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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature | 
| Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  198 reviews
Sales Rank: 19505
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0142003344
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.234
EAN: 9780142003343
ASIN: 0142003344
Publication Date: August 26, 2003
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Condition: New!
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Product Description
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 193 more reviews...
 One of the best books ever May 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Yeah, I dont mean to come across the wrong way but i do have a degree in philosophy and i honestly think this is one of the best books i have ever read. Even in light of Kant, Hume, Locke, (Descartes sucks), Aristotle etc... This book does NOT seem to create an original system of philosophical thinking, rather this book is a synthesis of all intellectual pursuits put together, Anthropology, psychology, neurology, philosophy, history, etc... His main thesis is determinism, which in my opinion will be the next revolution in the culture of mankind... Similar to the so called Darwinian Revolution... In a nutshell our brains, more than our environments or so called free will, control our actions...
I highly recommend this book...
Blank Slate is erased March 1, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
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!
 Weak February 23, 2008
7 out of 11 found this review helpful
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.
A must read for anyone interested in human nature December 26, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
A Discussion on Human Nature November 25, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
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