, is a wonderful, thorough and thoughtful intellectual, just not an engaging writer and is unnecessarily verbose. In my opinion, the information he is trying to convey is incredibly important and it would be terrific to partner with another author to help disseminate the information in a more creative and illustrative way that is concise and accessible to the general curious public.

Brought it for my daughter for her birthday flight to NY. She loves it, and now uses it at work when she needs to concentrate. Her husband is so impressed he asked for one for his birthday. What could I do? A great gift therefore for someone you love, and also in my case for someone they love.

Though there is an element of "having a dig" at his peers, Dr Pinker writes very compelling arguments, both for and against the idea of human behaviour, being solely a product of nurture. He explores all avenues of existing theories and conjecture, laying them open and explaining their merits and downfalls.Anyone interested in the nature versus nurture debate should read it.

I've come to this one late after reading a couple of his other books. Very persuasive and well written overview of a complex subject. It runs out of steam towards the end, with a weak chapter on modern art, but otherwise brilliant.

Exceptionally thorough, methodically written, broad view and enlightening. It describes the scientific research in to the origins of mind and thought in detail, but also makes suggestions as to what brings meaning to life and being human.The knowledge contained within, if seriously considered and applied as to how you want to live your life, can change your outlook on everything for the better.