Steven Pinker
Photo Credit: Max S. Gerber

Steven Pinker



Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker



Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate exposes the nature nurture debate and examines the very foundation of human identity. Pinker argues that intellectuals have ignored what we are when talking about who we are, denying what is at the very heart of our being – our innate human nature. In an exclusive interview Steven Pinker talks candidly about Chomsky’s profound influence on his work, challenges comparisons between himself and Freud, and reveals his top five films.


We differ in important ways as well. I believe that language, and human nature in general, should be understood in a Darwinian framework, whereas Chomsky does not believe that evolutionary biology provides much if any insight. As such our conceptions of human nature – and perhaps, as a result, our politics – differ. Chomsky has a more romantic, young-Marxian view of human nature as being dominated by innate impulses toward creativity, cooperation, and social solidarity, which ties into his ‘libertarian socialist’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ politics. I take a more jaundiced view of human nature, which is more compatible with a classical liberal sympathy towardconventional democracy and market economies.

Do you think The Blank Slate will be more controversial to American readers where evolutionary theory has perhaps been slower to permeate popular thinking? How long will it take our intellectual communities to weed out the fallacies of the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and the blank slate from their thinking?Yes, I think that the traditional American antipathy to evolution, partly influenced by the fundamentalist religious right, will make the book more controversial in the US than in the UK. Another reason is the greater American sensitivity to issues surrounding race, which makes any kind of innatism seem to veer too close for comfort to hypotheses about innate racial differences. As to how long it will take for the fallacies to be weeded out – well, as the American baseball legend Yogi Berra said, ‘predictions are difficult, especially about the future.’

Are you confident that evolutionary psychology will soon provide an account of human nature that is satisfactorily scientific? How do you refute comparisons between evolutionary psychology and Freudian psychology of a century ago, which suggest that Freud’s ‘unconscious’ is akin to evolutionary psychology’s ‘human nature’ and the definition of ‘human nature’ is only slightly less arbitrary?Yes, I am confident. The comparison with Freud is just wrong. First, evolutionary psychology is grounded in well-established principles of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, whereas psychoanalysis was grounded in Lamarckism, nineteenth-century hydraulic models of the mind, and Freud’s idiosyncratic beliefs. Second, the hypotheses from evolutionary psychology are testable and routinely tested, whereas Freud’s were notoriously unfalsifiable. When Freud predicted that little boys have an unconscious desire to have sex with their mothers, you had to take it or leave it. In contrast, when Donald Symons predicted that geometrically average faces should be more sexually attractive, evolutionary psychologists got out their computers, generated morphed faces, showed them to people, and measured their judgments of how attractive they were.

You have said that ‘a gene for x’ is just shorthand for ‘in comparison with it’s alternative allele, averaged over the environments it appears in, robabalistically leads to more behaviour x, being solicitous in to one’s children.’ How important is it that science makes itself properly understood to the wider public? Are there any limits in your opinion to the extent to which science can be ethically prescriptive rather than empirically descriptive?Actually, I never said that – what I said was that ‘a gene for x’ is ‘a gene that increases the probability of a behavior compared with alternative genes at that locus. And that probability is an average computed over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time, and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived in.’ Now, a given gene may not have the same effect in all environments, nor the same effect in all genomes, but it has to have an average effect. That average is what natural selection selects (all things being equal), and that is all that the ‘for’ means in ‘a gene for X.’


A major theme of The Blank Slate is that science, by itself, cannot be ethically prescriptive at all – it can only be empirically descriptive. Ethical judgments require both scientific facts and human values, which cannot be dictated by science (though they can be informed by it).

In what ways have you answered Jerry Fodor’s criticisms of How The Mind Works, more specifically; 1) Massive modularity – whether the mind is modular to the extent you suggest, and moreover, how do you account for the overall integration of information. Rose has pointed out that both yourself and Dawkins claim to be able to act morally, independently of genetic impulses. What implements the logic of morality that you refer to? 2) The methodology of reverse engineering. Doesn’t the function of the system you are trying to reverse engineer need to be known? Isn’t the function of the mind missing from our account? 3) Are there not alternative explanations for the evolution of the complexity of the mind?Fodor misunderstood How the Mind Works. He thought I was positing ‘mental modules’ in his own narrow and idiosyncratic sense of discrete, informationally encapsulated processing systems – like computer chips with a few pins for input and output. In fact I was positing only that the mind is a complex system with specialized parts, much like the body. The blood, the lymphatic system, and the skin are specialized organs, but they are not encapsulated in little boxes; they interact with other body parts in complex ways. So it is with mental subsystems like language, intuitive physics, intuitive psychology, and other specializations – they are not ‘modules’ in Fodor’s sense, but I never found that sense useful to start with.

Rose is even more confused. My point was not that some mysterious ‘I’ can overcome the biological impulse to reproduce my genes. My point was that there is no biological impulse to reproduce one’s genes to begin with. It is sometimes useful to think of evolutionary processes by thinking of the genes as having the ‘metaphorical’ goal of making copies of themselves. People like Rose misunderstand that


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Steven Pinker
Max S. Gerber
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10/1/2014 AT 7:30 PM
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Steven Pinker
Max S. Gerber
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Steven Pinker
Max S. Gerber
10/3/2014 AT 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM pst