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I struggled quite a bit with this review, as this book has much to recommend it and also some serious problems. The basic problem for me in a nutshell is that any serious student of neuroscience or psychoanalysis might readily offer that knocking down the notion of the mind as the Blank Slate is clearly knocking down a straw man. It is unlikely that anyone coming from a psychoanalytic background would think for a minute that human nature is any version of a Blank Slate. Additionally, anyone familiar with affective neuroscience would also be readily and obviously uncomfortable with any of the purported cultural assumptions that Dr. Pinker spends his entire book debunking. Additionally, although Pinker acknowledges that it is nature—nurture interactions that are deemed critical, the book seems determined to attack some version of a “nurture hegemony” that in my judgment is not nearly as rampant as Professor Pinker thinks.
So a real question might be, “Who in the psychological sciences, or among reasonably sophisticated laypeople, or anybody for that matter with basic emotional common sense, truly believes in the Blank Slate, and why does Dr. Pinker devote hundreds and hundreds of pages (in fact the book could have been put on a major diet) to this whole line of analysis?” One might take issue with Pinker's notion that some version of an assumption of a “Blank Slate” is the driving source for many modern problems and abuses. The heart of the question for me that I cannot quite answer is: “Why does Professor Pinker think that the rejection of any formal concept of human nature is such a rampant problem or ideology in the social, political, and psychological sciences?” Certainly, there are places where Dr. Pinker's analysis applies, but I'm hard-pressed to see such a blanket rejection of the concept of human nature as a widespread and terrible cultural cognitive distortion responsible for large amounts of human suffering. I would see a much more destructive and insidious