The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Allen Lane Science) [Hardcover]

In The Blank Slate, the bestselling author Steven Pinker produces his most polemical and convincing attack upon the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. Pinker's previous books The Language Instinctand How the Mind Works have already attracted huge praise and controversy in arguing that language and cognition are natural rather than cultural. In The Blank Slate he refines and extends his arguments.

The book is aimed at "people who wonder where the taboo against human nature came from", and promises to explain "the moral, emotional and political colorings of the concept of human nature in modern life". For Pinker, the belief that we are all born as "blank slates" upon which culture places its decisive imprint is not only wrong but dangerous. He persuasively argues that "the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history". This is all very well, but at over 500 pages it can also be daunting for the general reader, as Pinker takes on all-comers, from biologists and sociologists to a dizzying array of classical thinkers from Calvin and Hobbes to Marx and Dawkins. The sections on gender will undoubtedly inflame many feminist writers (the most persuasive of which Pinker sadly neglects to discuss), and the criticisms of modern art are flimsy, but The Blank Slate is an impressive and sustained broadside that cannot be ignored. -–Jerry Brotton

Pinker challenges conventional wisdom that our thoughts and feelings seep into our heads from the surrounding culture.

In this title, Steven Pinker makes explicit the argument which has been a backdrop to his previous books and many other popular science titles. He argues that much of our social commentary, conventional wisdom, and academic orthodoxy is wrongly rooted in the doctrines of the noble savage (civilisation is the source of human corruption) and the blank slate (the mind has no innate structure; all thoughts and feelings seep into our heads from surrounding culture). He explores the impact of these notions on our attitudes to sexuality, ideology, political correctness and the arts, and insists that we need to be more honest about human nature.

Steven Pinker is a best-selling author and Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT. "Deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him" - The New York Times Book Review