The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

Attempts to explain behavior in mechanistic terms are commonly denounced as “reductionist” or “determinist.” The denouncers rarely know exactly what they mean by those words, but everyone knows they refer to something bad.

this is the one transplant operation in which it is better to be the donor than the recipient.

(There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? “It was good for you; how was it for me?”)

Boas wrote, “I claim that, unless the contrary can be proved, we must assume that all complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary.”

Wallace became a spiritualist and spent the later years of his career searching for a way to communicate with the souls of the dead.

For decades we psychologists preserved human bragging rights by telling our classes that no computer could read text, decipher speech, or recognize faces, but these boasts are obsolete.

which is why everyone knows that computers will never compose a symphony, write a story, or paint a picture.

lol

A study of Albert Einstein’s brain revealed that he had large, unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, which participate in spatial reasoning and intuitions about number.

always thought this is not true

as if genocide were wrong only when the victims are nice guys.

Nim Chimpsky

lol

Autism is an innate neurological condition with strong genetic roots.

the IQ of a group is the lowest IQ of any member of the group divided by the number of people in the group, but that is too pessimistic.

Since no regime can keep a gun trained on every last citizen, political power grows out of a regime’s ability to command the fear of enough people at the same time.)

For example, the statement “English has a larger vocabulary than Japanese” could be true even if no English speaker has a larger vocabulary than any Japanese speaker.