Steven Pinker's "Blank Slate"

Just finished reading Steven Pinker's excellent book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Here are some quick thoughts on it.

Pinker convincingly argues that the nature v nurture debate is all but over and that nature has won. As an adoptee who was raised in a home with a child who was subsequently born to my adoptive parents, this comes as absolutely no surprise to me. I also appreciated Pinker's take-no-prisoners approach to dealing with political critiques of the results of scientific research. He lambasts the political left for its attacks on sociobiology and excoriates the religious right for decrying modern theories of mind as unholy with equal vengeance.

Unfortunately, Pinker ventures into what seems clear to be unfamiliar territory for him when he moves away from science and toward the humanities. For example, he advances the empirically discredited theory that democracies don't fight wars argument several times in support of the claim that the more we know each other, the more civil we become and treats a very simplistic and utilitarian view of the nature of justice as a given. More disappointing--given his core argument that there is such a thing as human nature--he seems to be completely unaware of Marx's arguments for man's inherent nature as a maker of things and a social creature.