Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful & Essential Reading, 18 Oct 2002
This profound book examines 3 doctrines: The Blank Slate (no human nature), The Noble Savage (no selfish or evil instincts), and The Ghost in the Machine (independent existence of the mind from the body/brain).
Steven Pinker elegantly presents the evidence against these views, sometimes in concise and quite overwhelmingly devastating lists.
In a small way this subject matter is similar to J.Diamond's 'The 3rd Chimpanzee' or E.O. Wilson's 'Consilience'- showing that we are imperfect products of evolution, limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority.
If this were all the book was about it would still be fascinating reading. Fortunately however, Pinker has gone two steps further, thus making this book a landmark in the Nature/Nurture debate.
Firstly he explains that the reason why so many people (Postmodernists, Marxists, Gender Feminists etc) want to believe in these 3 doctrines is based on fears of inequality, determinism, imperfectability, and nihilism. He examines each of these fears and demonstrates that they are based on a poverty of understanding of human nature (the 3 doctrines), a myriad of fallacies and non sequiturs, a lack of understanding of ethics, and moralistic self-displays.
Secondly, in agreement with Chekhov's 'Man will become better when you show him what he is like', Pinker gives powerful and sensible arguments how an accurate understanding of human nature would aid in the reduction of violence & oppression and increase human happiness. They are a real and timely intellectual treat, brimming with positive potential of application.
For those new to evolutionary psychology I would recommend that they first read Pinker's 'How the Mind Works' or Robert Wright's 'The Moral Animal'.
It would be an understatement to say that this book is eye-opening. I would regard this book as essential reading to those that think that the Greek's advice 'Know thyself' is sage.
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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pinker's Best Yet, 4 Nov 2002
This is Pinker's best book to date. He's no great original thinker, but what he does superbly well is to clarify and summarise. There's no hidden ideology here: the author sets out to present as clearly as he can what he sees as the current state of research into the nature/nurture evolutionary psychology debate, and there is simply no escaping the fact that nature is vitally important. Not only is current scientific research showing this, but it's also common sense. The extraordinary thing is how strong the resistance is to this obvious fact, largely from the academic left, who have adopted the Blank Slate doctrine that human nature doesn't exist (pace Marx - consciousness doesn't determine society: society determines consciousness), and like to accuse all those who disagree as fascists. As Pinker points out, there is absolutely no reason why the left should have to saddle itself with this absurd doctrine; after all, if your aim is to improve society, the basic starting point should be to establish exactly what material you're working with. And it should hardly need emphasising at this point in history that those societies which have based themselves on the notion of an infinitely malleable human nature have been uniformly totalitarian. So not only is this book an excellent guide to contemporary scientific thinking on human pyschology, it's also a powerful work of popular philosophy, and a wake-up call to the left. As Peter Singer and others have stated, the left needs to abandon its disastrous alliance with Marxism, and start looking at Darwin instead.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amusing, rigorous, and concrete., 2 Jan 2003
I would recommend this book to everybody for many reasons, of which the following are just a few. All the books by Pinker have in common several features that make them real treasures: on the stylistic side, they are clear, very well written, easy to understand, entertaining, and often genuinely amusing. On the methodological side, they always offer plenty of evidence for each theory they propose, both by offering an exhaustive bibliography, and by calling the attention to simple facts of everyday life that by themselves support those theories. On the content side, they speak about basic facts of everyday life, always succeeding in shedding a new light on them, and building bridges between topics at first sight unrelated. The most rewardful experience I owe to these books is reading one page of any of them, and finding myself on the next day, one hundred times throughout the day, remarking things I never noted before, and surprised of how my vision of the world had changed: in the words of E. Drew, I "live more intensely for the reading of it". All this was true of the three previous books I read - 'The language instinct', 'How the mind works', and 'Words and rules'. But it is even more true in the case of 'The blank slate', which deals with an intrinsically more general topic.
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