This is a debate in which the science has been abused, distorted and dismissed by the religious right and the Marxist left. They found that convicted murderers and other violently inclined people were likely to have a smaller and less active prefrontal cortex.īut what does all this mean? Are humans shaped more by nature or nurture? Are we born aggressive, violent and greedy? Do we learn to be nasty by playing Grand Theft Auto? Was there ever a state of innocence? Can we make ourselves a better, more caring, less judgmental species? Are individuals programmed to be what they are because that's what their genes dictate? They pinpointed the brain's funny bone, and stimulated it to engender laughter they located its God spot, and identified the place of spiritual experience.
In 2001, geneticists unravelled the entire text of the human genome, complete with a shopping list of genes that would inevitably sooner or later be coupled with human traits, conditions and actions.Īt around the same time, neuroscientists began to use functional brain imagery: at last they could see which parts of the brain swung into action as people thought about objects, activities or identities. If humans, like dolphins, are creatures of evolution, then we are programmed to be human-like, just as dolphins are imprisoned in their evolved dolphin-ness. In short, this is a book about science as ideology.įirst the big picture: Darwin again.
There were things we thought we knew then, and the only advance since then has been that we now know that we don't – at least not yet – but we still feel passionate about it anyway. On second reading, it all looks different. On first reading The Blank Slate in 2002, one felt that a lot of what Pinker said was probably right, or at least common sense.
It also gives the reader a sense of eavesdropping on a furious family row, with the entomologist EO Wilson, the zoologist Richard Dawkins and Pinker himself mounting a fierce assault on the neuroscientist and Moral Maze broadcaster Steven Rose, the palaeontologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould and the geneticist Richard Lewontin. What makes this book so intoxicating is the clarity of the writing, the brilliant choice of quotations, the insight into scientific reasoning and Pinker's trademark flair for ambiguous headlines ("British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands").
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