In this book, Professor Pinker presents some radical new ideas, which he backs up with rigorous statistics and copious academic references: boys are different from girls; children take after their parents; it's hard for parents to change a child's personality; some rapists do it for the sex; there is such a thing as human nature, and it affects what we think and do.
At this point, you may be thinking that all this is common sense -- your grandmother would have told you as much. If you want to see why Professor Pinker needed to write this book, take a look at the one, two and three star reviews. Not one criticises the book for stating the bleeding obvious.
Some thirty years ago when I was at university, our sociology lectures really did feed us the line that those reviewers are trying to assert: that intelligence and personality are not inherited; that boys and girls would be the same if they were brought up the same; that rapists are not interested in sex, just violence in asserting male hegemony; that humans are a blank slate.
Strangely enough, I bought into these assertions myself, not because they had any evidence or theory to back them up, but because the lecturers were respected academics, and because they presented the ideas as new and somehow left wing and feminist.
This book is important, not only because it shows that their ideas are unsupported and wrong, but because it shows that they are not left wing either. Dr Pinker is not some male-chauvinist right-wing bigot, and in the book he shows that feminism and equality must not be tied to ideas about human nature that run counter to the facts. Even if there is evidence that man and women are different, it must not become an excuse for discriminating against women.
The book has some flaws. Dr Pinker is careful to show that differences between men and women should not be allowed to affect our value judgements about sexism. However, his chapters on education and art do make this sort of linkage, implying that jazz and rock music are better than modernist serial music because they are closer to human nature, for example. In this case, I agree with Pinker's conclusions, but not his argument, which is less academically rigorous than other chapters of this book. Worse, these arguments undermine Pinker's points about sexism and racism, and the book would be much better without them.
Nonetheless, this book represents rather a turning point for academia, drawing together recent research by feminists, statisticians and other academics that leaves the old-style sociologists and philosophers looking rather silly. An important book, presented in Pinker's fluent and accessible style, and a comfortable five stars.
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Popular highlights in this book
Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.Highlighted by 183 Kindle readers- The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine—or, as philosophers call them, empiricism, romanticism, and dualism—are logically independent, but in practice they are often found together.Highlighted by 182 Kindle readers
- Psychologists have discovered that our personalities differ in five major ways: we are to varying degrees introverted or extroverted, neurotic or stable, incurious or open to experience, agreeable or antagonistic, and conscientious or undirected.Highlighted by 152 Kindle readers
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- Amazon CustomerReviewed in India on 16 August 2022
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shorebirdReviewed in Japan on 11 August 2003
ピンカーによるNature vsNurture論争（あるいはそれがいかにずれた問題意識か）の総括
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