Blank Slate (Paperback)

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...