Blank Slate [Hardcover]

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.

Pinker explores the history of biological determinism, and dissects the major arguments against it, effectively proving his point by page 223; however, from that point onward, he discusses the "positive" applications of his research from a progressivist, scientistic, and individualistic viewpoint, thus affirming the very belief systems that gave rise to his much-detest concept of the "Blank Slate."

While the first half of this book is thus insightful and politically controversial research, the second half is the kind of social platitudes that one might expect from a professor who teaches introductory creative writing, not a lucid mind. However, the book remains important for its comprehensive and diligent tackling of what is perhaps the greatest pseudo-scientific mythos of our time.

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...