The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature and Modern Intellectual Life
by Steven Pinker
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Author talks about human nature and shows slides in TED format
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Oct, 2008
Spoiler:
The author says that although we love to point out the exotic differences between cultures, there is a notable commonality between the world’s 6,000 cultures in terms of behaviors and emotions. He also discusses the remarkable similarities between identical twins separated at birth. However, he says that the blank slate theory, or the idea that we all start out with the same toolkit and are shaped by parenting and culture, is false. He warns that most parenting studies are useless because they don’t control for heritability.
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Steven Pinker responds to written questions in Big Think format
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Apr, 2012
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The author shares that he is a student of human nature with a focus on language. He is fascinated by “the interface between language and the rest of the mind” and what language says about our social interactions. For example, why is so much of our language use indirect? He says that a veiled request is usually a way of preserving the status of a social relationship; for example, “Pass the salt” changes a relationship to one of dominance while “If you could pass the salt, that would be great” preserves equality.
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Steven Pinker presents at National Academy of Sciences
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Feb, 2013
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Stephen Pinker observes that for millennia the concept of human nature came from religion; for example, the idea of free will can be found in the Genesis story in which Adam and Eve are punished for eating fruit, the implication being that they could have chosen not to eat it. He says that since no scientifically literate person can be expected to take the Genesis story literally, we have had to come up with other “groundings” for human nature. One of these is the “blank slate theory,” which Pinker says is false.
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Steven Pinker gives brief explanation of blank slate theory
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Jan, 2014
Spoiler:
The idea that the human mind is a blank slate at birth—that our personality, talents, and inclinations come entirely from parenting and culture— is appealing to those wishing to confirm that there is no difference between the races or genders. As attractive as it may be, however, the author says that this is an idea that is absolutely false. He says the blank slate theory came into being in part as a backlash against pseudoscientific theories of racial inferiority.
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Steven Pinker is a Canadian cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist. He is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and has also taught at Stanford and MIT. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Pinker is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Humanist of the Year, and holds nine honorary doctorates. He has been named one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.”
Other books by Steven Pinker
Publications
The Guardian: Hoist by his own polemic
The New Yorker: What Comes Naturally
The Guardian: Are we the prisoners of our genes?
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