A BIOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE: A TALK WITH STEVEN

PINKER [9.9.02]

Introduction
Every few years a book is published that commands our attention and causes us
to consider questions that challenge our basic assumptions about ourselves. This
month marks the publication of such a book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial
of Human Nature by MIT research psychologist Steven Pinker.
Pinker is a unifier, someone who ties a lot of big ideas together. He
has studied visual cognition and language acquisition in the
laboratory, and was one of the first to develop computational
models of how children learn the words and grammar of their first
language. He has merged Chomskyan ideas about an innate
language faculty with the Darwinian theory of adaptation and
natural selection. Pinker also wrote one of the most influential
critiques of neural-network models of the mind.
His book The Language Instinct discussed all aspects of language in a unified,
Darwinian framework, and in How the Mind Works he did the same for the rest of
the mind, explaining "what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to
see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life."
In The Blank Slate, he notes "that there is a quasi-religious theory of human
nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both
empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people
hang on those assumptions. The theory has three parts".
One is the doctrine of "the blank slate": that we have no inherent talents or
temperaments, because the mind is shaped completely by the
environmentparenting, culture, and society.
"The second is "the noble savage": that evil motives are not inherent to people
but come from corrupting social institutions.
The third is "the ghost in the machine", that the most important part of us is
somehow independent of our biology, so that our ability to have experiences and
make choices can't be explained by our physiological makeup and evolutionary
history.
These three ideas are increasingly being challenged by the sciences of the mind,
brain, genes, and evolution," he says, "but they are held as much for their moral
and political uplift as for any empirical rationale. People think that these doctrines

are preferable on moral grounds and that the alternative is forbidden territory
that we should avoid at all costs".
JB
STEVEN PINKER, research psychologist, is Peter de Florez Professor in the
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT; director of the
McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language
Learnability and Language Development: Learnability and Cognition; The
Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; Words and Rules: The Ingredients of
Language, and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of language has received
the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from
the American Psychological Association. He has also received awards for his
graduate teaching at MIT and for his undergraduate teaching at MIT, two prizes
for general achievement, an honorary doctorate, and five awards for his popular
science books.
Pinker is a fellow of several scholarly societies, including the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. He is an associate editor of Cognition and serves on many professional
panels, including the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and the
Scientific Advisory Panel of an 8-hour NOVA television series on evolution. He also
writes frequently in the popular press, including The New York Times, Time,
Slate, and The New Yorker.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_blank/pinker_blank_print.html